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ABSTRACT
Although Western and Chinese philosophy evolved from disparate doctrinal foundations, the department of ethics is a notable exception. “How to live the good life” is a subject treated by Confucius and Aristotle in a manner that exhibits many surprising points of coincidence, not least in the colossal influence of both these philosophers on the social and political shape of their respective civilisations. This article is an attempt to correlate the relevant ideas which, as it were, build a bridge between East and West on the perennial issues that affect all mankind in the context of a civil society.
Notes
Translations of Confucius’s works are from Wing-Tsit Chan’s edition, although I have at times substituted a word or phrase from other sources. In quoting the Analects I have mostly given preference to the Waley translation.
Quotations from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics are from the translation of W. D. Ross.
1. For my present purpose, I disregard Aristotle’s two other ethical treatises, Eudemian Ethics and Magna Moralia. All references to the Nicomachean Ethics are from McKeon, ed., Basic Works of Aristotle, and will be cited in the text.
2. The six books purportedly written or edited by Confucius are: I Ching, or The Book of Changes; Shih Ching, or The Book of Poetry; Yao, or The Book of Music; Shang Shu, or The Book of History; Li Shi, or The Book of Rites; and Chun Qui, or Autumn and Spring Annals. However, this collection needs to be distinguished from the Four Classics put together by Chu Hsi in the twelfth century, which were thereafter accepted as the canonical texts of Confucianism: The Analects; The Great Learning; The Doctrine of the Mean; and The Book of Mencius. Of these, the first three are attributed to Confucius, even though he figures in them as an actor, not author.
3. Fung, Short History of Chinese Philosophy, 41.
4. Taoism also continued to maintain itself as an autonomous doctrine and eventually entered a separate alliance with Buddhism. Ionian nature philosophy likewise proceeded via Leucippus, Democritus and Epicurus into the Roman and Renaissance epicurean stream (Lucretius, Gassendi and on to modern science), while from Anaximenes, via Pythagoras and Socrates and on to the Stoics, a continuous line proceeds to Neoplatonism, Christian theology and scholasticism.
5. Lao-Tse, Tao Te Ching, xvi. The reader might find it intriguing to compare this with the sentence of Anaximander, quoted in Guthrie, History of Greek Philosophy, vol. 1, 76.
6. Confucius, The Great Learning, “Text.” This tract comprises a one-page text followed by 10 chapters of commentary.
7. Xinzhong Yao, Introduction to Confucianism, 139 (emphasis added).
8. Word, speech, tale, news, proverb, description, explanation, account (incl. financial), reason, understanding, repute etc. Later additions include correspondence, proportion (used in the mathematical sense by Plato and Aristotle). Cf. Guthrie, History of Greek Philosophy, vol. 1, 420–21.
9. Barnes, Cambridge Companion to Aristotle, 51, 121, 161, 174–75. Another interesting specimen is logoi enhyloi, affectations of the soul “enmattered” as, for example, in the practical effect of anger.
10. Xinzhong Yao, Introduction to Confucianism, 210.
11. Confucius, Analects, 15.30; hereafter references are cited in the text.
12. Creel, Confucius and the Chinese Way, 154, 155.
13. Ritter, “Das bürgerliche Leben,” 110 (my translation).
14. Ibid., 124.
15. Ackrill in “Aristotle on Eudaimonia,” 352–55, is somewhat exercised by Aristotle’s failure to legitimise the supremacy of a life of theoria. It does seem incompatible to praise a life of action as quintessentially conducive to eudaimonia and then extol a life of contemplation as even higher. But in the end Ackrill finds his own rationale: “The suspicion remains that a man who really believed in the supreme importance of some absolute could not continue to live in much the same way as others.” Indeed; and this is not the first nor last time that this problem occupied a philosopher or even ordinary folk. Confucianism is rife with it; cf. this passage from Mencius: “Potentially the path to self-fulfilment is the path to greatness, to that elevated state where a man walks in virtue with the world—or alone. The ultimate achievement, however, is to transform this knowledge into sagacity, to become a sage. In principle this is attainable to any man with a true desire to become sage-like.” Christians at times choose to live as hermits in the greatest conceivable indigence to be closer to their God, but whatever their private feelings may be, it is hard to accept that they can be called ‘happy’ in Aristotle’s sense. So this must remain an irresolvable conflict between flesh and spirit. What is, perhaps, the highest desirable good, may stand as a beacon for us to aim, without ever being taken seriously as a genuine possibility.
16. Schwartz, World of Thought, 80.
17. Cf. Smith, Confucius, 64.
18. Cited in Creel, Confucius and the Chinese Way, 84.
19. As noted, Confucius sees self-perfection as something with the potential of rubbing off onto others. Cf. Confucius, Analects, 12.1.
20. Smith, Confucius, 76.
21. Creel, Confucius and the Chinese Way, 86.
22. Irwin, “Metaphysical and Psychological Basis,” 47.
23. Smith, Confucius, 97.
24. I think Aristotle’s point, once we get past the demonstrations and tabulations, is pretty much the same.
25. Cf. the quotation linked to note 29.
26. Ackrill, “Aristotle on Eudaimonia,” 31.
27. Chan, Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, 16–17.
28. Schwartz, World of Thought, 77.
29. Smith, Confucius, 69.
30. Chai, Story of Chinese Philosophy, 26–27.
31. Please note the plural, which I take to indicate the generic sense and not, as Plato would have us understand in his critique of Protagoras, each man as his own judge. The word “man” in “Man is the measure of all things” is surely denotative of “men in general” and in the normative sense of “what men in general are capable of sensing and understanding.” If I am colour blind or jaundiced, I am disqualified from judging certain colours and tastes, and so on with all (even piffling) idiosyncrasies. I refuse to believe that Protagoras could possibly have disregarded this.
32. Cf. Jaeger, “Medizin als methodische,” in Mueller-Goldingen, Schriften zur aristotelischen Ethik, 143–44, which discusses the premise that “the problem of correct method is paramount to Aristotle … and thus we find that he refers persistently to medical examples as paradigmata for the right application of ethical criteria.” We recall that Aristotle’s father was a physician, and now the plausible assumption is that some of that knowledge must have rubbed off on the son.
33. Hutchinson, “Ethics,” in Barnes, Cambridge Companion to Aristotle, 218, offers this specimen of the “lopsided” swing of the pendulum: “Virtue is normally closer to one of the vices than to the other. For example, many men tend to be excessively enthusiastic about pleasure, and ‘intemperance’ is naturally supposed to be the opposite of ‘temperance’. But there is another opposite, more unusual and more similar to temperance, the disposition to desire pleasures insufficiently. This is such an unusual state that it does not have a name of its own in common currency, and Aristotle coins the term ‘insensibility’. Human nature is more or less constant and tends towards one vice rather than another; [and] thus it is the vice to which we tend that we refer to as ‘the opposite’ of the virtue. This usage is strictly speaking incorrect because there are two opposites of every virtue, but it is nevertheless a comprehensible usage which expresses a truth of human nature.”
34. Herodotus I, 33.
35. Schwartz, World of Thought, 69–70.
36. Filial love, while very developed among humans, is comparatively rare among animals. Aristotle finds a few specimens in support of his contentions at Ethics 1155A16, but he would be hard put to add many more to his list even with today’s extended knowledge of animal behaviour.
37. Aristotle, Pol. 1280B35.
38. Confucius, in Chan, Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, 15.
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Jürgen Lawrenz
Jürgen Lawrenz gained his PhD on the philosophy of Leibniz at Sydney University, Australia, with his thesis on ?Leibnizian Double-Ontology” initiating a new category in Leibniz scholarship. He has since published seven books on philosophy, including two book-length studies of Leibniz, all published by Cambridge Scholars.