Confucius was a Failed Revolutionary: the Origins of Chinese Political Philosophy.

the job dynasty is ending confucius
wants to restore the old joe political and ritual order the new qin dynasty has some new ideas lord shang is the most convenient author to refer to as an example of this he became the emblem of the new political philosophy of chin and then step three after the collapse and end of the qin dynasty the han dynasty has authors who reevaluate the historical significance of the chin they largely evaluate it negatively and we then have the ongoing disputes between confucianists and legalists as to what the future of china should be already with these two quotations and believe me i have more already with these two quotations we see that confucius is living with the delusion that if only he could take over the leadership if only he could get himself some sort of position like prime minister or viceroy in government within three years he could completely transform the social order he could completely return china to its former glory under the joe dynasty but moreover he isn't just willing to go to job interviews he's willing to join in armed rebellion he's willing to join in the revolution he's willing to support rebels who are in a state while they're starting a civil war [Music] how many of these names do you recognize these are some of the greatest the most important authors political philosophers in the history of china and they're some of the most important in the history of the world and they're not just important in the past tense they're important and influential for more than a billion people in china right now they're going to be even more important as the next 50 years of our history unfolds how many of these names have you heard of and for those of you in the audience maybe you have a bit of background in this area you've studied at university if you've heard of the names how many of these books have you actually read and i don't even mean cover to cover how many of these books have you even read 10 pages of let's be honest now a lot of us have read a few selected quotations from confucius but uh you may not have read 10 pages there was a lecture uh here on youtube from a university professor who began by asking the audience how many people had actually heard of let alone read han fetzer he praised his audience for being honest because apparently almost nobody raised their hands and he said that before giving the lecture he went and checked with the library and the library had records going back about a hundred years nobody had ever taken the book out of the library nobody ever requested the book neither in chinese or in english translation so in the year 2020 we're going through a really interesting period of transition the importance of chinese political philosophy is recognized everywhere and again not just its importance historically or retrospectively its importance here and now and for the future this is still providing not just the vocabulary of chinese political debate it's not just providing references in chinese political discussions it really is in a meaningful sense part and parcel of ongoing political discourse political philosophizing in the people's republic of china and in places like singapore hong kong and taiwan everyone recognizes the importance of this corpus of literature but nobody reads it nobody in english reads that nobody in french german nobody in the western world has been paying attention to this literature while at the same time we've all been recognizing its tremendous importance this is not an entirely negative situation the political philosophy of ancient india the political philosophy of medieval thailand cambodia laos there are myriad cultures all over the world that actually do have written records at least going back several centuries they have their own written history their own written political philosophy political discourse and that's being completely ignored and nobody recognizes the importance of it at all so we're going through a period of transition now the modern west recognizes the importance of these things but as ignore them and we're going to shift to recognizing the importance of these things and not ignore them so here we get into our first problem ancient grace has left us relatively few authors with relatively few pages extant concerning politics or political philosophy there are just a few famous names that are studied by a small elite within our society but we all recognize their importance some of you may complain that aristotle's politics in fact has a great many pages uh the history written by thucydides has a great many pages yes but if you read those two books you've read pretty much the majority of what there is to read on politics of the ancient world yeah there are a few other few other ancient greek authors i can shout out here but it doesn't add up to all that much when we shift to ancient china we're talking about mountains of manuscripts huge amounts of text from a long list of many different named authors the good news is that this huge quantity and this huge diversity of ancient chinese political texts fits into a simple historical narrative now you should always be suspicious of simple historical narratives they tend to be both overly simplistic and to reflect the impulse of modern readers to want to simplify history and there's some truth to that nevertheless it's very useful and kind of reassuring that we can all keep our own sanity as we wade into this huge quantity and diversity of text that there is this historical narrative you're going to learn in just the next couple of minutes to help us keep straight what these texts were what their political significance was and indeed what their political significance now is because this is very much a tradition that is ongoing one footnote here the bad news as noted at the bottom of the screen a lot of chinese popular culture a lot makes propagandistic use of this historical narrative the extent to which mainstream chinese movies misrepresent misinterpret wildly reinvent this history it's just kind of mind-blowing to me and given that many children grow up watching these films whether you regard them as popularizing entertainment or as political propaganda or both because they're both it's very easy to see how a child who grows up watching these movies would as an adult have mixed misapprehensions about who these historical figures were what their political significance now is so expect controversy if you talk about these subjects with chinese people they may get angry at you they may get confused and it's unlikely to be that their mouth pieces for communist party propaganda more likely they themselves have just grown up with this kind of popularizing mix of historical fact and fiction bottom left corner of the screen i've expressed this simple historical narrative with the utmost simplicity in just three stages one the joe dynasty collapses keep in mind the joe dynasty you're talking about roughly 800 years of history comparisons are odious but the collapse of the joe dynasty would have been for people in china at that time an event much more significant than the collapse of the roman empire in europe so the collapse of the joe dynasty step one here it was a big deal step two the chin dynasty emerging out of what's called the warring states period look all this terminology doesn't matter it'll be on the test if you're actually in the university you need to know the term warning states parade the chin dynasty changes everything for better or worse and then step three the han dynasty reflects on and debates those changes thereafter is this the whole story of course not you could start the story earlier with the rise of the joe dynasty but this is it in three simple stages while the joe dynasty is declining confucius is an ultra conservative trying to return to joe era tradition politically his side lost every other side was really talking about significant innovations following after the collapse of the joe the other major authors didn't want to idealize the past or at least not to the same ludicrous extent that confucius wanted to this is only slightly more complex than the three-step timeline i've presented you with before the job dynasty is ending confucius wants to restore the old joe political and ritual order the new qin dynasty has some new ideas lord shang is the most convenient author to refer to as an example of this he became the emblem of the new political philosophy of chin and then step three after the collapse and end of the qin dynasty the han dynasty has authors who re-evaluate the historical significance of the chin they largely evaluate it negatively and we then have the ongoing disputes between confucianists and legalists as to what the future of china should be comparisons are odious but comparisons can be quite useful i remember just a few years ago when i was teaching my girlfriend the history of ancient greece and we read through the major political philosophers that have come down to us extant from ancient athens i similarly summarized the political history of that period and you see here a timeline whether you think of it as complex or simplistic showing that you really can't understand who these major authors are socrates plato thucydides xenophon herodotus just by considering which war it was they were born during which war was they fought in which wars they were too young or too old to really appreciate the significance of there's this one period where athens is at war with persia there's this other period where they're at war with sparta and then we get into this kind of twilight of athenian democracy where increasingly it is rome that is the center of political debate and the concern of historians and philosophers and the significance of athens begins to disappear at least in the written record of history right here wrongly if you were to ask me why does anyone read aristotle why do people still read the ancient greeks the most honest answer i could give you is because they have to and if you were to ask me why do people remain ignorant of the political philosophy of ancient china my answer is because they can people tend to remain as ignorant of things as they possibly can be this is part of the tragedy of human nature there is definitely pressure on us to know aristotle who could possibly get through life even someone like bill clinton he would at least have to be able to fake his way through an interview pretending that he's read and understood aristotle's significance for the development of modern democracy out of its ancient roots and athens and so on and so forth um it is true that these chinese sources are lacking that kind of impetus of guilt that in order to be a sophisticated person in the 21st century you've just gotta read aristotle but there's also a sense in which the chinese texts are alienated from a great deal of our political discourse because they show absolutely no interest in democracy now to be fair i actually feel there's a similar contrast even if you look at the texts of ancient greece versus ancient rome there's very little sincere interest in democracy even in an author like cicero from ancient rome however many institutions within our modern democratic governments are completely lacking in democracy and i think if you just use your imagination a little bit you can actually see how a great deal of china's political philosophy applies to those institutions universities have no democracy no transparency no accountability they run like fiefdoms i suppose they run like little miniature dictatorships uh a great deal of what you find discussed about the relationships within the hierarchy of ancient china could be applied to corporate governance to the way universities operate it may not apply so well to the way we like to think of democratic governments in the western world and the extent to which the philosophy is applicable to the modern west it might be a horrifying reminder that our societies are not as democratic as we'd like to imagine them they're certainly certainly it's much less democratic than ancient athens was topic for another video in ancient greece we find this contrast between democracy aristocracy oligarchy and of course even these terms i'm using all of them come straight at aristotle the vocabulary we have to discuss this comes out of ancient athens in the ancient chinese texts there is zero democracy there is zero interest in the will of the people no concept of participation or representation of the people and indeed there's a very telling quotation from uh confucius where he says that when government operates properly the common people have no opinions about politics whatsoever if people are talking about and voicing their opinions of abolish it's a sign that the government is falling apart in ancient china also zero interest in cross-cultural analysis such as we see in an ancient greek author like herodotus for all these reasons you can certainly have the feeling that the ancient chinese political philosophy has much less salience to modern life this is a picture of cardinal ritua one of the most important men in the history of france and thus to some extent the world tell me was he a religious figure or a political figure would you think of him as a religious leader or political leader of course he was both we are raised with the delusion in the 21st century western world not that religion and politics are one thing that we forcibly separate but that they're intrinsically and inherently separable and always have been that they are two distinct domains and always have been throughout history and still are now nothing could be further from the truth this is totally untrue in the history of the western world it's totally untrue in ancient athens and ancient rome it's totally untrue in medieval europe and it's untrue in the modern world now but it is a delusion we cling to and when we look into the texts of other cultures when we look at ancient india or ancient china or ancient thailand or anywhere else we tend to separate even if it's just literally separating into different books on different bookshelves or different lectures in the university that day we tend to separate the religious from the political each and every one of the extant authors we have about politics in ancient china was also writing about religion there is no separation to be found it's extremely misleading to think that confucius wrote about religion and not politics or that a secular author a so-called secular author like kanfe wrote about politics but not religion i can quote you long passages from the han fates uh that are 100 percent taoist spiritual philosophy this is just uh let me put it this way the idea that confucius is not interested in politics this could only be created and sustained by very selective quotation and concealment of about 90 percent of the text and the idea that han fei is not interested in religion likewise would involve a great deal of cherry picking and sleight of hand and now you get this disclaimer at the bottom of the screen in yellow that i don't want to talk about about how it's some kind of terrible mistake to separate this corpus of ancient chinese political attacks into taoism confucianism and legalism one of the reasons why that is a mistake is that it creates this pleasing illusion that somehow confucius was a religious leader but not a political leader and that some of the other authors were political leaders but not religious leaders and that that's really misleading and dangerous and wrong however i do understand why people wanted to create this category of the legalists some people call them the realists because for one thing every single one of them was openly a vicious critic of confucius and the confucianist so there's there's tension and you can divide the authors into different rival camps broadly speaking the people we refer to as legalists were men who had practical experience in business in worldly affairs in warfare and in the actual business of the government whereas someone like confucius well let me just read you this quotation in brief de gong asked about governing confucius said in reply simply make sure there is sufficient food sufficient armaments and that you have the confidence of the common people zigong then said if sacrificing one of these first three things became unavoidable which would you sacrifice first confucius replied i would sacrifice the armaments zigong said if sacrificing one of the two remaining things became unavoidable which would you sacrifice next confucius replied i would sacrifice the food death has always been with us but a state cannot stand once it has lost the confidence of the common people to this i add the simple observation this sounds like the opinion of someone who has never experienced starvation and warfare this is the none too subtle distinction between confucius and people like him and authors who are openly hostile to confucianism like lord shang like the author of the han feza and the sunshine numerous other texts broadly referred to by modern western people as legalists it's really easy to make this kind of um abstract pontification about how you know armaments aren't really what win war and weapons aren't really what maintains the social order and starving to death is no big deal the guys who've actually been through war anarchy rebellion desperate terrible struggles and who've actually seen people starve to death or come close to starving selves let's just say the difference in tone it's none too subtle at all so contrary to this notion that confucius is somehow a religious rather than a political leader i'm here emphasizing every single page of the analytics of confucius is political in nature and what you see at the bottom of the screen in yellow is the shocking but necessary next step where i begin to explain to you that confucius was indeed conspiring to take over the government yes i said it and yes i can back it up first quotation here if someone would simply employ me confucius complains if he could simply get a job as the ruler basically within a single year i could put things into some kind of order and within three years the transformation would be complete section 17.5 so these are not continuous quotations gong shan furao was a rebel who used the stronghold of b to stage a revolt against the ruling g family he summoned confucius and the master was inclined to go zulu was displeased and said we have nowhere else to go that is true but why must we go to the house of gongshan the master replied if i found someone to employ me could i not establish a new joe in the east already with these two quotations and believe me i have more already with these two quotations we see that confucius is living with the delusion that if only he could take over the leadership if only he could get himself some sort of position like prime minister or viceroy in government within three years he could completely transform the social order he could completely return china to its former glory under the joe dynasty but moreover he isn't just willing to go to job interviews he's willing to join in armed rebellion he's willing to join in the revolution he's willing to support rebels who are in a state while they're starting a civil war in a period in china when there was a fair bit of civil war going on here's a parallel passage vc summoned confucius and the master was inclined to go zulu said bc is using the city of jongmo to stage a rebellion against his superior how could it be acceptable for you master to go to him the master replied have i not also said a gentleman is so hard that grinding will not wear him down so pure that dying will not stain him black do you take me to be a bitter gourd content to merely hang on a string without being eaten confucius is telling you quite clearly that he's not afraid to get his hands dirty in the various forms of rebellion war and civil war in order to put himself into a position of power hugong and ee were examples of government officials who resigned on a point of moral principle their persons remain pure and their resignations from office were well considered confusions concluded quote i however am different from all of them in that i have no preconceived notions of what is permissible and what is not yes indeed section 14.17 zugong asked guanzhong was not a good person was he when du kwan had prince joe murdered he turned around and served his master's murderer as prime minister confucius replied when guan zhong served as du kwan's prime minister he allowed him to become hegemon over the other feudal lords uniting and ordering the entire world to this day the people continue to enjoy the benefits of his achievements if it were not for guanzhong we would all be dressed like barbarians who had conquered us confucius is telling you quite clearly here that he is not afraid of moral compromise not even engaging in murder or not even at least shall we say benefiting from murder if someone else has murdered the king so that he can be part of a faction that takes over government thereafter this is the end of the video this is not my first video on the topic and it is not going to be the last in this video we've just barely gotten started but i think that we have set out all of the hooks that we're now going to hang the coat hangers on in shall we say reorganizing the closet of ancient chinese political philosophy and there's one big secret that's come out of the closet already people who we tend to think of as pious well-intentioned religious leaders like confucius really were in their own time political leaders and they weren't just mediocre conformist political leaders they were radicals in their own way with shocking new ideas or even if you look at confucius as a conservative he has shocking conservative ideas and they were willing to kill they were willing to fight wars and participate in civil wars to advance their ideas and indeed just their own position their own career over the careers of others the amount of bloodshed and torture that we're going to get into in the videos coming up in this series um may give you nightmares i don't know to what extent that's a contrast to ancient greece or ancient rome where bloodshed is indeed part of the history of democracy hashtag spoilers they killed socrates you don't know um but the extent to which all of these men were risking their lives in even writing down their political philosophy and participating in the political system of ancient china in any way is shocking and this will be brought home to you vividly as we have written descriptions of exactly how these men were tortured to death for daring to step forward and from their perspective take on a life of self-sacrifice as civil servants serving the people serving the state the stakes for ancient chinese philosophy were very very high and not just with the rise and fall of particular dynasties even during the periods that we would describe as peaceful the extent to which people were putting their own lives at risk well that is a significant contrast from the authors of ancient greece and rome does it matter does it matter that confucius volunteered to participate in these i don't know insurrectionary or subversive activities against the state in his own time of course it matters i mean the figures we have from ancient european history they emerge through the fog of public indifference once in a while a figure like confucius a figure like lord shang everybody who's anybody in china reads every word they've written historically until quite recently people memorized the writings of confusions people did indeed write exams that presumed they had memorized the writings of confucius the precise words confucius used even in sarcastic remarks and insults have become immortalized and become part of the dna not just of chinese culture but particularly of chinese political culture there's a sense in which the smallest details of the expressions of confucius really do matter really are part and parcel of the way the chinese state is governed in a way that the writings of karl marx never were and never will be