Confucianism: A Short Introduction

Confucianism is the political and social philosophy established by its progenitor Confucius and later developed by other leading thinkers within the Confucian tradition, notably Mencius, a disciple of the founder.

It has proved to be the most enduring moral and spiritual framework of Chinese public philosophy, and to this day it enjoys paramount importance as the essential social insitution in East Asian societies at large, even experiencing a revival as guiding mores in mainland China.

The central values of Confucianism could be summarised according to the following scheme:

• family commitment
• ritual (li)
• the material well-being of the people
• humaneness (ren)
• meritocracy in education and politics
• diversity in harmony (he)
• this-wordly outlooks

This-wordly outlooks is to say that its focus is on the sublunary world. In other words, Confucianism appears to function as a largely secular social system in its worldly instantiation.

That being said, it must also be stressed that another key Confucian institution is the widespread practice of ancestor worship and veneration. This imagined component in the family unit seems to suggest that (deceased) forebears are considered to be continous participants in the good of family life.

The family is taken as the main social institution in the Confucian framework, and remains a traditionally important theme in Confucian ethical theory and practice.

This has bearing on both social and political affairs in East Asian countries. For example, it’s widely held that children have a profound moral obligation to care for their elderly parents, and this duty is only to be forsaken in the most exceptional circumstances.

This familial commitment goes hand in hand with the wider Asian emphasis on social harmony as well as putting communitarian values and the interests of society before the individual. The family is also viewed as the main, if not the only, springboard for moral learning, ultimately eclipsing the instructive potential of wider civil society.

However, Confucians have long advocated that it’s possible and desirable to extend family values outside the family itself, but the family-centered reality in most East Asian countries suggests that Confucianism may not be sufficient, or that they likely suffer from a culturally particular social predicament.

The greater social focus in Confucianism also translates into emphasising the value of relationships in the Confucian conception of the good life.

Another important value is education, the merits in which remain highly prized in East Asian societies, and which exerted a direct moral force on the learned scholarly culture and the state bureaucratic apparatus of ancient China. This cultural backdrop may help to explain the significant amount of spending on education in these countries compared to other societies with similar levels of socioeconomic development.

The main theoretical issue in contemporary Confucianism is how to resolve the tension between the universalizing tendencies of early Confucianism and the moral pluralism that tends to characterise the modern world. Confucius and Mencius did not entertain the possibility of there existing ethically legitimate alternatives to their own normative structure, but current followers of Confucian teachings ought to allow for the possibility of other recognized moral systems in different contexts.

Once this conflict has been reconciled, Confucianism may well serve as a useful ethical guideline, for instance through its inspiring humane goverance in other countries.

These valued communal attachments are not simply left to individuals’ own devices, but are actively and aggressively upheld by East Asian governments.

For example, the essentialist right to filial piety is enforced by a law that makes it mandatory for children to provide financial support for elderly parents in Japan, mainland China and Singapore, whereas Hong Kong and South Korea use more indirect methods such as tax breaks and housing benefits to facilitate at-home care for the elderly.

This is a manner in which shared moral values remain deeply embedded in the social fabric, which is a notion of such meaningful societal embodiment that Western societies could learn from it.