# Notes on *Confucius - the Secular as Sacred*
**Author: Herbery Fingarette**

*I read this back in October? (once again, I picked it up semi-randomly) and thought I would come back to piece together main takeaways. Turns out I forgot most of them and a vague feeling of understanding is very unsatisfying.*

*So, here we are.*

The main point of this book is to help clarify the Analects, the main piece of literature on Confucian philosophy. It fuels the states with leaders who abide by it in Asian countries.

You question how these countries have risen to “standard” success, some of which can be attributed to what fuels the people who govern them.

Initially, the author found Confucius to be a prosaic (lacking poetic beauty, unromantic, lacking prose….) and parochial moralizer. However, he reconciles that he was ahead of his time, is it because of the global decline in religiosity? I don’t think any philosophy is widely adopted enough to say that he predicted some general shift in virtuosity, but maybe? [Rachel M. McCleary](https://scholar.harvard.edu/mccleary/home) (Harvard) is working on this, and I’ll look into this later (hopefully).

Also, by mandate, I will preface that translations are hard. Translating philosophy is harder; you lose a lot of nuance. But, like every philosophy not originally in English (or modern English) suffers from this.

Confucianism doesn’t reject the supernatural; it’s more so that you can glorify, but idolatry doesn’t fit into these community-based practices.

In the Abrahamic religions, there are clear-cut, prescribed ways of discipline: praying at set times, giving prescribed tithe, fasting, etc. There are ways you can do this in a more general way that manifests as “hard work” or “labour.”

“Instead of the diversion of attention from the human realm to another transcendent realm, the overtly holy ceremony is seen as the central symbol.”

# Chapter Notes and Thoughts

## Human Communion as Holy Rite

Humanhood is (innately) meaningful.

The duties that man must partake in are also meaningful.

There’s a notion of serving man and a means to being able to serve the supernatural, which seems contradictory to my notions about Confucianism, but I also need to stop branding it as the opposite of Abrahamicism - convergences are allowed.

There’s some consequentialism, and absolute goodness (li) to a man’s work that goes beyond agency, virtue, etc and this differs from Western philosophy.

So, here’s where the prosaicism is identified, but there’s this magic (Jen, a more ethical goodness) that comes from the idea that anyone can achieve this absolute goodness in their work. It makes me think about [Matt Lakeman's blog post about “Little Soldiers” and the Chinese Education system.](https://mattlakeman.org/2020/01/23/little-soldiers-inside-the-chinese-education-system/) Tiger parents and their relentlessness is rooted in this fundamental belief that your child can achieve, but it comes with work.

Work is ceremonial, and we do it in abidance to the “Tao”. Due to the consequentialist nature of work, we’re judged by the public -- it’s requisite for doing anything “good” because “their” opinions are the measure, and our community, and this is a good thing, or at least central to the philosophy.

Ultimately, the Holy Rite is a metaphor for human existence. At this point, I’m still unclear what this means, but for now, I’ll take it for granted.

## A Way without a Crossroads
Okay, here’s where things are interesting. We start to explore the concept of responsibility, or rather how it doesn’t really exist.

Punishment is something that exist(s) in China to deter future wrongdoing.

I think to Saphir-Whorf hypothesis (let’s ignore it’s validity) and the idea that the language to express the meaning of choice and responsibility didn’t really exist.

So, it’s not that these things didn’t manifest in society, but they can’t really be central teachings which obviously changes things and there’s probably other constructs that are more prevalent.

The book itself becomes quite pretty when he discusses man in this raw form that builds into a true human after following “the way”. It’s quite churchy and actually a little untasteful. I’m unsure.

In short within the Confucian framework, you either follow the “way” or you don’t and therefore you fail. It’s binary, so you do have “choice”, but it’s whether to fail or to succeed.

The breakdown of moral problems is interesting, so there’s 4 forms.

1. The wrongdoer who is ignorant and doesn’t know what is “right” and “wrong”. This person doesn’t understand the *Way*

2. The wrongdoer who is aware, but has not yet learned the “requisite skills to follow the *Way* in some form or another.

3. The wrongdoer who hasn’t put in enough work to act in accordance of the *Way.*

4. The wrongdoer who “knows enough to go through some of the motions, but he is not totally committed to the “way.” This person might also just be erratic and/or succumbs to the lust of personal gain.

## The Locus of the Personal
We start to understand Jen. A Confucius take on the most important virtues of man. The type of man who follows “li” to perfection.

“You want to be established yourself, then seek to establish others. You with to advance, then advance others. From what is near to one to seize the analogy….there is jen’s way.”

There is something about Jen that also describes how to relate to others. It is centered around “general goodness” that we explore prior: “reciprocal good faith and respect among men.”

We have ‘shu’- mutuality in human relations; ‘chung’ - loyalty, ‘hsin’ - good trust toward others.

## Traditionalist or Visionary?
There are difficulties in implementing philosophies in a world that looks different from the ones in which they were established. The conflict of anachronism.

It’s not a novel thought to consider this, but you take in the principle of roughness, or you lose spikiness in favour of generalizability. A classic problem. It notes that Confucianism remains strong and “true” while these larger geopolitical comities prevail, but without it, there’s a question of whether it should.

So we have the legalists that suggest this harsh governance. It's kind of oligarchal in spirit where some people profit from imposing fear on citizens of the state?

The author gets existential, asking why all of this matters and honestly, who knows? I read this because I was grappling with my lack of motivation. I would either be turned off to “hard-work as a virtue” as a product of cringe or realize that succumbing to the grind was blasphemy (side-note that this is like my favourite word of 2023).

Here’s a nice excerpt from the section: “To cope with the meaning of life rather than its physical realities, man has always begun by apprehending that meaning not in the form of an abstract conception about this life but in the form of a narrative of events in some way parallel to it.”

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Ceremony. Emerging Unity. Tradition.

…Maybe, I’ll come back to add more, but this is a good stopping point to come back to. I need to study for my physics final.