I’ve read the Analects in several translations, and several other Confucian texts (many of them translated in the 19th century by Legge, who is not the most disinterested translator, by any means) My impressions:
reading the Anlects makes me feel as if I came into a movie partway through. There are an awful lot of references to things I know nothing about, but which the text asumes I’[m perfectly familiar with. (It’s a lot like reading the Koran, in that respect). A lot of it seems concerned with things that dopn’t seem to be of any importance. A succinct guide to The Way to Live Properly it is not.
from all accounts, Confucius was incredibly conservative and obsessed with Proper Formulas. I can’t say that I think his philosophy dark, but I think I would have found it too inflexible and hidebound.
I’ve read the Judge Dee novels many times over. They are written from the point of view of a Confucianist (as was the 18th century anonymous author of The Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee, which Van Gulik translated before writing his own fictional cases), so it’s not surprising that his hero exemplifies the best qualities of the Confucianist, and that there are many cases iof corrupt Buddhists and Taoists. But that doesn’t mean that the situation depicted corresponds with reality.
I read the Analects when I was young. It seemed clear to me, at the time, that Confucius was a very smart man who stated things in ways that provoked a lot of thought, but that his conclusions to his own questions were generally moronic. I suspect that he was very much like an apologist, not really trying to use his intelligence to come up with something new, just to take the society and way of living that he was comfortable with and use whatever complex switchbacks and loop-de-loops to demonstrate that the way things were being done is the way things should always be done.
And if you’re the guy in charge of that society, it makes sense why you would hold up Confucius as an enlightened philosopher.
N.B.: Confucius never invented nor claimed to have invented anything new. He was a systematizer. He simply took the already-ancient traditions and values of Chinese society, or at least of the Chinese gentry – patriarchy, hierarchy, courtesy, benevolence – and made them into a complete, systematic set of doctrines purporting to hold the correct guidance to every social situation or ethical problem.
The whole thing is entirely culture-bound. Confucius never even would have considered the question of whether his doctrines could be of value to non-Chinese barbarians.
Mostly on the level of, “Confucius say: Man who go to bed with itchy butt wake up with smelly finger.” That sort of thing.
IMO, the existence of a genre of American jokes attributing vulgar and infantile fortune-cookie-length aphorisms, told in stereotypical Chinglish, to Master K’ung, can be read as a sort of sublime and poetic posthumous vengeance on the stuck-up, tightassed, bigoted old prick. Ya shoulda listened to them barbarous Buddhists when they talked about karma, dude!
Once in a whimsy I wrote on a men’s room wall: “Confucius say: A superior man is Chen Li! When good men prevail in the state, he is to be found in office; when bad men prevail, he can roll up his principles and keep them in his breast.”
Except a lot of what Confucius was advocating wasn’t the way things were done. He was advocating for states to base their actions on a moral footing and that they had moral obligations to their subjects.
My biggest complaint with Confucius and (what little I’ve read of) Mencius is (IIRC) their habitual thought pattern of “If ____ is done, how could ____ not result?” e.g., if a ruler adopts a policy of belevolance, how could the people not support him, and so on. Some obvious pitfalls to this approach.
On the other hand, Confucius himself seems to have been a fascinating, inspiring, and humorous guy, hardly the stodgy dour faced moralist later commentators made him out to be.
Confucius is sometimes classed as a “philosopher,” but, in the Western sense of the term, he was not much of one. No structured logical arguments, no concept of formal logic or its antecedents, no delving into basic concepts or first things. Nor is his system a “religion” in any spiritual or metaphysical sense. About the gods, the afterlife, creation, it has nothing to say. Confucius’ interests were limited to ethical, social and political matters, and he regarded all first principles in those fields as settled before he began, and he did not think about them as an abstract philosopher would, nor did he think about them so practically as a Machiavellian philosopher would.
Still, it is something of great value that he founded a system that gained wide acceptance and that, for all its faults and limitations, really, really encouraged Chinese with any kind of power to use it benevolently and fairly. That has had deep influence, for better or for worse and probably better, in Japanese and Korean culture to this day. And in Taiwan, I suppose. OTOH, I do wonder if Confucianism has any living influence at all in China today.
It’s mostly a US board, and we are taught a lot more about Europe. What I have heard about Confucius is that he lived a very long time ago and advised people to respect their elders and don’t rock the boat.
