Good Confucianism book (pdf) - Department of Physics

80 Opponentspoint of view, which I may or may not share. Definitions of right, wrong,proper, improper, good, bad, ugly, and beautiful are a matter of taste, andConfucians are wrong to think otherwise. Confucians, like the rest of us,use their egos and try to impose their wills. Confucians, and most of the restof us, think they can define right and wrong. Confucians teach artificialityand unnatural behavior, like ritual and education. They are convinced thatthey know what they are doing and that everyone should follow them.Zhuangzi saw the Confucians as marvelous targets for jokes and stories.He made up all sorts of stories about Confucius, Confucians, and thingsthat they did. One of the stories in the Zhuangzi shows Confucians robbinggraves, while using all the proper ritual to do so. “ The big Confucianannounces to his underlings: ‘ The east grows light. How is the matter proceeding?’ The little Confucians say, ‘ We haven ’ t got the graveclothes off himyet, but there ’ s a pearl in his mouth! ’ ” They go on to quote ancient textsuntil they finally manage to steal all the treasures in the coffin. 18 Zhuangzi ’ smore serious point is that Confucian notions of ritual and proper behaviorcan be used to justify all sorts of bad behavior in the hands of those withno conscience.One of the axioms of Confucianism is that human beings are socialcreatures and that we will naturally tend toward the building of civilization.Daoists argue that we have had dozens of civilizations and, whetherthey were kingships, theocracies, autocracies, or democracies, the one thingwe know about all of them is that all of them fail. This is because, Daoistsargue, civilization cannot succeed. It is an artificial and unnatural thing.Everything that goes against the Dao dies. Civilization cannot be fixed, asthe Confucians believe. Civilization is the problem.Confucians are wrong on two important counts: there is no standardof right and wrong, and civilization cannot be fixed – it is doomed bydefinition.The StrategistsWhile Mohists may have constituted the largest group in the Warring Statesera, followed by Confucians, neither were the most popular. In a time ofconstant warfare, it is no wonder that the most popular thinkers and textshad to do with the military. One military text that has survived is the SunziBingfa , known in the West as The Art of War . 19 This was one of a largenumber of military texts written during the Warring States period and thesetexts were the most widely read and the most talked about.Later Chinese scholars looked down on things military and so thesetexts were not included in the later categories as a school of thought.However, during the Warring States era, as one might imagine, they were