The Five Loves and Commitments of Confucianism

“Know thyself,” said the temple at Delphi. Only you can peer into your heart and know what you truly love, but others can see your actions and see your commitments. These are related. Love empowers commitment; commitment sustains love.

What are the loves and commitments of Confucianism, the Ru Jia? To become a noble person I believe one starts by loving humanity. The love of humanity leads to a love of virtue. The love of virtue leads to a love of culture. The love of culture leads to a love of learning. And the love of learning leads to a love of order.

I believe the first commitment of a noble person is to family. The commitment to family enables a commitment to self-cultivation. The commitment to self-cultivation enables a commitment to community. A commitment to community enables commitment to a state. And a true commitment to a state should enable commitment to world peace, because no state is truly secure unless all states live in harmony.

A love for humanity empowers a family. A love of virtue empowers self-cultivation. A love of culture empowers community. A love of learning empowers a state. And a love of order empowers world peace.

World peace sustains order. A successful state sustains learning. Successful communities sustain culture. Successful self-cultivation sustains virtue. And successful families sustain humanity.

I have diagrammed these relationships. Click on the image to enlarge it.

This is my contribution to modern Confucianism.

Robert

Canonical Books and America's Future

A canon is an accepted body of related works. Mortimer Adler, the University of Chicago, and the Encyclopedia Britannica assembled and published 60 volumes of works called Great Books of the Western World. Adler studied at Columbia University where John Erskine developed classes based on Masterworks of Western Literature. Great Books courses have been very influential. The famous philosopher Richard Rorty studied the Great Books at the University of Chicago. Thirty years after graduating from Columbia University, the writer David Denby re-enrolled in the Great Books courses at Columbia and wrote "Great Books" about the experience. More recently Alex Beam has written, "A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books." As the quality of American education has declined, so has the study of the Great Books.

For a household or for an individual, the main problem with the Great Books is their quantity. Any list you find will have 100 or more works. Who can trully absorb that much? Who can absorb Plato's Republic in one reading?

The Confucian tradition, the Ru Jia, has a much shorter list. Even though Confucian scholars have been writing for thousands of years and many brilliant works have been produced, the Confucians have as their canon The Four Books and the Five Classics.

The Four Books are The Analects, The Mencius, The Great Learning, and The Doctrine of the Mean.

The Five Classics are The Book of Poetry (also called The Book of Songs or The Odes), The Book of Rites (also called The Liki), The Spring and Autumn Annuals (a history of the state of Lu), The Book of History (ancient Chinese history), and The Book of Changes (also called The I Ching).

The Four Books are the Core Curriculum of the Confucian tradition and they are remarkably compact. The Analects and the Mencius are books, but the Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean are essays.

The Four Books are brilliant works. You can read them all in a month or two, but spend years studying the width and breadth of their wisdom.

The Confucian tradition is a sub-set of Chinese culture as Stoicism is a sub-set of Western philosophy, so it makes sense that the classical Confucian tradition can be represented by four books while it takes over 100 books to represent Western civilization.

The Christian tradition is represented by one canonical book, the Bible. Some Christians might have a second book like The Institutes of the Christian Religion by John Calvin or The City of God by Augustine of Hippo, but these second books tend to identify schisms in the Christian tradition.

Except for the Christian tradition, there is little that truly unifies Americans. This is why E.D. Hirsch, Jr. wrote "Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know." His concept of cultural literacy focused on effective communication, not unity.

As Christianity becomes less influential in America, America becomes less unified. This is probably why the Russian Igor Panarin is forcasting America breaking apart in 2010, as reported in the front page of the Wall Street Journal on Monday December 29, 2008 in "As if Things Weren't Bad Enough, Russian Professor Predicts End of U.S." by Andrew Osborn.

If there were a reasonable number canonical books, say between one and ten, embraced by a large majority of Americans, the philosophy or morality within these canonical books could unify our country. We could become a stronger and better nation, more purposeful and successful if we had better direction in our lives than acquiring money and buying things.

If every person, every household, every community started reading great books and discussing great ideas, that would be a step toward finding canonical books we might all believe in.

Robert Canright

A good introduction to the Four Books is "The Four Books" by Daniel K. Gardner (ISBN 978-0872208261)

Response to the comment attributed to Max Weismann

Thank you for the feedback regarding the book by Alex Beam. The negativity you discussed was in Beam's book, not my blog. One review of Beam's book mentions he "offers childish critiques and name calling," so the negativity you mention has been noted by others.

Readers can find quotes from Robert Hutchins' essay, "The Great Conversation," at this link and can read the entire essay at this other link. Here is a link to the Great Books Academy for my readers.
-- Robert

The Sage, Perhaps Misunderstood by Americans

President George W. Bush was quoted using the word "sage" in the New York Times, Friday December 19, 2008 in this article: "‘Headed Out of Town,’ Bush Turns Reflective" by David Stout.

His exact words were:
“Reflections by a guy who’s headed out of town,” Mr. Bush called his musings in a question-and-answer session. “An old sage at 62 ... headed to retirement.”

President Bush used "sage" in the sense of "old man" or "wise old man." But this is not the sense in which "sage" is used in the Confucian tradition. They remembered the sage-kings of their ancient history, like Yao, who ruled with benevolence and led their kingdom into prosperity. The ancient sage kings were revered.

Confucius might have been thought a sage by his students and admirers, but he would never call himself a sage, for example:

From the Analects of Confucius, translated by James Legge, BOOK VII, CHAP. XXXIII:

"The sage and the man of perfect virtue — how dare I rank myself with them? It may simply be said of me, that I strive to become such without satiety, and teach others without weariness."

Being a sage in the Confucian tradition is not about experience or knowledge. It is not just about wisdom. Being a sage depends upon wisdom and virtue, and virtue in the sense that refers to an "inner potency" or "divine power," as explained in the Wikipedia article about the Tao Te Ching.

Here is a link to a nice article on the Sage.

This dependence on virtue makes the Confucian sage different than the Philosopher King of Plato. Plato believed true philosophers to be the most virtuous of men, but that sense of inner power flowing from virtue, in my opinion, is missing from Plato's Philosopher King.

Lack of virtue in America's financial leaders is what crashed the American economy in the Fall of 2008. I think we can learn much from the Confucian tradition about virtue and how it should lead to prosperity for the people.

Robert Canright