Overcoming the Confucian: a modern reflection on Chinese classicism. (Philosophy & Ideas).

IN THE ANALECTS we read: "The Master said: `I lighten only the enthusiastic; I guide only the fervent. After I have lifted up one corner of a question, if e student cannot discover the other three, I do not repeat.'" In the spirit of the Master, let me merely try to lift one corner of the question and leave it to your enthusiasm and fervour to discover the other three.

The question is: What do the Confucian classics have to teach us at the dawn of the twenty-first century? This question has been raised in the recent so-called "Asian values" debate. Lee Kuan Yew wrote last year that "There is no Asian model as such, but there are fundamental differences between East Asian Confucian and Western liberal societies." Samuel Huntington wrote, in 1996, of the threat to Western civilisation arising from "Confucian civilisation". I do not intend, however, to address the question in that context.

I propose, instead, to put it into a different and deeper context: the emergence of what I call universal cognitive humanism. By this I mean that what happened in China 2500 years ago is intelligible in terms of the general cognitive evolution of human kind. Indeed, it is actually more intelligible in such terms than if we lose ourselves in the obscurities of Chinese Confucian orthodoxy.

In the deeper context I propose to offer, we can set the Chinese sages free of narrow interpretations based on current political agendas. We can set both their work and contemporary debates about the "clash of civilisations" in critical perspective. We can, therefore, position ourselves to see where current debates come from before plunging into them.

This may sound like lifting more than one corner of the question. I believe, however, that once the matter is seen this way, your enthusiasm for lifting other corners of the question will be kindled. Lifting them will be much easier for you than if I had started somewhere else--for example, by trying to put Lee Kuan Yew back in his corner. A Master does not lift a random corner of any question. He lifts the corner best calculated to enable one to get underneath the question and therefore lift all the other corners together as one stands up under it, which is to say as one develops under-standing.

Let's begin, then, by reversing our temporal perspective on the ancient Chinese sages. We say "ancient" because we think of them as being long ago, in the earliest era of world history--that is, the years BC. They therefore occur to us as "early" in the story of mankind. They were not early, though. Even in terms of agrarian civilisation, these thinkers of the second half of the last millennium BC were latecomers. There had been settled agrarian societies for thousands of years in the world they were born into. In any case, their perspective was one of looking back on an ancient past, not looking forward to a radically different future. In this respect, they have a great deal in common with the ancient Greek philosophers, Plato and Aristotle.

So, how did their minds work? Well, consider that human cognitive development--the development of the human mind--goes back far earlier again than the beginnings of agriculture. Archaic human beings have been in what we now call Asia for some two million years. Modern human beings--our own species of hominid--have been in what was to become "China" a couple of thousand years ago for at least 40,000 years. Both genetically and culturally, the human beings of Confucius' era, who fought one another like ancient Greeks and who discussed ethics and politics as human ideals, were of vastly older stock than our backward-looking historical perspective tends to allow.