Modern European Philosophy: Phenomenology - Hegel & Merleau-Ponty

On many occasions, I have been frustrated with a common view amongst academics that before the 1700s, there is little of consequence for modern history, science and philosophy.  Zizek, who recently wrote a massive work on Hegel entitled Less Than Nothing, says that all of philosophy before the Critique of Pure Reason was a mere precursor to Kant, and that the fifty years between the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781 and the death of Hegel in 1831 was the critical time of philosophy, the time that the “gang of four”, Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, changed philosophy permanently.  Fichte and Schelling are often characterized as a bridge between the thinking of Kant and Hegel.  This week, we will briefly examine the central ideas of Fichte and Schelling that influenced Hegel, then look at the central ideas of Hegel’s history of thought and logic, and finally end with the work of Merleau-Ponty, a Phenomenologist like Hegel and Heidegger.  Last time I mentioned that, following Kant, Phenomenologists are concerned with the systematic ways we experience things, the way that they appear for us as phenomena.

As mentioned the first week, Analytic philosophy broke from the continent after Kant, charging Hegel and others with obscurity and needless complexity.  The Continental tradition certainly follows Kant in being difficult to understand and long-winded, though deep and meaningful for those who take the time to understand.  Kant wrote long, difficult (one might even say, convoluted) books.  Martin Jay, a renowned expert on the Frankfurt School with whom I took classes on Hegel and post-Hegelian thought in graduate school, once said in class that reading Hegel is like wading through a swamp.  Heidegger and other Continental thinkers, who were each vying to be the next Kant or Hegel, follow in this tradition.  Thus, before cracking the works for oneself, it is often very helpful to have a guide give an overview of German Idealism and its central concepts, such that one does not have to be overwhelmed by the primary sources, or learn about it on the street.


Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762 - 1814 CE), like many of his day, was inspired by the French Revolution and became entranced by Kant’s Critiques, so much so that he went to Konigsberg to meet Kant.  After a disappointing meeting, as Kant was not very impressed with the young follower, Fichte threw himself into work that would prove himself worthy.  At first, Fichte’s anonymous writings were considered the work of Kant himself, and then when his name became known he began to acquire fame.  Becoming a professor, he, like Schelling and Hegel, taught many students who would go on to become central Continental philosophers, such as Schopenhauer who we will study next week.  After Fichte wrote a work arguing that there effectively was no god other than rational morality, he was dismissed from his professorship for atheism.  Recall that Kant had no love for religious ceremony, but believed in the purity and objectivity of reason and morality.

Fichte argued against Kant’s unknowable thing-in-itself.  Like the Realists mentioned last time, Fichte claimed that a gap between our experience and the objective thing left open the possibility of insurmountable skepticism.  Like Hegel, Fichte argued that all is representation, phenomena, and therefore any ‘noumena’ was itself phenomena, representation.  The incompleteness of our representations is a part of the representations themselves, not a categorically removed unknowable thing beyond reach.  Self-consciousness is itself a phenomena, an appearance, the most fundamental in and through which other phenomena appear.  Rather than say, like Kant, that there was a thing apart from its appearance, Fichte argued that the thing is its appearance, insofar as it exists for us.

Like Hegel, Fichte argued that self-consciousness is a social, not merely individual, phenomena.  This would be critical for future Continental philosophy.  As mentioned, the Analytic tradition avoids history and the social, focusing on the immediate and individual.  The thinkers we have covered so far, from Descartes through Kant, considered self-consciousness as fundamental, but personal and singular, not historical and cultural.  While Berkeley said we recognize ideas in others, it was God, not relations between human individuals, that constituted reality.  For post-Hegelian Continental thought, reality is a social construct, a synthesis of individuals and social movements.  Reality is intersubjectivity.  Objectivity is collective subjectivity.  It is just this sort of relativism and perspectivism that angered the Realists and Analytic tradition.

Fichte argued that it is through others that we find ourselves called to obedience as well as freedom.  Being, as self-consciousness, is a calling or summons (Aufforderung in the German).  The individual, as the “I” (Das Ich), asserts itself, and this assertion is the existence of the “I” as well as its basic activity.  It is in accord and against this assertion of self that additional activity, additional phenomena, take place for the self.  This became a central idea important not only for Hegel but later for Freud and Psychoanalysis.  While the ‘I’ starts out unlimited, it comes to discover its limits through its interactions with others.  The self learns what it is through resistance (Anstoss) of others.  Just as Berkeley argued that we recognize others by their ideas, which resemble our own, for Fichte we set up the presence of the other, as ourselves but removed from ourselves, to explain the resistance we find in others.  Hegel’s view of history, particularly his master/slave dialectic which we will soon consider, is founded on this idea of recognition evolving through a process of resistance.

Unfortunately, Fichte became a bit too social in hearing the calling of German Nationalism, as well as antisemitism and misogyny, arguing that the Germans must assert their Germanness, and that Jews and women should not be included in the state or given rights.  Unsurprisingly, many Nazis were far more into Fichte than Hegel, who they identified with the rise of Marx and Communism, an internationalist enemy of nationalist fascism.  Fichte, like the Nazis who would rise over a hundred years after his death, believed in the original German folk people, the Volk, while Hegel considered the Germans to be slaves of the Greeks and Romans who had just come into their day after a historical succession of many cultures.  Later, Nietzsche rejected German Nationalism and antisemitism, seeing it as a weakness, while Heidegger embraced the idea of the German Volk through the lens of Fichte and Hegel, seeing it as a strength.  Like Fichte, Heidegger embraced Nazi fascism for several years, arguing that it was an authentic and admirable calling for the union of the German people.


Friedrich Schelling (1775 - 1854 CE) was a student of Fichte’s, as well as Hegel’s roommate at the University of Jena.  A prodigy, he attended the university and roomed with Hegel at 16, where he studied Neoplatonism and the work of Kant and Fichte, becoming a professor at Jena at 23 and writing his major philosophical work at 25.  At first, he was befriended by and mentored by Fichte, but the two soon diverged in their thinking and their relationship soured.  Amongst many things, Fichte hated Spinoza, while Schelling loved him.  It was with Schelling’s help that Hegel joined him and Fichte as a lecturer at Jena.  Originally Hegel sent Schelling the manuscript of his first major work, the Phenomenology of Spirit, and asked him to write an introduction, but Schelling, after reading the work, found that it dismissed Schelling’s own philosophy as inferior, as a footnote to history, which had progressed beyond the views of Kant, Fichte and Schelling to Hegel’s own philosophy.  Schelling declined to write the introduction.  

After that, the two attacked each other’s work continuously, and after Hegel’s death Schelling took Hegel’s central position at Jena, trying to fight the “dragon’s teeth of Hegelianism”, the rising tide of followers Hegel’s work had acquired.  Unfortunately, by this time Schelling had grown rather conservative and traditionally religious, and his later thinking was rejected by many who heard Hegel and his lectures and saw them as a call to radical revolution and change, particularly the Young Hegelians such as Marx and Engels, the authors of the Communist Manifesto, and the anarchist theorist Bakunin.  There is good reason to believe that the Analytic tradition broke from the continent in part due to Hegel’s association with Marx.  Kierkegaard attended the lectures of Hegel and Schelling, influenced by while despising both.  Later, Schelling’s work had an impact on both Nietzsche and Heidegger, and Zizek has written two works on Schelling’s philosophy.

Influenced by Neoplatonism, like Hegel, Schelling argued that duality, polar opposition, is the expression of nature, essential to our reality.  He saw nature consisting of expansive and contractive forces, light expanding into darkness, life expanding into space and time.  Recall that Fichte argued that existence is resistance.  Nature is a progressive revealing of the absolute, the evolution and unfolding of the mind of God as life and the spirit of each successive culture.  Human thought, for Schelling ‘Natural Philosophy’, is the height of the expression of nature.

Consciousness is a rupture of original unity, a splitting of the whole into self and otherness.  As with Fichte, the ‘I’ is the source of the universe, all of which is defined in relationship to the self, and there is no ‘thing-in-itself’ other than that which the self finds in opposition to itself.  As we think, the “I think” of Descartes, this already posits the “I am”.  The self is a synthetic act, a creation of both self and others, of the world outside of the self as well as the others one encounters as similar yet different selves.  Expansion and restriction are the two fundamental activities of the self as well as the universe, an endless struggle that changes along with the landscape.  Identities are unstable, and battles lead continuously to further battles.  Resistance, which Schelling identifies with negation, is followed by mediation and synthesis, a rebalancing and redrawing of the lines that constitutes the positive progress of history.


Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 - 1831 CE), who was much in debt to Kant, Fichte and Schelling, took their ideas and created an elaborate system that described the evolution of all human thought, including philosophy, politics, religion and art.  Most of the Continental thinkers we will be studying for the rest of the course, including Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Bataille, Sartre, Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida, were influenced by Hegel’s dialectical system even as most reacted against it.  The Analytic tradition, as mentioned, breaks from the Continental tradition after Kant, so they, like the Continental thinkers, are part of the reaction to Hegel as well.

Like Kant, Hegel was fascinated as a youth by the French Revolution, a revolt of reason against traditional authority, dogmas and understandings, in an age when science was overturning many old assumptions.  The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807 CE), Hegel’s history of thought and first major work, was written as Napoleon was approaching Jena with his troops, after which he would go on to conquer much of Germany.  When he was young, Hegel enthusiastically supported the radical revolutionaries, only to find that the political infighting lead to chaos, which was resolved by Napoleon.  Hegel interpreted the passage from King Louis the 16th to the French Revolution to Napoleon as a concrete instance of dialectic, the progression of history that works as a symbiosis of opposition.  Like Fichte and Schelling, Hegel saw individuals, ideas, and cultures as positive assertions that spawn resistance, and that in each stage of history culture is resisted by counterculture, which then merge to become a greater culture, a greater synthesis, which then repeats the cycle.  Hegel saw himself as happening upon the final stage of history and philosophy, the age where Napoleon balanced order and freedom, authority and rights, in the modern European nation state.
After writing his Phenomenology, Hegel wrote the Science of Logic (1816 CE), which further details the operation of understanding and reason that underlies the historical and cultural evolution of philosophy, politics, science and religion.  From here out, I will refer to the first text as Hegel’s Phenomenology, and the second as Hegel’s Logic, the common abbreviated names that are often used in scholarship.  To understand Hegel’s system, we must examine dialectic, the roles of understanding and reason, and also the roles of dogmatism and skepticism in human thought.

Dialectic is often explained as a progression from positive to negative to synthesis, much like the passage from Louis to Napoleon in France.  Some critics have pointed out that Hegel does not use these terms himself, and is critical of Schelling for oversimplifying the process of assertion and resistance, but it is not an oversimplification to see these as central to Hegel’s system.  In the ancient world, philosophers understood the world in terms of opposites that work together.  In ancient India with the Jains and Buddhists, in Greece with Heraclitus, skeptics and Neoplatonists, and China with Daoism, we find the idea of the union of being and nonbeing together as becoming.  Thought is exercised by considering thesis and antithesis together as a unified whole that can be viewed from opposite sides.

Like the Greek Pyrrhonian skeptics, Hegel considered each point of view to be an appearance or semblance (Schein).  His system is an attempt to fuse all the previous positions of philosophy together as contradicting opposites, the sum of which give the whole.  Just as for Newton, who argued that in every instance of force there is an action together with an equal and opposite reaction, in human thought for every assertion there is an opposite assertion.  Just as Napoleon took the authority of Louis the 16th and balanced it with the rationalism and freedom of the French Revolution to become the next, greater authority, a great thinker is one who sees beyond the contradiction of thesis and antithesis to create a greater synthesis, which Hegel also calls sublation (Aufhebung), a preserving and transforming.

Just as Napoleon came on horseback at the right time in history to balance order and freedom in its latest form, Hegel saw himself as arriving just after the dogmatism of the Rationalists and skepticism of the Empiricists to synthesize the whole out of opposing parts.  Based on the simpler opposition between belief and doubt, Hegel viewed the history of human thought as a struggle between conservative dogmatism and progressive skepticism.  Hegel considers this dialectic as “self-completing skepticism” (PS 79), and his entire project is designed to show that synthesizing both sides of a contradiction of views, bringing position and counterposition together, is the completion and concrete synthesis of the whole of what is.  Similarly, if one looks at the front and the back of a thing, one has seen the entirety of a thing.  The front and back views do not cancel each other out, but complement each other as a concrete whole.

While Hegel argued against pessimistic skepticism, what many would call nihilism, the assertion that nothing can be asserted truthfully at all, an “excuse for nonphilosophy”, he saw his own system as the union of dogmatism and skepticism, as an optimistic system-building skepticism that can fuse various sides into a full completion of possible perspectives.  The problem with skepticism is that it can show both sides oppose each other, but it cannot build systems.  The problem with dogmatism is that it affirms systems, but myopically, without critical doubt.  For Hegel, belief must progress forward and persevere, but also contradict and criticise itself to progress.  This tension requires great geniuses to leap over the hurdle of each contradiction, of each stage in history.

Hegel calls Plato’s Parmenides the most “perfect and self-contained document and system of genuine skepticism”, the greatest masterpiece of ancient dialectic.  In the dialogue  Parmenides proceeds to show Socrates, by debating dialectically, that our understandings of reality form sets of contradictions, and implies that if Socrates practices these exercises, he will continue to become wise and arrive at greater understandings of reality.  Parmenides argues that being is both one and many, does and does not exist, is known and unknown, changes and does not change, and in all of this has and does not have contrary properties, does and does not contradict itself.

Like Fichte and Schelling, Hegel argues that things are opposed to each other as well as the whole, and so it is opposition that defines a thing, making it into what it is.  Hegel calls this determinate negation, and details how every way of being is a particular way of not being.  While many would consider nonbeing to be simply empty and nonexistent, we can understand particular determinate negation in terms of distinction.  What a thing or phenomena is is always intimately and essentially bound up with what it is not, to the thing or things it is opposed to, just as conservative and progressive, dogmatism and skepticism, define each other.

All is change, continuous becoming which Hegel says early in the Phenomenology is at first disorienting, just as the Sun is disorienting and blinding to the one who manages to find their way out of Plato’s cave.  Common sense, with its simple dogmatic assumptions, is bewildered by the “bacchantic frenzy, in which every limb is intoxicated”, which questions all of its understandings just as Kant was awoken by Hume.  Like an extreme skeptic, Hume did not create a system, leaving truth as a various unexplained set of assumptions.  Kant built a system, crowned by reason, but did not, for Hegel, bring it to completion, failing to explain how the categories arise in time or how they are opposed to each other.  For Hegel, in the final synthesized system and completed understanding, subjectivity and objectivity are two sides of the same coin, a Phenomenological synthesis beyond Kant’s exclusive and elusive ‘thing-in-itself’.  The abstract is the concrete, the subjective appearance is objective reality.  Kant was wrong to attempt to separate the objective and subjective.  History creates complexity in an orderly way, each step in relation to the previous sum of steps.

Kant and Fichte argued that reason is always beyond the understanding, speculating as to what should be beyond what is.  Like Kant, Hegel says that our reasoning is free and speculative in relation to the understanding, but for Hegel reason can contradict the understanding.  It is contradiction that is the pattern reason conforms to if it is successful.  For Kant, reason extends the understanding through noncontradictory continuity.  For Hegel, Kant stalled out, misunderstanding reason as merely a higher understanding of understanding.  For Hegel, reason does not merely operate like understanding, nor does it simply conform to it.  Rather, reason is revolutionary, and part of its job, unlike understanding, is to contradict understanding.  While understanding works by noncontradiction, the principle of Aristotle and Leibniz that Kant wanted to salvage as central to metaphysics, reason must be free to oppose understandings in order to bring them to greater completion.  If understandings were perfect, there would be no need for reason, just as if knowledge was complete and absolute, there would be no need for wisdom, and if authority and culture was simply good and just, there would be no need for revolution and counterculture.

Understanding’s job, as Kant recognized, is to create categories for experience, but reason has a different job, to create ideas that synthesize the understandings.  While understanding synthesizes things but keeps these syntheses categorically separate from each other, for Hegel reason seeks to unify understandings, and the great leaps in human thought are unifications of contradictory understandings.  If reason merely operated like understanding, as Kant believed, it would be incapable of revolutionary insight.  For Hegel, Kant’s synthesis of reason fails and falls short because Kant, afraid of skepticism and contradiction, failed to understand the cooperation of noncontradiction and contradiction, the cooperation of dogmatism and skepticism.

In his Logic, Hegel writes, “Contradiction is the root of all movement and life...All things are contradictory in themselves”, and that the being of a particular concrete thing, which is also a dynamic activity, is the “force which can both comprehend and endure contradiction”.  When the contradictions of a thing are resolved, the thing ends, transformed into a new thing, a new situation of contradiction.

“Kant, as we must add, never got beyond the negative result that the thing-in-itself is unknowable, and never penetrated to the discovery of what the antinomies really and positively mean.  That true and positive meaning of the antinomies is this: that every actual thing involves a coexistence of opposed elements.  Consequently to know, or, in other words, to comprehend an object is equivalent to being conscious of it as a concrete unity of opposed determinations.  The old metaphysic, as we have already seen, when it studied the objects of which it sought a metaphysical knowledge, went to work by applying categories abstractly and to the exclusion of their opposites.”

“However reluctant Understanding may be to admit the action of Dialectic, we must not suppose that the recognition of its existence is peculiarly confined to the philosopher.  It would be truer to say that Dialectic gives expression to a law which is felt in all other grades of consciousness, and in general experience.  Everything that surrounds us may be viewed as an instance of Dialectic.” (118)

Thomas Kuhn’s idea of paradigm shift, which we will consider in a few weeks with philosophy of science, is useful for understanding Hegel.  A model always has problems, and so there are counter examples that arise as any model is used.  This creates culture and counterculture, dogmatists who support the model and skeptics who attack its weaknesses.  For a time, culture supports the continued use of the model and the skeptics and problems can be ignored, but then when the problems become too great, the paradigm is changed, shifted, to resolve the problems.  This resolution brings an end to the old paradigm, and now the new paradigm, with new problems, begins to generate a new contradictory situation.

The overall story of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, which can also be translated into English as Phenomenology of Mind (as the German ‘Geist’, related to the English word ghost, can mean either mind or spirit, the conscious part of the human being), is a dialectical rise from the ancient world to Greece and then to Germany.  For Hegel, the first stage of history is the Orientals.  Hegel uses this term as it was used until recently, before the 1960s, to refer to everyone who is not European.  In the 60s, 70s and 80s this term was still used by many to refer to East Asian people such as the Chinese.  As archeology in Hegel’s time had revealed the ancient glory of Mesopotamia, Egypt and India, Hegel puts this as the first and basic starting stage in human development.  It is good that it is a non-European start, but unfortunate that all further development is European (first Greek, then German) and the development is a course of Europe becoming different from others.  This is overly simplistic and somewhat racist and eurocentric, but this is still largely the view preached on campuses today.

The Orientals understood objectivity and the state, two powerful positives.  The Orientals are the start of society and science, but they do not question their society or science.  They see the real as real, but do not understand that the real is also mental and can be questioned.  In some cases, such as Buddhism in India, Hegel believes that they realized skepticism but did not develop it further, turning the world into a simple void or nothing.  Thus the Orientals get simple one-sided Being or Nonbeing, but do not put these two together to see the unity of the opposition.  It is the Greeks, and specifically Heraclitus, who Hegel argues make this next leap and become the second stage of history.

The Greeks now rise above the Orientals and grasp the opposite of Being as Non-Being, the opposite of the state in the individual, the opposite of objectivity as subjectivity.  This centrally involves Heraclitus and Plato.  While Hegel believes that the Greeks are the ones who are this step forward, it is more correct to understand the relationship with the earlier empires as complex and also that the Greeks were only one civilization of many that made leaps forward like this.  Jaspers calls the age of the Greeks, the Indians and the Chinese the axial age.  While I enjoy using this term, particularly as it equates non-European cultures with the Greeks, recent critics have opposed this term, arguing that human thinking did not change significantly in this period.  Rather, we find human thought before, during, and after the axial age, and so Hegel and Jaspers are wrong to characterize the axial age as the time when humanity came to understand subjectivity and individuality for the first time.  I continue to use the term, while agreeing with these recent criticisms.

For Hegel, just as the Orientals understood the positive, the Greeks understood the negative, the subjective, temporary and perspectival.  Hegel sees this as Heraclitus bringing being and nonbeing together as becoming, and sees Plato merging Heraclitus with Parmenides as a further development.  However, this is not the last stage because the Greeks still put being off in another world, either as Heraclitus’ flux of fire or Plato’s static ideal forms.  It is the Germans, and specifically Hegel himself, who see the true unity of objectivity and subjectivity, of state and individual, of necessity and freedom, of science and discovery, to complete the history of thought in three stages.  Hegel leaps entirely over Islam in a page, giving them no credit for the development of later thought at all, similar to his treatment of the Indians before the Greeks.

The Europeans, specifically the Germans, who are in Hegel’s time becoming the foremost champions of philosophy, history, science, and politics, are in the position to realize the union of the mind and world.  Hegel sees Hume and Kant as the last dialectical turns before his own system of syntheses, and believes that history is almost at its completion in his time with his own philosophy and the politics of the German parliamentary state which balances collective objectivity with individual subjectivity.  He also believes that religion evolves exactly as philosophy and politics does, and that German Lutheran Christianity is the final form of religion that unites the individual directly with God (living objectivity) because each man is the priest of his household.

One influential idea of Hegel’s that appears early in the Phenomenology is the Master-Slave dialectic, which Hegel uses to describe the earliest evolution of human culture.  At first, the self (which can be an idea, individual or culture) goes out into the world and discovers that there are other selves out there with opposing opinions and views.  The self, Fichte’s Ich, thus wants to kill the others, but it finds that if the others are killed there is no one left to acknowledge the self as supreme.  Changing strategies, the self decides to show restraint and conquer the others, enslaving them, as it wants to prove its view, its subjectivity, to be objectivity.  The slave, then, comes to do everything for the master, and develops while the master deteriorates and grows lazy.  The slave comes to realize that he can do things he never thought of for someone else, so he can do things no one has thought up yet for himself.  After this situation builds until the breaking point, the slave triumphs over the master and becomes the next master.

This is Hegel’s explanation for why the Orientals started out with objectivity but then failed to do real subjective philosophy, the Greeks followed but failed to complete subjectivity with objectivity, and the Germans bridge the gap grasping subjectivity and objectivity as the two opposed yet united sides of existence. Notice this correctly understands that the Greeks were slaves of the Orientals, and the Germans were slaves of the Greeks!  This is not often pointed out, but it is implied by Hegel and confirmed by historians today.  While Hegel is quite eurocentric, he is right to point this out.  This is the reason why more Nazis were into Fichte than Hegel, as the original German Volk were an inferior slave people until they were forced to evolve.

The Master/Slave dialectic influenced many thinkers, especially progressive left-leaning political thinkers such as Hegel’s student Karl Marx.  Feminist Hegelians, like Simone de Beauvoir, uses it for women in ‘The Second Sex’, Franz Fanon uses it for black people in ‘Black Skin, White Masks’, as does the Black Panther, activist and professor Angela Davis, who went to Germany to study Hegel before being arrested by the FBI for providing two shotguns to Black Panther party members in Oakland during the 60s.  Often called “the big three”, class, gender and race are the major social divisions, the differences between people that are problematic, and progressives who try to counter each of these have found inspiration of the “We shall overcome” message of the Phenomenology.  

Just as Hegel’s history passes from Oriental empire to Greek city state to the French Revolution to Napoleon, philosophy similarly evolves from sense certainty to perception to understanding to reason.  Each stage is a move from conflict to resolution, which then is the site of another conflict.  The development of philosophy starts with sense certainty, like Samuel Johnson kicking the rock to disprove Berkeley, the position often called ‘Naive Realism’: things just are as we see them.  Consider the expression, “Right as rain”.  Although rain cannot speak, and so cannot be right about anything, like the ancient Indian logicians of the Nyaya school we consider rain to be something self evident, a clear truth about which one cannot be mistaken, just as Samuel Johnson considers the rock to be clear and distinct.  Hegel shows that what we call common sense is actually empty and abstract, and concrete understandings are the result of a process of rational reflection.  While, “The table is solid” seems to be nice and objective, we can only know how solid the table is if we doubt and test its solidity, coming to a more complex and thus more accurate, defined and concrete understanding.

Hegel says that if we write down obvious truths, such as “It is now night time”, if we look at our truth come noon the next day, we find that it is no longer true, as it has, for Hegel, “grown stale”.  Our ‘now’, which was so immediate, changes with time, and so any statement about ‘here’ or ‘now’ is not universal, but rather contingent on time and place.  The mind attempts to understand ‘being’ in terms of space and time, of here and now, but all that it can determine is that ‘being’ is not ‘nonbeing’.  Here is the first instance of “negation of negation” in the text.  The categorical dualism between being and nonbeing does not satisfy the mind, as it is entirely empty of content.
While Hegel mentions India, and Buddhism by name, for Hegel this philosophy did not grasp anything other than nonbeing.  It was in ancient Greece, for Hegel, that philosophers such as Heraclitus grasped the union of being and nonbeing together as becoming, even though we can find earlier expressions of this same unity earlier in Jain and Buddhist thought of India.

The mind turns from sense certainty, which is a part of the truth but incomplete, to the relation of subject and object.  To summarize much of the Phenomenology in a few words, first humanity looks for the answer in essences within the world.  Hegel sees Plato’s ideal forms, the essences of things in the sensible world, as the grasping of this stage.  Plato tried to put the truth of things above them, and the viewer can rise above a merely subjective view to see the objective truth of things by examining the essences.  Many failed attempts and philosophers later, Hegel argues that the Germanics of Europe turned from essences in the world to essences in the mind, conceptions such as those debated in the opposition of the Rationalists and Empiricists.  While I often mention that this psychological turn was much influenced by the golden age of Islamic thought, particularly the work of Avicenna, Hegel gives Islam no credit, just as he didn’t for India.

Just as Heraclitus’ grasp of becoming lead to Plato’s forms in ancient Greece, Hegel sees Hume’s Empiricism leading to Kant’s categories, essences placed in the mind rather than in the heavens above.  Unfortunately for Kant, the categories are disunified and their origin is unexplained.  Hegel sees his own position as the superior synthesis, as the gathering up of Kant’s categories into a living, singular Idea. Subjectivity and objectivity are understood as one continuous thing, unified while opposed to itself.  The self is its world, and the self understands itself in terms of others as Fichte had argued.  Similarly, necessity and freedom are one and the same.  This is the totality of all previous positions, unified together, which goes forward as philosophy and science.  Some have argued that the final pages of the Phenomenology are Hegel’s plea for modern university system, such that philosophers and scientists can continue to speculate and seek greater truth.

While mathematics is a useful measuring device, just as the knowledge supplied by science is useful, it must be understood in a philosophical, free and critical context, with room for both dogmatism and skepticism, to be genuine and authentic.  Hegel writes in the Logic, “It is in vain that an attempt is made to fix it by means of spatial figures and algebraic symbols for the purpose of the external eye and of a notionless mechanical treatment or calculus”.  In order for philosophy and science to be authentic, they must be understood as dynamic, as evolving and open, not as dead and closed.  Hegel considers Kant to have been a great thinker, but his inability to tolerate contradiction made his system a dead corpse, not a real living grasp.  Living, authentic thinking must be ready and willing to contradict any part of itself, breathing the life of opposition into any stale conception.

Alexandre Kojève, a Russian born philosopher living in Paris, introducing many French thinkers to to Hegel’s work through his seminars, sometimes informal meetings at people’s houses between 1933 and 1939, when Paris was seized by the Nazis.  His seminars were attended by the philosophers Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, the Surreal writers Bataille and Breton, and the psychoanalyst Lacan.  Later, Foucault and Derrida said that Kojève’s work on Hegel was central to their own philosophical development.  Kojève read Hegel through the lenses of Marx and Heidegger, and he focused on the Phenomenology, in particular the master slave dialectic, and Napoleon as the resolver of the French Revolution and the bringer of the modern European nation state.

A friend of mine posted a Huffington Post comedy piece, roasting the Republicans blocking the nomination of Chuck Hagel to defense secretary (Hagel’s family likely changed the spelling of the name, like Hume, so that it would be pronounced correctly).  Ted Cruz is a Tea Party supported senator who has been compared to McCarthy for making unfounded accusations that Harvard Law had at least twelve communists and only one conservative among his professors.  The satirical piece is titled, Cruz Claims Hagel Inspired Marx, and the opening reads:

“Senator Ted Cruz (R/TP-TX) launched a blistering attack on Defense Secretary nominee Hagel, asserting a direct link to Karl Marx: ‘History shows that Marx not only read Hagel, but took his inspiration from him," said the Princeton-educated Harvard Law School graduate. "I should know. I was taught by at least 12 communist professors at Harvard.’  Broadening his attack on Hagel, and citing French(!) socialist professor Alexandre Kojéve's interpretation of Hagel's thesis, Cruz warned of the ‘danger to America having a secretary of defense who believes that history ended with the Battle of Jena.’  Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) called for a delay in the vote on Hagel's nomination until the Committee had a chance ‘to read the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Philosophy of Right, two of his key writings, to understand what this nominee really believes, and why he encouraged Karl Marx. These are critical questions for any Defense Secretary nominee.’  Former Governor Sarah Palin (R/TP-AL) revealed that, after she took a speed-reading course, she had read Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit in 20 minutes and concluded: ‘It's all in German.’”


Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908 - 1961 CE) is a Phenomenologist influenced by Hegel, Marx, Husserl and Heidegger, and was a member of Sartre’s inner circle along with Simone De Beauvoir and Fanon, both progressive thinkers who use Hegel’s Master/Slave dialectic.  Merleau-Ponty’s central work, The Phenomenology of Perception (1945), is an attempt to bring attention to the body as the site of experience, the body-subject, against Descartes’ mind-body dualism.  Just as Locke said that it is hard to see the eye as well as understand our capacity to understand, Merleau-Ponty argued that the body is often ignored, even as all phenomena are known to us through our bodily senses, particularly vision, sound and touch.  We commune with our senses, and through our senses with others.  Our subjectivity is corporeal, as our world is framed by our body.  We view things partially through our perspective.

Consider that we do and do not see the things around us.  We only see what is in front of us, not what is behind us, and of what is in front of us, we only see the side facing us, not the side facing away from us.  This is often ignored, even if it is obvious once it is pointed out.  Similar to Hegel’s idea of determinate negation, what is behind us or behind things exists as an unperceived, as a not appearing.  While unicorns are also unperceived and not appearing to us, we expect things to exist behind us just as we expect the concealed side of objects to exist behind them while we do not expect to encounter unicorns.  That which falls outside our perspective exists as the yet-to-appear, not as the nonexistent.

I mentioned with Kant that Heidegger famously said, “Every revealing is a concealing”.  Merleau-Ponty, who was influenced by both Hegel and Heidegger, found a similar revealing/concealing in our immediate experience, in the world of sensation long before we gain the capacity to create complex conceptual ideas.  Just as Locke, Hume and other Empiricists argued that we get our abstract ideas from our experiences in the sensual world, Merleau-Ponty argued that we get our understanding of perspective, central to Hegel, from our early sensual experience.  Just as Berkeley argued against Locke’s primary qualities, arguing that there is no objective property which is not subjective, and Fichte and Hegel argued against Kant’s thing-in-itself, as things exist insofar as they appear, Merleau-Ponty argued that perspective is our reality, and any projection of reality outside our perspective is itself viewed perspectivally.  When we imagine objectivity, we imagine a human-like view that exceeds our own.  When we imagine things, we imagine a thing that is viewed from a particular angle, and which has alternate sides that are potentially viewable from additional angles.  Our world, and the things that inhabit it, are open ended.  The world does not have definite boundaries, nor is there a closed set of things.  This does not make the world or the things in it meaningless, but it does leave their meanings open.

Merleau-Ponty’s idea of embodied consciousness influenced two famous Berkeley scholars, the feminist Judith Butler and the Cognitive Linguist George Lakoff.  Lakoff’s work shows that accross cultures we are “hardwired” to frame experience in terms of metaphors involving basic physical experience.  Affection and excitement are warm, indifference and calm are cool.  Good is up, while bad is down.  Important is big, and insignificant is small.  Similarity and intimacy is close, and difference and the unfamiliar are far.  Good is fragrant and sweet, and bad is stinky, bitter and sour.  Order is clean, and disorder is messy.  Easy is light, and difficult is heavy.  Concepts and understandings are containers, help is support, time and change are motions, purpose is a destination, knowing is seeing, and understanding is grasping.

Intro Philosophy: Confucianism

Introduction to Chinese Philosophy & Confucius

As we have seen in the course so far, systems of thought are not simply dogmatic answers, but cultures of questioning as much as answering.  We saw Shamans go on vision quests to learn the sources of problems, and the Egyptian wisdom proverbs question authority, social status, consumption (over eating and drinking), expertise, and other aspects of human life and society.  Now, we move to China and examine one of the foremost ethical geniuses of world history: Grand Master Kong, Kong Fu Zi, or as he is known to us, Confucius, the Latinized name transliterated by Catholic Jesuit missionaries who got to China in the 1600s and were astounded to find that the most influential philosopher in thousands of years of Chinese history has teachings very similar to Jesus.  Confucius was dedicated to the idea that the individual can obtain fullness and happiness by placing others before oneself and by recognizing the desires of others as equal to the desires one has for oneself.

Before we start in on the schools and sages of the Chinese tradition, first we must cover the shift in transliteration of Chinese into Phoenician/Roman alphabetic characters.  Today, we use the Pinyin system, adopted by the People’s Republic of China in 1958, adopted by other countries by the 1980s.  It still has problems, but is vastly superior to the Wade-Giles system invented in Britain in the 1800s.  When you read books from the 60s and 70s, you find the word Dao spelled ‘Tao’.  This is because the Wade-Giles ‘t’ became ‘d’, and so the Daoist classic the ‘Tao Te Ching’ became today the ‘Dao De Jing’.  What was once the capital city ‘Peiking’ is now ‘Beijing’.  Important for Chinese Philosophy, while the Latinized names ‘Confucius’ and ‘Mencius’ remained the same, all other names changed, particularly the suffix for ‘master’, which was ‘Tzu’ but is today ‘Zi’ (pronounced something like ‘tzih’ with a soft ‘t’ in front).  My favorite Chinese philosopher used to be ‘Chuang Tzu’, but is today ‘Zhuangzi’, or Master Zhuang.  Similarly ‘Lao Tzu’ is today Laozi, Master Lao, and ‘Mo Tzu’ is Mozi, Master Mo.  None of these names unfortunately appear in spell check either way.  Luckily, Wikipedia is a good tool for dealing with this annoying situation, for if you search for a name either way, it sends you to the right page with the modern Pinyin name.  I use this all the time, even though I have studied these guys for years.


Chinese Philosophy and The Period of the Hundred Philosophers/Schools

One would like to think that times of peace and prosperity are good for systems of thought, but times of civil war and disintegration of empires seems best for thinkers and systems of thought.  This was true in ancient Egypt, India, Greece, and true in the golden age of ancient Chinese thought as well.  Human beings only rethink problems when they are faced with them, and they are only able to teach new and countercultural solutions when the orthodoxy is weak and failing.  In Confucius’ China there were great problems in the Warring States period (500 – 220 BCE) as many kings came and went, each calling themselves ‘mandated by heaven’.  Interestingly, this same period is known as the golden age of Chinese thought, the Period of the Hundred Philosophies, also called the Period of the Hundred Schools and Period of the Hundred Sages.

As we have learned with ancient cosmology, the worldview of ancient Egypt and Persia that influenced all three of the axial age powers (ancient India, Greece and China), the world was thought to be built like a person and order was thought to be spoken downward from the heavens to the earth.  In ancient China, it was said that if a king was good he would be supported and affirmed by the voice of heaven, which in speaking for a king gave the king the ‘mandate of heaven’ and allow him and the empire to prosper.  This is very similar to most other polytheistic and monotheistic cultures of the ancient world.  If the king does not follow the way of heaven, the gods or god stops speaking for the king, and someone else comes along and takes the king’s place.  Each new king claims that the old king was ‘no longer spoken for’, so the populations of Greece, India etc. find themselves wondering: who or what kind of king exactly does heaven (the heavens) speak for, and why?

The Period of the Hundred Philosophers or Hundred Schools, as it is called, came with the Warring States Period after the Zhou dynasty crumbled and ended with the Han dynasty.  While there may not have been a hundred separate schools, there were many schools of thought in this time but many and their teachings did not survive.  The four most popular and famous philosophies were Confucianism, Daoism, Moism, and Legalism.  The Han did not like the authoritarianism of the Legalists, who believed in harsh punishments and strict laws (likely because the Han were trying to win over the people at a prosperous time with many options), but they also did not like the communalism of the Moists who believed that war should be abolished and, like in Plato’s ideal republic, all property and family shared in common (likely because the Han were trying to hold down a prosperous and diverse empire).

The Han chose, in supporting education, scholarship and the arts, to patronize Confucianism and Daoism.  Confucianism included Confucius (550 – 480 BCE), and the two central and early Confucians, Mencius (Men Zi, 370 – 290 BCE) and Xun Zi (312-230 BCE).  Daoism included Lao Zi (600 – 500? BCE), supposed author of the Dao De Jing, and Zhuang Zi (370 – 300 BCE), though these two figures would not have known themselves to be ‘Daoists’ any more than Confucius would have known his followers would go on to found the central system of Chinese thought and politics.

Confucius and the Daoists we will examine next week proposed different solutions to this problem.  The Daoists believed that going off into nature and rejecting human ways was best for cultivating the individual, while Confucius believed that the city, morality and study were best for cultivating human virtues.  Thus, while Confucius and the Daoists were both questioners of individual desires and judgment, Confucius believed we should turn to civilization and cultivation to realize our true nature and the Daoists believed we should turn away from civilization and back to simplicity and the natural to realize our true nature.

Confucius, the Daoists and others speak of the ‘Mandate of Heaven’ (Tianming) and the ‘Way’ (Dao) of heaven (Tiandao) but not of the Lord of Heaven.  In India, Greece, China, and many other places, we can see that first many tribes and their gods were drawn into polytheistic (many gods) systems (as we focused on last week), and then after this these were drawn into monotheistic (one god) systems.  We can see that many gods with human like desires become one god with human like desires, and then this one god becomes more and more abstract.  We see the same pattern in China, where polytheism grew into a monotheistic and then abstract monist ‘Way’ or ‘Mandate’.  Essentially, the All Lord becomes simply the mind of the universe or the ‘way’ or ‘order’ of things.  The Zhou and earlier empires spoke of the Lord of Heaven, but Confucius and the Daoists in the Warring States period do not speak of the Lord of Heaven, but rather the Mandate and Way, showing us that, like the golden age of thought in ancient India and Greece, the revered thinkers were challenging the old tradition with philosophical monism that questioned the very shape of cosmology itself while extending it.


Confucius and his System of Thought

Just like we had with Egypt last week, Confucius (550-480 BCE) believes that the heart is the center of the human being.  Notice that this ‘center’ is both mental and physical, fitting with cosmology, psychology and medical practices.  Confucius is often understood as a champion of traditional order and ritual, as he is a proponent of civilization and education against the Daoists who are proponents of nature and meditation.  However, it is clear from the Analects that Confucius believed it was more important to have right insight rather than right ritual or tradition, to have right intentions than right actions, i.e. ‘one’s heart is in the right place’.

Confucius was a master of ritual, an official position important for civil ceremonies and legal practice as they still are in courts of law and political processes today.  Confucius believed that ritual was the strength of a society and one should perform the rituals, but he also believed that the worst thing was to do ritual without the proper intention.  Confucius would say to a churchgoer today: it is more important to enjoy your church than to attend your church, for if you do not enjoy it whole heartedly you should not go.  Consider the more secular example of giving a gift to a friend.  If you give gifts so that you can borrow someone’s car, you corrupt the act of giving gifts, which should be done without expectations of repayment.  It would be better, according to Confucius, to not give gifts to friends than to give them expecting repayment.  Empty ritual, ritual simply for the motions rather than authentic love for and continuity with one’s society, is the worst thing, and thus it would be better in such a case to avoid false ritual and simply not perform the ritual at all.  This point is often lost when people focus on Confucius’ great love of ritual and traditional culture.

A good example of this point is Analects 5.5 (and yes, these are standardized so no matter the translation, ‘5.5’ is always the fifth aphorism of the fifth chapter or book, just like the Bible and Koran are standardized with numbers): Confucius says that Ran Yong does not need eloquence (civilized speech) if he is not good.  Another good example is 11.10, where Confucius is grieving ‘inappropriately’ for his favorite student, and tells his students who complain that genuine love and expression of emotion is more important than being polite or pleasant (right intention trumps right outer form).  However, the best example is clearly 3.26, “Authority without generosity, ceremony without reverence, mourning without grief, these things I cannot bear to contemplate”.

Because the Han and many later Chinese dynasties used Confucius as a voice supporting subordination to authority, and because Confucius does indeed say to obey the father and obey the chain of command, it is often overlooked that, just as intention is more important than tradition, unjust fathers and unjust states must be corrected.  Many times Confucius says that truth must be spoken to power.  How will things change if no one complains?  In one passage, Confucius tells his students they should rise up and overthrow an unjust local prince.  One should  be subordinate to authority, but only just and good authority and tradition.

Confucius was a great champion of scholarship.  Like Plato, Confucius believed that society should not be an aristocracy but rather a meritocracy.  Confucius believed that scholarship was necessary for developing the heart, and the ‘gentleman’, Confucius’ word for the great person, developed love for others and knowledge through study of the classic texts.  As scholars have pointed out, while it has often been translated ‘gentleMAN’, the term is gender neutral and Confucius was talking about the righteous rather than the nobly born, though the term was used before Confucius to refer exclusively to nobles before him.  When we see the term in the text, it can also be translated as ‘the noble’, meaning anyone of either gender or social status who is an excellent human being.

Needless to say, Confucius’ Analects became one of the central texts for devoted study in Chinese society, and Confucius became an ancestor revered by devotees with ritual.  Confucius is credited as the father of China’s civil service system, a system in which anyone who tested well, regardless of their position in society, was given a government position.  This is similar to the development of types of scribes in Egypt.  It is just such a development that we call ‘the middle class’, the individuals who through study and work can rise or fall in position to fit the many niches required to run large cities and systems.  What Plato recognized in Egypt, Confucius was much more successful in implementing in Chinese society, though unfortunately only after his death.  Confucius himself always hoped for a good position, but did not succeed in obtaining one during his own life though he did teach many students and was revered by many of them, including powerful nobility.

Just as Confucius taught that intention is more important than action, he hated scholarship for show without genuine love of learning and discovery of human nature.  A good example is 4.9, ‘if a scholar is ashamed of his shabby clothes or poor food, he is not worth listening to’.  He also taught that we should balance learning with critical reflection, just as Buddha did, though Buddha, like Daoists, argued that study and critical reflection also needed meditation whereas Confucius saw study as superior to meditation.  In the analects, Confucius says that studying without thinking is useless, but thinking without studying is dangerous, showing us that he does believe in individual insight but is traditional and believes in studying the traditional classics.  He says, “The noble person is not a pot”, meaning that we are not containers for knowledge but should transform and reflect on what we study.

Confucius was a genius at seeing himself as equal to everyone, and he encouraged this attitude as the path to excellence itself.  It was this point that the Jesuits found fascinating in comparing Confucianism to Christianity.  Most of us have likely heard the ‘Golden Rule’, which is paraphrased from Confucius: ‘treat others the way you want to be treated’.  While Jesus says, ‘don’t treat others how you do NOT want to be treated’, we can understand them to be one and the same.  My favorite example is 7.22: Confucius says that if you put yourself with any two people at random, you can take their strengths as a model to follow and their faults as a warning.  Clearly, Confucius believed that we all share the same set of strengths and faults, no matter how talented (or horrible) we happen to individually be or where our talents are.  Confucius taught that NO ONE is perfect, not even himself, but there is good in everyone and everything, and we had best remember that we will never lose any of our connection to our fellow human beings if we only remember to look hard enough for it.  Another excellent example from the Analects: “When you see a worthy man, seek to emulate him…When you see an unworthy man, examine yourself”.


Mencius & Xunzi

Confucius had two followers who became the famous two poles of interpretation of the Analects.  Mencius or Menzi, the second patriarch of Confucianism by popular consent in the tradition, believed that Confucius taught that the human being is basically good and develops the heart, growing and developing the virtues through love.  He argued that because the human individual is essentially good, we need ritual to guide our growth but love is the true essence.  Xunzi, the third patriarch of Confucianism, a cynic and conservative, argued that the human being is essentially evil and without the rituals and tradition to hold our nature back we would be selfish and uncivilized.  This remains the major split in Confucian thought, which accommodates both opinions while leaning more toward Menzi.

Menzi uses the famous example of a child about to fall into a well, arguing that anyone watching a child near a well would naturally grow anxious, even the most evil of people.  Menzi argues that civilization began when people saw the corpses of relatives being attacked by animals and insects and felt compassion and grief.  It is true that burial sites are some of the first archeological finds we have of human culture.  Both Menzi and Xunzi, who attacks Menzi’s position later by name, use the example of little children to argue that human beings are good and human beings are evil.  Menzi says that we know little children are good, before they are educated and taught manners.  Xunzi says we know little children are evil, before they are educated and taught manners.  Happy children are indeed lovable, and angry children are indeed immature.  Many great thinkers, including Jesus and Nietzsche, teach us ‘be like a little child’, but we often tell others, ‘don’t be like a little child’.  Opposite truths are often equally true.


Neo-Confucianism, Zhu Xi & Wang Yang Ming

About 1100 CE, Confucianism merged with Daoist and Buddhist ideas to form a Confucian revival called Neo-Confucianism by scholars today.  Buddhist metaphors such as the pearl at the bottom of the muddy lake and the sun emerging from behind the clouds were reinterpreted in light of Confucianism and Daoism.  The major figure of this revival was Zhu Xi (1130-1200 CE), who argued that all three traditions were teaching the same truth but that Confucius was the superior and primary teacher.  The Neo-Confucians were trying to put Confucianism back into its primary place in Chinese culture after losing much ground to Buddhism over the previous five hundred years.

Wang Yang Ming (1470 – 1530 CE) one of the most revered Neo-Confucians, was famous for the idea of the unity of knowledge and action.  While Confucius taught that intention and action are distinct things, Wang Yang Ming taught the complementary truth that the two are interactive as one whole.  While someone can say that they know something, we can judge whether they truly know or not by how they act.  An example he uses is if someone says they know that a smell is bad, but they do not act like it is bad (gagging, opening a window, pointing at their younger sibling), we could say that they do not really know that the smell is bad but only saying the smell is bad.  In the same way, if we know someone is a good person we do not get nervous around them or hide our valuables when they come over.  If we did, it could be said that we do not truly know they are good because we do not act like they are trustworthy.


Confucius’ Analects

Confucius shows us a brilliant development of questioning the individual and state that we have already seen develop elsewhere.  When people gather, they can see each other and see groups, and are questioning and skeptical of themselves, other individuals, and group organizations.

First we look at the criticism of the individual, clearing the individual heart and putting oneself in tune with the Way.  Then we look at criticism of the state, and see that the same shape applies.
Second, notice the passages where Confucius is criticizing sages who go to nature and do not study.  Pay attention to this for next week, as these are early Daoists who have different opinions than Confucius about the cultivation of the human individual.


Criticism of the Individual:
(4.12) He who acts out of self interest arouses much resentment.
(5.5)  ‘Ran Yong is good but not eloquent’- I don’t know if he is good, but he certainly does not need eloquence if he isn’t.

(11.10) Yan Hui died.  ‘Master, this grief isn’t right’  C; ‘What sort of grief for such a man is right?


Criticism of Luxury:

(5.18) Master said: Zang Sunchen built a house for his tortoise,  with pillars in the shape of mountains and rafters decorated with duckweed.  Has he lost his mind?

(7.16) Even if you have only coarse grain, water and your arm for a pillow, you may still be happy.  Riches and honors without justice are to me as fleeting clouds.


Criticism of Ritual without Virtue:

(3.26) authority without generosity, ceremony without reverence, mourning without grief, these things I cannot bear to contemplate.

(4.13) If one cannot govern by observing ritual and showing compassion, what is the use of ritual?

Scholarship without greed or want of career:
(4.9) If a scholar is ashamed of his shabby clothes or poor food, he is not worth listening to.

Haven’t seen someone who studies without any thought of career.

Good is at Hand (7.30) but no one is perfect (7.26)

Says again and again that he is not perfect, nor has he met perfection…
(7.33) My seal is as strong as anyone’s, but I have not succeeded in living nobly.
yet: ‘Is goodness out of reach?  As soon as I long for goodness, goodness is at hand.’

(7.34) I make no claims to wisdom or to human perfection- how would I dare?  Yet my aim never flags and I never tire of teaching people.
Disciple: ‘This is what we fail to follow.’


Criticism of Selfishness and Pride:

Whatever one’s position, you always share the faults and talents of everyone.
Thus, you have to work to compare self with others, as not intuitive.

You should compare yourself to others, reflect yourself through others no matter how you judge them to be, and work to get over selfishness and become compassionate and balanced (the way of heaven, opposed to selfish desire for lower).
Confucius values joining all of humanity, not being selfish.

(7.22) Put me with any two people at random- they will invariably have something to teach me.  I can take their qualities as a model and their defects as a warning.

(9.8) Am I knowledgeable?  No. A Bumpkin asked me a question, and my mind went blank.  Still, I hammered at his problem from all sides, till I worked out something.

(1.16) Don’t worry if others don’t recognize your merits: worry that you may not
recognize theirs.

(2.13) Practice what you preach.

(4.17)     When you see a worthy man, seek to emulate him.  When you see an unworthy man, examine yourself.

(5.12) Zigong ‘I do not want to do to others…’ C: you’re not that far yet…

(11.4) Yan Hui is of no help to me: whatever I say pleases him.

(9.28) It is in the cold of winter that you see how green the pines and cypresses are.

(15.23)    A gentleman does not approve of a person because he expresses a certain opinion, nor does he reject an opinion because it is expressed by a particular person.

(15.24) ‘Single word to guide one’s life?’ C- Reciprocity: do not do to others…

(19.21) A gentleman’s mistake is like an eclipse of the sun or moon.
When happens, everyone notices, and when corrected everyone looks up in admiration.


Good as Unknown, Beyond Judgment and Opinion:

(9.17)  The master stood by a river and said: ‘Everything flows like this, without ceasing’
(note Heraclitus)

(2.17) Master said: Knowledge is to take the known as known and unknown as unknown.

(pre 3.14) (quoted by Wittgenstein) About what we don’t know we must keep silent.

(5.13) Our master’s views on culture can be gathered, but you can’t hear his views on the nature of things or the Way of Heaven.

(7.21) The master never talked of miracles, violence, disorders, spirits.

(7.35) Confucius is ill, student: ‘pray to spirits above & spirits below’
Con: In that case, I have been praying for a long time already.
(note not a rejection of the spiritual, but a knowing unknowing)

(11.12) Asked how to serve spirits, says: You have not yet learned how to serve man, how could you learn to serve the spirits?
Death: You do not yet know life, how can you learn about death?


Middle Way: (Buddha, Heraclitus)
(6.17) Who would leave a house without using the door?  Why do people seek to walk outside the way?

(6.29) The power of the middle way is supreme, and yet it is not found among the people anymore.  (notice restore the golden age)


Reform the old, bring in the new:

(2.11) He who by revising the old knows the new is fit to be a teacher.

(2.12) A gentleman is not a pot.

(Pre 3.4 cut off) each generation has added and dropped from the ritual, so we know what people will look like 100 generations from now (they will add and drop)

In pursuit of virtue, do not be afraid to outpace your teacher (15.36)


Criticism of the State:

Confucius is not a compliant sheep when it comes to the state.
His criticism of individual judgment and pride is matched by criticism of the state.

(11.17) Rich student tyrant: C- attach him: you have my permission.
Sees private interest trapped in the state (nobles disunifying Zhou court, into warring states).

(13.15) asked by Duke: Is there a single maxim/rule that could ruin a country?
C- The prince should never suffer contradiction.  When in error, prince should be told.

(13.24)  ‘What if everyone likes a man?’ C- Not enough
‘What if everyone hates him?’ C- Not enough: Good should love, bad should hate.

(13.20) ‘present politicians?’ Those puny creatures are not even worth mentioning.

(9.26) One cannot deny the humblest man his free will.


Criticism of Daoism and its sages retreat into Nature:

Just as Confucius appears in Daoist texts as an ally but inferior rival, so do proto-Daoist sages in the Analects.  This is very much like Buddha vs. the Jains, in that other group isn’t mentioned by name, but found not to be in balance but extremists.  Daoists wanted to escape into nature, while Confucians believe in the value of the city and embracing not escaping humankind.  Believe in balance, like Daoists, but seek to balance the city, not escape into the perfect balance of nature from the city.  Daoists are more skeptical of society.

(18.16) One cannot associate with birds and beasts.  If the world were following the way, I would not have to reform it.

It is not right to be a hermit, and discard human relationships to preserve one’s purity.

(18.18)  I do things differently.  I follow no rigid prescriptions on what should or should not be done.

(4.1) It is beautiful to live amidst humanity.  It is hardly wise to live in a place destitute of people (don’t be a Daoist hermit).

Criticism of Meditation (D and later B), to Confucians not as good as study:

(15.31) I once to meditate went without food for a day and a night without sleep.
It was no use. It is better to study.


Numerous criticisms of inactivity, inferior to activity, study and effort:

(2.1):  At 15, I set my mind upon learning.  At 30, I took my stand.  At 40 I had no doubts.  At 50, I knew the will (mandate) of heaven.  At 60, my ear was attuned.  At 70, I follow all the desires of my heart without breaking any rule.

(4.2)         A good man rests in his humanity.  A wise man profits from his humanity.