you can see ,my english is real shit.
i am a real chinese .
when BETWEEN the 2008 olympics game.our chinese news will say something
like 5000 years history so great ,Confucius and his Analects.
but it is really dark in recently 500 years in china. it is hardly relate this
Confucius’s Analects .in fact his analects always bring society go to corruption
I Swear TO YOUR GOD .i’m saying the truth.
are you western hemisphere people really think Confucius is a SAGE OR SAINT?
if you really think he is a saint ,Forget I even spoke.
i still want to tell you , belive his RU is dangerous.
it connote many dark things,in the chinese original text .not translation version.
From my limited understanding of Confucianism, its precepts of blind obedience to one’s elders and superiors are good for societal order, and ridiculously bad for innovation. So personally I think he was a sage of his time but in no means a saint.
It is my understanding that Confucius praised and advocated an extremely rigid feudalistic social structure, in which the serf majority should (as jjimm says) blindly obey their elders and anyone else higher up in society.
In other words, he was basically a Republican, so you probably won’t find many people arguing in his favor in this forum. (What? It’s in Elections, so I have to needle at least one of the current political parties. )
I don’t think anyone here views Confuscius as a saint.
There are people here who view him as a sage, but that can be said about almost anyone who has ever made public statements. There is a wide assortments of opinion among Americans, and many, many of us are stupid. Even more of us are poorly informed.
I don’t know much about Chinese history. What little I do know suggests that historically Chinese governments have viewed stability and order as the most important things to pursue. This does not necessarily mean things are good for any given individual, but considering what terrible things can happen when there is instability and disorder, it is not a completely ridiculous viewpoint.
This is true, even though it is said jokingly. There are many people who value maintaining the established order far more than the welfare of any particular individual. Here in the U.S., it is almost a rule that the more a politician claims to value freedom, the more he really wants to wants to prevent the freedom of anyone who doesn’t share his viewpoints.
Throughout the entire world, you will find that most governments have been maintained on behalf of the governors, not the people governed. People who have power want to keep it. They will find justifications for doing so. Sometimes it’s religion, sometimes it’s ideology, sometimes it’s something else.
BUT that doesn’t mean that stability is worthless. People in countries with little or no effective government are generally not better off than people in countries with lots of government. The very wealthy people may be better off, because they can buy most of what governments provide for themselves, but the poor can suffer terribly.
Corruption happens. It didn’t start because of Confucius, and it won’t end after Confucius is forgotten. All we can do is try to prevent it from happening, and expose and punish it when it does.
In all honesty - most people in the Western Hemisphere don’t think about Confucius at all. If you asked everyone you met on the street, most people would say he was the man who said the cute sayings in fortune cookies.
I personally wouldn’t say he was unimportant. But his philosophy is so different than western ideas that it’s not taught or even really discussed much here.
As for corruption … well, it seems like every system becomes corrupt over time. People start out with good plans for a system and then corrupt people discover ways to break the system for their own benefit. Confucianism doesn’t seem more corrupt than other systems. But it was developed to address problems in a feudal society. Today we live in a different society, with different problems. We need new systems to address our new current problems.
However, I’m annoyed by the notions presented here. It’s obvious that most responders didn’t, err, have any idea what Confucius said.
The short version is that Confucius* was very much a teacher emphasizing personal moral correctness and harmony, and did not really say much about political tradition. T the extent it impacted his philosophy, he ared about loyalty to correct bodies. And in fact, in nature he seems to have been an optimist, implying that humans would tend towards good if the governemnt was good. Therefore, the government’s highest priority was to be morally upright itself.
Confucius didn’t emphasize blind obedience. His philosophy was based on the idea of relationships between people. He felt that there was a relationship between every pair of people based on their relative status and there were principles for how the relationship should work. But it was a two-way obligation. Both people in the relationship had duties to the other.
His overall philosophy could best be described as “everyone benefits when we all do what we’re supposed to do.”
Confucius isn’t very well known in the west, and his philosophy isnt’ very well respected, either. Westerners look to Plato or Aristotle, and the great Christian leaders, not Confucius. In fact, he is mostly known for a series of jokes.
People who know much about him have usually studied East Asian history, or lots of world philosophers.
By contrast, in the modern West the trend is to pretend that everyone’s the same status (an example would be Silicon Valley companies where the CEO doesn’t have his own office, or superiors and inferiors being on a first-name basis). At the same time, of course, everyone is subtly status jockeying, and there’s no longer a sense of moral obligation from the winners to the losers - precisely because we got rid of lots of obvious signs of status. So even though we look more egalitarian, there aren’t as many social limitations on what rich, powerful, or popular folks can get away with.
Contrast this to Confucianism, which says of course there’s status inequality in the world, now let’s codify it and link it to obligations towards your inferiors. As a way to restrict the caprice of the powerful it has a lot in common with the old Western idea of noblesse oblige - the personal obligations of the powerful to the weak.
To echo what a lot of other people said, Confucius is not well known in the West, he had a lot of pretty good ideas, and the society that people based on his writings (centuries after his own time) had a pretty good track record when compared to other societies of the same time.
uoadgx2, I think Confucius is respected in the West only inasmuch as he is known to have been a very important, perhaps the most important, intellectual influence on Chinese culture, thought and history. As such, his thought certainly deserves to be taken seriously in the West, even though it has had very little direct influence on Western culture, thought or history. As to whether his influence has ultimately been for good or ill (on China or on the rest of the world), that can probably be judged much better by Chinese people such as yourself than it can be by almost any Westerner. Clearly you think his influence has mainly been bad, but I am sure (and I am sure you know) that very many Chinese people would think otherwise. I doubt whether the debate in China over whether his influence is good or bad is much affected (or should be much affected) by what Westerners think (and, most Westerners, in fact do not have much opinion on the matter).
I am rather inclined to think that you are right, but I am very aware that I have very little basis for that feeling. I simply do not know enough about China to have a valid opinion.
It is true that the Confucian government of the late-Ching-Dynasty China of the 19th Century was broadly and deeply corrupt. I don’t know about earlier examples, nor whether the situation was in any way related to Confucian doctrine. As I understand it, the point of the Imperial Examination system was to produce a bureaucracy of men who had completely internalized the Confucian values and ethics, including public service and virtue and stuff. Though there were other purposes:
Recently I read the whole series of Judge Dee novels (set in the Tang Dynasty, purportedly-by-internal-narrative written as historical novels during the Ming which accounts for certain anachronisms) by Robert van Gulik. Dee is the ideal of what the system is supposed to produce.
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