Legacies of Plato and Confucius – an observation

A mosaic of Plato with his students at the Academy

In my experience, it’s been next to impossible to read anything by or about Plato without stumbling, in one form or another, onto that tired ‘series of footnotes’ saw coined by Alfred North Whitehead. And yet, we can identify, in the annals of Western thinking, discrete figures and groups of people who are broadly considered to have been ‘Platonists’. In the classical world: the Middle Platonists (of whom Plutarch was the major figure) and the neo-Platonists (epitomised by Plotinus). In early Christian times, several of the Church Fathers (but certainly not all of them!) were influenced deeply by Plato: Saint Augustine of Hippo, Saint Dionysius the Areopagite, Saint Irenæus of Lyons, Saint Basil of Cæsarea, Saint Gregory of Nyssa, Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, Saint Maximus the Confessor. Later: Mary Astell and the Cambridge Platonists. And in our own age: Vladimir Solovyov, Leo Strauss, George Grant, Simone Weil and Alain Badiou. I haven’t even mentioned the Islamic Platonists, because I’m not familiar enough with them, although I’m quite aware of their existence and influence.

‘Confucianism’, however, is something at once more conceptually discrete, and also more diffuse, than ‘Platonism’, in spite of the well-founded parallels between the two philosophers otherwise. On the one hand, it would be profoundly silly to assert, as Whitehead did about Plato, that all of East Asian philosophy is a series of footnotes to Confucius, for the simple reason that Confucius’ contemporaries, the zhuzi baijia 诸子百家, existed, and that many of them went on to become profoundly influential. To be sure, many Western commentators attempt to do this anyway, by applying Confucianism as some kind of a priori cultural rubric onto everyday practices in East Asian business, etiquette, everyday life and so on. On the other hand, individual Confucians or groups of Confucians in Chinese intellectual history tend to be harder to identify than Platonists in the West, precisely because it was a philosophy that was heavily tied up with political legitimacy and class status. Anyone who passed the civil service examinations had to be familiar with the Classics and would be judged according to the depth of their understanding; thus, if one isn’t careful, one could wind up judging any post-classical Chinese thinker with official status as being a ‘Confucian’.

We can still try to draw some parallels. Confucius did have an academy, and many of his students went on to become philosophers in their own right. Mencius (a pupil of Kong Ji) and Xunzi each represented a branch of classicist thinking that relied heavily on Confucius’ teachings. Later, the schools of Dong Zhongshu and Yang Xiong represented a further split in Confucian thinking. Han Yu and his philosophical writings in response to Buddhism mark the definitive ‘neo-Confucian’ turn in classicist thought, and by the time you get to Zhu Xi the Confucian canons have been standardised and Confucianism fully transformed into a state ideology. (Ironically, Dong Zhongshu too often gets unfairly blamed for the process of institutionalisation perfected by Zhu Xi, the less-‘political’ thinker.)

After Zhu Xi it becomes much trickier to tell the difference between ‘Confucians’ (those philosophers convinced of the rightness of Confucius’ ideas and proponents of the classical canon) and the general class of scholar-officials tied to the Song, Ming and Qing states, and several Confucians were sympathetic to other modes and forms of thought (particularly those who rebelled and remonstrated against the official culture and order). There was no such ‘institutionalisation’ of Platonism, which makes it slightly easier to identify thinkers in the course of Western and Islamic history who were genuinely drawn to Plato’s ideas, despite the fact that Plato’s fingerprints are all over Western and Islamic philosophy.

I don’t think there’s any essential difference between the East Asian and Western-Islamic worlds that necessitated these shifts. I agree completely with Dr van Norden about the necessity of taking each seriously and on its own terms; and I find it atrocious that we don’t already. I further don’t think it’s conceptually impossible to find thinkers in modern times whose ideas and thinking were closer in spirit to Confucius than others – in the same way we can tell which thinkers in modern times are more influenced by Plato than by, say, Aristotle, the Pythagoreans, the Stoics, the Cynics or the Epicureans. I merely happen to believe that the Confucians who are truer and closer in substance to Confucius’ own thought are those that haven’t tried to definitively resolve the self-ritual dialectic with conceptual imports from German idealist or Buddhist philosophy. Confucius himself leaves that question, of whether the institutional rites come first or whether the self which cultivates them in itself does, as a problem for his own students. He doesn’t set out to solve it himself, at least not in the Analects, and it’s therefore inappropriate to cast Confucius as a definitive individualist or as a definitive collectivist.

At any rate, just a random observation here about some of the difficulties in doing genuine comparisons between the historical legacies of Plato and Confucius. I am still convinced that the two thinkers have much more in common with each other, than either of them do with the modern societies that lay claim to them.

Confucius teaching his students