Final Thoughts

    My second trip through Confucius' Analects has proved enormously rewarding for my way of thinking about him. The first time I read through the work I was left with the impression that his thought resembled the Socratic approach to philosophy accompanied with some needless Eastern obscurantism that did more to make me confused than it did to further his argument in any way. I was also struck by the richness and vast array of characters among his disciples, but given the speed with which we read through the book in seminar I didn't have enough time to truly approach their nuances. 

    This time around I had a much greater appreciation for how the text speaks through the silence, in a way that a Socratic dialogue never could, and started to see characters like Zilu and Ran Qiu as real people that I could compare to others I've met in my life. There truly are no throwaway books or characters in the Analects and every analect contains a wealth of hidden meanings that does require one to make the attempt to round off the other three corners. In many ways, the silence of the Analects now presents me with a challenge to overcome my unwarranted and swift presumptions of understanding when confronted with a text like this one; intellectual humility is definitely one of my biggest takeaways. I also now more inclined to see each character as a different temperamental disposition of mine: Zilu represents the impulsive, rash sides of my psyche, and Ran Qiu represents the timid part of me that wants to draw the line before its time. 

    The more abstract conversations about the nature of the Junzi we had in class also made me realize how bold Confucius' project was. He wasn't just trying to create a political or bureaucratic class of gentleman-scholars like how the Neo-Confuciansts understood him or how many modern history textbooks try to teach. The Junzi was an ontological possibility for the human person that was supposed to be a real manifestation of the Tao in human life. Political peace and prosperity was definitely one of Confucius' aims, but this was secondary to a remarkably complex and individual approach to human life that cherishes virtue above all else. Parallels can be made to Greco-Roman humanist projects in the West, but there is something about the Confucian approach that preserves the existential mystery of being a human in a way that comes across as very fresh. Having studied a lot of Western humanism, it's easy to see the humanist project as somewhat formulaic or overly sentimental after awhile, but Confucius is anything but that. He deals with the pain of life in a way that does not shy away from its terribleness, while also giving one hope that virtue will triumph in the end.

Comments

  1. Krishnan VenkateshApril 6, 2022 at 10:34 PM

    Beautifully expressed. Thank you. I think the Confucian work comes across in the West in writers like Montaigne, Henry Fielding, and George Eliot, who try to do exactly what you describe: to manifest the Tao in human life, from within.

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