1.7 Puett丨Capricious World Early Confucian Thinking

Capricious World Early ConfucianThinking

In terms of these great philosophical andreligious movements in China, certainly one of the most historicallyinfluential would be the ways of thinking that comes out of a figure named Confucius. Confucius,as we have seen, a rough contemporary of Socrates, a rough contemporary ofBuddha, and equally like the ones I just mentioned, a figure whose thinking,approaches, and ideas would have an incredible influence on the civilization inquestion. Confucius himself was bornbelow the aristocracy. He was educated to gain a political position in one ofthese emerging states. He did so and had some relatively minor positions thathe definitely did extremely well.

And at a certain point in his career, heturned instead to being a teacher, teaching his disciples to, yes, be educated,to read, write and understand the world around them, but much more importantly,to begin to rethink the world around them and to begin to create a better worldwith values about how, potentially, humans really could begin to flourish. Wehave, as far as we know, relatively few writings from Confucius himself, but we have lots of discussions by Confucius. One very important text is knownas The Analects, which is an attempt bylater figures, reportedly both his immediate disciples and much later disciplesto write down the words, the arguments that Confuciusmade to them and trying to lay out the basic philosophy.

And we also have many writings from laterfigures, who would see themselves as coming out of the teachings of Confucius, who would develop these ideas intoa lot of the key ways of thinking that we will ultimately come to think of as Confucianism. So, let us begin with adiscussion of both Confucius himselfand one of his very early and perhaps most important interpreters, Mencius, and discuss what they were sayingboth in general, but much more importantly for our current concerns, how theywere relating their philosophies to the world at large. So, to begin with Confucius. Confucius,as we have noted, is living in this crucial moment when these earlieraristocratic societies were collapsing, and he is part and parcel of thebeginnings of a very different world that is being formed.

He is certainly not at all happy with theway that world is going, and he is calling for a return, in some ways, to theseearlier Bronze Age societies, but certainly not the world that we were justmentioning. He is certainly not calling for a return to aristocratic rule. Heis not calling for a return to positions of power being defined by heredity.What he wants to return to is a world, as he perceives it to have been, a worldin which things like ritual were seen as crucial to human flourishing. And Confucius will devote much of his teaching torethinking what it would mean to develop a flourishing world through ritual.The primary rituals he was looking to were, not surprisingly, those that werein existence during the Bronze Age and particularly during the Zhou dynasty. Primarily,as he said, simply because the Zhou dynasty came after the previous two Bronze Age societies.

And because of that, they were able todevelop and elaborate the ritual system. Now, why for Confucius would ritual be important? As we've already seen formany of the societies in question, certainly very much including the Zhou, rituals mainlymeant things like sacrifice and divination, mainly aimed at gaining, hopefully,the support of a very capricious world. Confuciusagrees with this only in part. He will certainly agree that the world,at least to us, is often very capricious. The spirits, at least as far as wecan understand them, which is very minimally, appear to be very capricious.

Even Heaven,the high deity, is often, to our understanding, highly capricious as well. But Confucius will take out the argument that weshould be doing things like sacrifice and ritual in general in order to appeasethem. In fact, Confucius seems to berelatively uninterested in using ritual to try to alter the spirits at all. Ifthe spirits enter our rituals and are changed accordingly, that is perfectlyfine. The degree to which they in fact are being transformed by our rituals isactually not something Confucius isterribly concerned about. Confucius ismainly concerned about changing human behavior. He wants to use these ritualsto alter us.

And the fact, and to him, it is a fact,that the world as we can see it is capricious is to him crucial for thefollowing reason: we should use ritual to improve ourselves as human beings,and we should understand that improving ourselves as human beings does not meanthat the divine powers will support us. It does not mean we will be rewarded ifwe are good. It does not mean we will be punished if we are bad. You try tobecome good simply so that you can be good to those around us. That's it. It isonly through ritual that we can become good, and if you do so, you willhopefully become the kind of person who can affect those around you for thebetter as well. And meanwhile, the spirits will continue to be capricious, andwe are not looking to them to reward our behavior in any manner, shape, or formwhatsoever.

With this being said, then, it raises thecrucial question: how do we use ritual to better ourselves? Confucius’s general view seems to be the following.Humans consist of a ton of emotions, dispositions, desires, faculties, and whatwe're doing with rituals is refining our ability to respond to the world. Weundertake rituals in order to improve our dispositional responses to the world,to improve our ability to sense the world and act properly in the world, and ifwe spend a life doing rituals along these lines, training our dispositions, wecan ultimately, hopefully achieve a state of humaneness, a state where we canbegin to sense in any situation how we should act to help those around us, evenwhen there is not a ritual there to tell us what to do.

In other words, we would simply, throughthe training of rituals, sense the world effectively and be able to acteffectively in the world. And again, if we do so, this would mean we willaffect the world for the better. It does not mean that we will therefore gainthe support of divine powers. Divine powers, for Confucius,are capricious, to our understanding, and our rituals are not there togain their support. They are there to improve us. These ideas were taken inmany ways at the time, highly, highly influential, but let me simply turn veryquickly to one of his most important interpreters and certainly one of his mostinfluential interpreters, a figure named Mencius.

Mencius lived a bit later. So, he is a 4th century BCE figure. And Mencius saw his project as one of laying outthe philosophical background that would explain why what Confucius was talking about would make senseand how to understand it. And Mencius’sgoal was to lay this out in terms of moral psychology. His argument was thatthe reason we can so train our dispositions is because humans have within thema potential for goodness. We have sprouts of goodness within us that if wecultivate properly, tend to properly, water properly can grow into beingextraordinarily moral qualities. And for Mencius,the key, both individually, is to so cultivate these roots, and in terms of apolitical philosophy, it is also how to create societies within which peopleare being cultivated.

In other words, creating the equivalentof the types of soil and watering and sunlight that sprouts need in order togrow. But Mencius will also maintain Confucius's basic view that the world itselfis fundamentally capricious. In other words, even if we do all that we justmentioned and we so cultivate our sprouts and so become the sorts of humanbeings who are truly, truly virtuous to those around us, there is no claim herethat we will therefore be rewarded.

In fact, Menciuswould put it more strongly: we can do all of that, and for reasons thatmake no sense, at least to our understanding, horrible things will happen tous. Great people will die young. People will do extraordinary things and bestruck down. And others who seem to be from any point of view bad people canbizarrely be incredibly successful. And the reason this is so important for Mencius, very much building upon Confucius, is that that means the focus isexclusively on the cultivation process. We are simply striving to be good tohelp those around us. We are not undertaking this work in order to gain thesupport of divine powers because if we do, of course, we're thinking simply ofdoing things for ourselves, getting rewards for ourselves, as opposed to doingthe kinds of work we need to be doing simply to be good to those around us.

In short, what Confucius and his later interpreter Mencius are arguing is the following: let us take the ritualsthat used to exist during the Bronze Age, mainly as a means of appeasing andgaining the support of divine powers, usually capricious divine powers, and Confucius and Mencius are saving the claim that thedivine powers are, at least to our understanding, capricious, but removingritual from our means of controlling or appeasing them. Ritual becomes simply aprocess for human, moral cultivation. And explicitly they mean to argue thatour doing so is simply being done in order to make a better world for humanity.It will not mean that, necessarily, the divine powers will support us. Itcertainly does not mean the divine powers will be altered in any way by thefact that we are doing so. We do so to create a better world. It is, in otherwords, a philosophical tradition based upon rituals, but rituals within whatwas seen to be a fundamentally capricious world and a world that would befundamentally capricious after our work within ritual continues.

As we will see, this idea will play outnot only in very significant ways in later Chinese history, it will play out inways that actually push very strongly against the kinds of views that figureslike Max Weber were mistakenly readinginto the Chinese context. Thank you very much.