This transformation process alone would bring people together under a common, familiar cause and, once it was fully undertaken, would aid in both government and shared morality. Regardless of how old we are, we never stop learning.
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See disclaimer. Confucianism Vs. Although the punishments were cruel and caused many to suffer, it also provided obedience from citizens. Johnson Legalism was based off of three strict guidelines: Fa.
India vs China The classical civilizations of China and India were two of the most important and extant civilizations with major political development. India was manifested by artistry, trade, and exceptional advances in mathematics. There were three main dynasties in classical China known as the Zhou, Qin, and Han Dynasty while India was founded by three empires: the Mauryan, Kushan, and Gupta empires.
Furthermore, morality has been fluid over time, changing to reflect the cultural mores of society; given enough.
Home Page Research Confucianism vs Legalism. Confucianism vs Legalism Words 10 Pages. Confucius taught the materialistic Chinese to admire the virtuous and respect the highly placed, whose characters were presumed to be moral. The word ren, a Chinese term for human virtue, means "proper human relationship". Without exact equivalent in English, the word ren is composed by combining the ideogram "man" with the numeral 2, a concept necessitated by the plurality of mankind and the quest for proper interpersonal relationship.
It is comparable to the Greek concept of humanity and the Christian notion of divine love, the very foundation of Christianity. Confucius' well-known admonition, "Do not unto others that which you not wish to have done to yourself," has been frequently compared with Christ's teaching, "Love thy neighbor as thyself. Confucius was less intrusively interfering but, of course, unlike Christ, he had the benefit of having met Laozi, founder of Taoism and consummate proponent of benign non-interference.
A close parallel was proclaimed by Hillel 30 BC-AD 10 , celebrated Jewish scholar and president of the Sanhedrin, in his famous maxim: "Do not unto others that which is hateful unto thee. No reasonable man would challenge the propriety of the Five Relationships Wulun. It is the most immutable fixation of cultural correctness in Chinese consciousness. The Five Relationships Wulun governed by Confucian rites are those of: 1.
Sovereign to subject 2. Parent to child 3. Elder to younger brother 4. Husband to wife 5. Friend to friend These relationships form the basic social structure of Chinese society. Each component in the relationships assumes ritual obligations and responsibility to the others at the same time he or she enjoys privileges and due consideration accorded by the other components.
Confucius would consider heretical the ideas of Jean Jacques Rousseau , who would assert two millennia after Confucius that man is good by nature but is corrupted by civilization.
Confucius would argue that without a Code of Rites Liji for governing human behavior, as embedded in the ritual compendium defined by him based on the ideas of Zhougong, human beings would be no better than animals, which Confucius regarded with contempt.
Love of animals, a Buddhist notion, is an alien concept to Confucians, who proudly display their species prejudice. Confucius acknowledged man to be benign by nature but, in opposition to Rousseau, he saw man's goodness only as an innate potential and not as an inevitable characteristic. To Confucius, man's destiny lies in his effort to elevate himself from savagery toward civilization in order to fulfill his potential for good.
Justice would emerge from a timeless morality that governs social behavior. Man would be orderly out of self-respect for his own moral character rather than from fear of punishment prescribed by law. A competent and loyal literati-bureaucracy shidafu faithful to a just political order would run the government according to moral principles rather than following rigid legalistic rules devoid of moral content.
The behavior of the sovereign is proscribed by the Code of Rites. Nostalgic of the idealized feudal system that purportedly had existed before the Spring and Autumn Period Chunqiu, BC in which he lived, Confucius yearned for the restoration of the ancient Zhou socio-political culture that existed two-and-a-half centuries before his time.
He dismissed the objectively different contemporary social realities of his own time as merely symptoms of chaotic degeneration. Confucius abhorred social atrophy and political anarchy. He strove incessantly to fit the real and imperfect world into the straitjacket of his idealized moral image. Confucianism, by placing blind faith on a causal connection between virtue and power, would remain the main cultural obstacle to China's periodic attempts to evolve from a society governed by men into a society governed by law.
The danger of Confucianism lies not in its aim to endow the virtuous with power, but in its tendency to label the powerful as virtuous. This is a problem that cannot be solved by the rule of law, since law is generally used by the powerful to control the weak. Mencius claimed that the Mandate of Heaven was conditioned on virtuous rule.
Mencius Meng-tzu, BC , prolific apologist for Confucius, the equivalent embodiment of St Paul and Thomas Aquinas in Confucianism, though not venerated until the 11th century AD during the Song Dynasty , greatly contributed to the survival and acceptance of the ideas of Confucius.
But Mencius went further. He argued that a ruler's authority is derived from the Mandate of Heaven Tianming , that such mandate is not perpetual or automatic and that it depends on good governance worthy of a virtuous sovereign. The concept of a Mandate of Heaven as proposed by Mencius is in fact a challenge to the concept of the divine right of absolute monarchs. The Mandate of Heaven can be lost through the immoral behavior of the ruler, or failings in his responsibility for the welfare of the people, in which case Heaven will grant another, more moral individual a new mandate to found a new dynasty.
Loyalty will inspire loyalty. Betrayal will beget betrayal. A sovereign unworthy of his subjects will be rejected by them. Such is the will of Heaven Tian. Arthurian legend in medieval lore derived from Celtic myths a Western version of the Chinese Mandate of Heaven. Arthur, illegitimate son of Uther Pendragon, king of Britain, having been raised incognito, was proclaimed king after successfully withdrawing Excalibur, a magic sword embedded in stone allegedly removable only by a true king.
Arthur ruled a happy kingdom as a noble king and fair warrior by reigning over a round table of knights in his court at Camelot. But his kingdom lapsed into famine and calamity when he became morally wounded by his abuse of kingly powers. To cure Arthur's festering moral wound, his knights embarked on a quest for the Holy Grail, identified by Christians as the chalice of the Last Supper brought to England by St Joseph of Arimathea.
Mencius' political outlook of imperative heavenly mandate profoundly influences Chinese historiography, the art of official historical recording. It tends to equate ephemeral reigns with immorality. And it associates protracted reigns with good government. It is a hypothesis that, in reality, is neither true nor inevitable. It is necessary to point out that Mencius did not condone revolutions, however justified by immorality of the ruling political authority or injustice in the contemporary social system.
He merely used threat of replacement of one ruler with another more enlightened to curb behavioral excesses of despotism. To Mencius, political immorality was always incidental but never structural. As such, he was a reformist rather than a revolutionary.
Nicolo Machiavelli, in , 18 centuries after Mencius, wrote The Prince, which pioneered modern Western political thought by making medieval disputes of legitimacy irrelevant.
He detached politics from all pretensions of theology and morality, firmly establishing it as a purely secular activity and opening the door for modern Western political science. Religious thinkers and moral philosophers would charge that Macchiavelli glorified evil and legitimized despotism. Legalists of the Qin Dynasty BC , who preceded publication of The Prince by 17 centuries, would have celebrated Machiavelli as a champion of truth.
Mencius, an apologist for Confucian ethics, was Machiavellian in his political strategy in that he deduced a virtuous reign as the most effective form of power politics.
He advocated a utilitarian theory of morality in politics. A similar view to that of Mencius was advocated by Thomas Hobbes almost two millennia later. Hobbes set down the logic of modern absolutism in his book Leviathan It was published two years after the execution of Charles I, who had been found royally guilty of the high crime of treason by Oliver Cromwell's regicidal Rump Parliament in commonwealth England.
Hobbes, while denying all subjects any moral right to resist the sovereign, subscribed to the fall of a sovereign as the utilitarian result of the sovereign's own failure in his prescribed royal obligations. Revolts are immoral and illegal, unless they are successful revolutions, in which case the legitimacy of the new regime becomes unquestionable. In application to theology, God is the successful devil; or conversely the devil is a fallen god.
It is pure Confucian-Mencian logic. As Taoists have pointed out, there are many Confucians who evade the debate on the existence of God, but it is hard to find one who does not find the devil everywhere, particularly in politics. Confucius, during his lifetime, was ambivalent about the religious needs of the populace.
He also declined a request to elucidate on the supernatural after-life by saying: "Not even knowing yet all there is to know about life, how can one have any knowledge of death? Confucianism is in fact a secular, anti-religious force, at least in its philosophical constitution.
It downgrades other-worldly metaphysics while it cherishes secular utility. It equates holiness with human virtue rather than with godly divinity. According to Confucius, man's salvation lies in his morality rather than his piety. Confucian precepts assert that man's incentive for moral behavior is rooted in his quest for respect from his peers rather than for love from God.
This morality abstraction finds its behavioral manifestation through a Code of Rites that defines proper roles and obligations of each individual within a rigidly hierarchical social structure. Confucians are guided by a spiritual satisfaction derived from winning immortal respect from posterity rather than by the promise of everlasting paradise after God's judgment. They put their faith in meticulous observance of secular rites, as opposed to Buddhists, who worship through divine rituals of faith.
Confucians tolerate God only if belief in his existence would strengthen man's morality. Without denying the existence of the supernatural, Confucians assert its irrelevance in this secular world. Since existence of God is predicated on its belief by man, Confucianism, in advocating man's reliance of his own morality, indirectly denies the existence of God by denying its necessity.
To preserve social order, Confucianism instead places emphasis on prescribed human behavior within the context of rigid social relationships through the observance of rituals. As righteousness precludes tolerance and morality permits no mercy, therein lie the oppressive roots of Confucianism.
Most religions instill in their adherents fear of a God who is nevertheless forgiving. Confucianism, more a socio-political philosophy than a religion, distinguishes itself by preaching required observation of an inviolable Code of Rites, the secular ritual compendium as defined by Confucius, in which tolerance is considered as decadence and mercy as weakness.
Whereas Legalism advocates equality under the law without mercy, Confucianism, though equally merciless, allows varying standards of social behavior in accordance with varying ritual stations. However, such ritual allowances are not to be construed as tolerance for human frailty, for which Confucianism has little use.
St Augustine , who was born years after Confucius, in systematizing Christian thought defended the doctrines of original sin and the fall of man. He thus reaffirmed the necessity of God's grace for man's salvation, and further formulated the Church's authority as the sole guarantor of Christian faith.
The importance of Augustine's contribution to cognition by Europeans of their need for Christianity and to their acceptance of the orthodoxy of the Catholic Church can be appreciated by contrasting his affirmative theological ideas to the anti-religious precepts of Confucius. Immanuel Kant , who was born 2, years after Confucius, developed the theme of "Transcendental Dialectic" in his Critic of Pure Reason Kant asserted that all theoretical attempts to know things inherently, which he called "nounena", beyond observable "phenomena", are bound to fail.
Kant showed that the three great problems of metaphysics - God, free will and immortality - are insoluble by speculative thought, and their existence can neither be confirmed nor denied on theoretical grounds, nor can it be rationally demonstrated. In this respect, Kantian rationalism lies parallel to Confucian spiritual utilitarianism, though each proceeds from opposite premises.
Confucius allowed belief in God only as a morality tool. Rationally, Kant declared that the limits of reason only render proof elusive, they do not necessarily negate belief in the existence of God.
In antiquity, the market was for exchange of what one had for what one lacked. The authorities supervised it. There was, however, a despicable fellow who always looked for vantage point and, going up on it, gazed into the distance to the left and to the right in order to secure himself all the profit there was in the market.
The people all thought him despicable, and, as a result, they taxed him. The taxing of merchants began with this despicable fellow. Mencius believed that the individual was rational and capable of learning, something that would be viewed as a liberal view of human nature, today. If they follow these inclinations, they will struggle and snatch from each other, and inclinations to defer or yield will die. I disagree. His statement shows he does not know what human nature is and has not pondered the distinction between what is human nature and what is created by man.
Human nature is what Heaven supplies. It cannot be learned or worked at… Human nature refers to what is in people but which they cannot study or work at achieving. Human products refers to what people acquire through study and effort… [8]. The belief that human nature is inherently evil led to the belief that human nature and the anarchy that results from it needed to be controlled. This is what led to the doctrine of Legalism.
Legalists utilize the state as a means to control human nature, and to prevent human beings from pursuing their own self-interest. The most comprehensive account of Legalist economic thought during this period was Lord Shang Yang, who held high office in the state of Qin between the years of B. According to Han Fei Tzu:. An enlightened ruler will administer his state in such a way as to decrease the number of merchants, artisans, and other men who make their living by wandering from place to place, and will see to it that such men are looked down upon….
When a man who sits back and collects taxes makes twice as much as a farmer and enjoys greater honor than the plowman or the solider, then public-spirited men will grow few and merchants and tradesmen will increase in number. These are the customs of a disordered state: Its scholars praise the ways of the former kings and imitate their benevolence and righteousness, put on a fair appearance and speak in elegant phrases, thus casting doubt upon the laws of the time and causing the ruler to be of two minds.
Legalist scholars such as Han Fei Tzu feared merchants, and more importantly, feared the accumulation of wealth because it threatened the power of the state. Therefore, anything that threatened the power of the state was seen as a threat to order and stability. Xunzi expanded upon up the Legalist doctrine by arguing that control over the people and the economy was the only way to make a country self-sufficient.
How exactly does one let the people make a generous living through the exercise of government? According to Xunzi:. If one taxes lightly the cultivated fields and outlying districts, imposes excises uniformly at the border stations and in the market places, keeps statistical records to reduce the number of merchants and traders, initiates only rarely projects requiring the labor of people, and does not take the farmers from their fields except in the off-season, the state will be wealthy.
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