Kissinger is wrong on Confucius

So there I am, waiting for the lady in the bookstore to calculate my savings on my purchase of several volumes, and I notice Henry Kissinger's new book, On Chna, which is not one that I am buying just now, facing me on a shelf.  I pick it up, nose through the contents and see that he has something to say about Confucianism in the first chapter.  I open it up and start reading, and the brief passage lives down to my expectations.

I have not read the book and have only perused a few reviews (here, here, here), and maybe it is unfair to seize on such a small section of the work, but I am going to jump in with a critique.

Here is something he writes:

Confucius preached a hierarchical social creed: the fundamental duty was to "Know thy place."   To its adherents the Confucian order offered the inspiration of service in pursuit of a greater harmony.  Unlike the prophets of monotheistic religions, Confucius preached no teleology of history pointing mankind to personal redemption.  His philosophy sought the redemption of the state through righteous individual behavior.  Oriented toward this world, his thinking affirmed a code of social conduct, not a roadmap to the afterlife.

Most of this is adequate and unremarkable.  It's that first bit, though, that rankles.  Kissinger is overemphasizing the hierarchical nature of Confucian thought, at least in its pre-Qin expression.  Yes, Confucius, in his own time, assumed certain social and political hierarchies; yes, Confucius also urged us to be aware of the social context in which we exist: we have to know what social roles we need to fulfill.  But nowhere does Confucius reduce what is a rather complex understanding of moral dynamics to something so simple as "Know thy place."

We could just as easily say, if we are trading in facile reductions, that the prime directive of Confucianism is: know the place of others around you; know what roles they are working to fulfill and how you might participate, interactively, in their fulfillment of their duties.  How else can we understand Analects 6.29?

Zigong said, if someone could spread bounty abroad among the people and rescue the populace, how would that be? Could that be called humaneness?

The Master said, Why bring humaneness into the discussion?  If you must have a label, call the man a sage.  Even Yao and Shun had trouble doing that much.

The humane person wants standing, and so he helps others to gain standing.  He wants achievement, and so he helps others to achieve.  To know how to proceed on the analogy of what is close at hand [i.e. the people around you] - this can be called the humane approach.

The moral hierarchy of Confucius is more fluid and performative than Kissigner suggests.  Yes, the virtuous should rule.  But that does not mean that those who rule are virtuous (as Kissinger's own experience at the knee of Nixon should remind him).  To be worthy of rule, a person must continually fulfill his or her personal and social duties.  Those who are in positions of power and not living up to those duties should either get right with their actual conduct or get out of office, as Mencius (10.9) tells us :

Emperor Hsuan of Ch'i asked about ministers and Mencius said: "What kind of ministers are you asking about?"

"Is there more than on kind?" asked the emperor.

"Yes," replied Mencius.  "There are ministers from royal families and there are ministers from common families."

"May I ask about ministers from royal families?"

"If a sovereign is making grave mistakes, they admonish him.  If they have to admonish him over and over, and he still refuses to listen - they replace him."

The emperor blanched at this, so Mencius continued: "Why so surprised? You asked, and I wouldn't dare be less than honest and forthright with you."

After he'd recovered his color, the emperor asked about ministers from common families, and Mencius said: "If the sovereign is making mistakes, they admonish him.  If they have to admonish him over and over, and he still refuses to listen - they resign and leave his country behind."

This is an interesting passage because it reveals a certain aristocratic assumption on the part of Mencius (ministers from royal families should have wider political latitude than ministers from common families) as well as a kind of meritocratic mobility (there can be ministers from common families; and unvirtuous sovereigns can  be removed legitimately from opwer).  

Yes, all of this presumes knowing one's place, but it also shows that one's "place" in a social hierarchy is not permanent and unchanging, but, rather, reflects the conscientious daily performance of social obligations.  Confucian hierarchy is not rigid; it is meant to change to empower those who are actually living up to more general ethical norms.

Kissinger seems to miss all this.  Perhaps he is simply rushing through history and philosophy to get to his own role in contemporary Sino-US relations.  Whatever the case, the narrowness of his understanding of Confucianism is, alas, all too familiar.  The error here is to use the term "Confucianism" for what is, in reality, the fusing of Confucian and Legalist thought in the Han dynasty and after.  Kissinger makes reference to this, when he notes that Confucianism was made the "official state philosophy" under the Han.  But no mention is made of the ways in which that fusion changes "Confucianism."  Instead of the less coercive moral exemplarism of the pre-Qin period (save, perhaps, for Xunzi), a stance that relied more upon personal cultivation and less on state-commanded ethics, we get, with the Han, a bureaucratically defined code of laws and regulations, carried over from the Qin, that routinizes and rationalizes "Confucian" precepts, vitiating the subtlety and flexibility of the earlier texts.  This Legalist subversion has haunted Confucianism ever since.

It is rather odd, moreover, that Kissinger fails to see the Legalist rationale behind state-sponsored Confucianism.  He and Hanfeizi are kindred spirits, though Han was much more cautious in his foreign policy.  Kissinger sees the world in realist terms, defined by power and interests.  That's a Legalist orientation, not a Confucian one.  And it is a perspective that has a long and deep tradition in Chinese statecraft, which, especially in its foreign policy, has been more influenced by Legalism than by pre-Qin Confucianism.  

The long and the short of it: it would be much more persuasive if Kissinger explicated the Legalist foundations of Chinese foreign policy, instead of the hackneyed reductionism of "Confucianism" that he offers. 

Comments

[gregorylent]

do you think confucius was a mystic? enlightened? (those are imprecise terms, i know) .. lao tzu, zhuangzhi, many of the zen/chan guys were, for the sake of this conversation ... so?