Status Updates From Chinese Thought: From Confu...

2/2

According to Mencius, This also means rulers should uphold a proper division of labour so that each member of society flourishes to the best of his or her talents: ‘Some labour with their minds, others labour with their physical strength. Those who labour with their minds govern others; those who labour with their physical strength are governed by others’ (Mencius 3A.4).

1/2 Society needs market mechanisms, Mencius argues, since it is in the nature of things to be unequal: ‘If fine shoes and poor shoes were priced the same, who would make fine shoes?’

to control the waters, one has to follow the Way (Dao) of water, Mencius reminds us. You need to lead it to the seas rather than into your neighbour’s backyard, where it will do nothing but wreak more havoc and discontent (Mencius 6B.11). It is no coincidence that, in a land ravaged by capricious rivers, water held a prominent place in the conceptual armoury of its philosophers.

Wittfogel wrote Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power, in which he argued that agrarian societies that depend on large-scale irrigation require strong governments to control the labour force. The ‘hydraulic societies’ would inevitably require centralized, and oppressive, political regimes. Wittfogel had his critics but the link between water control and political power is in China’s history.

While there is some evidence of embalming corpses in Central Asia, there is no significant tradition of embalming in China, and only a few mummified corpses have been recovered there; the party faithful embalmed Mao Zedong’s body, but not at his own request.

At times, the spirit world itself took on bureaucratic attributes, with gods behaving as officials. This would become a lasting feature of Chinese folk religion. Chinese bureaucracy seeped into the religious imagination. For instance, a Controller of Fate was thought to supervise the registers of the dead and could be beseeched with a request to prolong one’s allotted lifespan.

The ancestral cult, one could argue, relieves people from the need for a god that is sole and supreme. The spirit of Great-Grandad may well be watching you but he does not expect unquestioned loyalty from those not of the same lineage. In the words attributed to Confucius, ‘To offer sacrifices to an ancestral spirit that is not your own is obsequious’ (An. 2.24).

Wang Fu (90–165 CE) complained that the lure of quick profits to be made by selling religious services drew women away from their primary occupation: ‘They embark on the study of shamanic incantations, drumming and dancing to serve the spirits, thereby deceiving the weak and deluding the common people.. even to the point that some are forced to flee from their seasonal labour’

The cult of the dead was the focal point of much of Chinese religious practice, and remains part of the religious fabric in Chinese communities today. To mourn and remember ancestors was an orchestrated proceeding. Both the duration of mourning and the mourning attire were dictated by one’s relationship to the deceased (the ritual canon prescribes five degrees of mourning). Even the wail was based on proximity.

Xunzi takes a more extreme position and turns ritual into a strict rule-book for a functional society: li provides the essential software to transform our hard-wired impulses into behaviours necessary for living harmoniously. Xunzi’s chapter ‘Discourse on Ritual’ (‘Li lun’) starts with the claim that the ancient kings and sages invented rituals to control human desire:

Xunzi allows for the possibility that the people can unseat incompetent superiors: ‘The ruler is the boat; his subjects the water. It is the water that sustains the boat, and it is the water that capsizes it’ (Xunzi 9.4). But not everyone is capable of rising to the top. Society requires a charismatic leader supported by talented ministers Hence his conclusion: elitism is a necessary condition for social harmony.

egalitarian or strictly hierarchical, the archetypes of a harmonious world were often projected back to a golden age from which humanity was said to have deviated. It followed that ‘reforming’ or ‘changing’ the present could be construed as restoring an originally harmonious order that the sages in antiquity had created (revolution as turning back to what had come before).

‘Harmony’ (he) has trumped successive buzzwords in Chinese political philosophy throughout the ages. It is hard indeed to doubt its central stature in Chinese thought: Confucians want humans to live in harmony with each other; Legalists want people to echo the will of the monarch; Daoists want to live in harmony with nature.

The core five relationships are described as follows in The Doctrine of the Mean (Zhongyong), a text attributed to Master Zisi (483–402 BCE), a grandson of Confucius: In the world there are five methods to reach the Dao and three ways by means of which to put them into practice: ruler towards minister, father towards son, husband towards wife, older brother towards younger brother, and interactions between friends.

So instead of seeing John as a single (and unique) individual with a particular set of character traits (shy, compassionate, intelligent, self-centred at times, but modest), there is John the father, the teacher, the son, the student, the husband, the lover, the taxpayer, John the employee, the line manager, the poet, the joker, etc. In order for John to be functional in society, he needs to be mindful of his role

Mencius calls the four ‘sprouts of virtue’ (also known as ‘beginnings’). Each of these emerging shoots sparks the development of four cardinal virtues: sympathy or pity gives birth to humaneness (ren); a feeling of shame leads to a sense of rightness (yi); modesty and deference foster a sense of propriety (li); and a sense of right and wrong is the sprout of wisdom (zhi).

In the conflicting views on how individuals may best thrive in their surroundings, one shared reality emerges: without others there is no self; without a self there is no other. Whether human beings are seen as part of a social or a natural order, they become (or cease to become) persons while standing in relationship to others and other things.

Radical Daoists saw no point at all in refining people within the context of the family or the state. Instead of life in harmonious association with others, they proposed, the priority should be to turn inwards and live in harmony with the self.

Confucian thinkers held that every human being was perfectible: ‘It is only the most wise and the most stupid that cannot be changed’ (An. 17.3).

Whereas Confucius felt that no state can be governed without an intellectual elite, the Legalist ruler sees intellectuals as the most serious threat to the state. Every minute wasted in glib talk and conversation is a minute lost to farming and fighting; conversation can only lead to subversion. The ruler therefore must keep his people simple and ignorant.

Programmed into the moral consciousness of the Confucian ruler is the belief that the common people require good leadership as they are inherently incapable of providing it themselves: ‘The common people can be made to follow a path but not to understand it’ (An. 8.9).

These so-called Confucian virtues include a sense of righteousness (yi), sincerity (cheng) or trustworthiness (xin), benevolence or humaneness (ren), ritual propriety (li), filial devotion (xiao), and a desire to be loyal (zhong), considerate (shu) and knowledgeable (zhi).

A famous anecdote in Master Sun’s biography recounts how he persuaded the King of Wu to employ him by bossing around a troupe of palace ladies as if they were soldiers. He divided them into regiments, and, when the women knew no better than to giggle in response to their drill orders, Master Sun executed the king’s two favourite concubines who had been assigned the role of unit commanders. Orders must be obeyed.

Much of early Chinese thought is elitist. It is ruler- rather than people-centred. Chinese philosophers devoted most of their time to thinking about those who occupied leading roles in society: the ruler, the general, the sage, the worthy, the scholar, the noble person, the authentic person, the king, the sovereign, the lord, the duke or the emperor.

At the heart of Chinese ethics are two central questions: how we should define the role of human beings in their interdependent relationship with the world and each other; and what strategies are most helpful in order to govern and control the human situations that are played out in this world of change.

Dao: ’One who knows does not speak about it, one who speak about it does not know’ from Daodejing - The Classic of the Way and Virtue.

Compare:

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. from The Tractatus by Wittgenstein.

the language, which is mostly monosyllabic, tries to express a great deal through a relatively sparse number of characters. In other words, one of the tricks in reading classical Chinese is to handle omission. Readers need to learn how to infer what is not said, which they may do on the basis of word order, the parallel occurrence of certain words and phrases, the use of function words and rhyme, among other things.

As in China today, where household registration is required, free movement of people and goods was very limited. Travellers needed tallies and passports to pass through internal and external border posts. So, during the centuries that were most significant in the development of Chinese thought, China was geographically confined to a small area roughly between the Yellow River in the north and the Yangzi in the south.