Sunday, November 13, 2011

Is this statement about Confucius and Pericles correct?

1. Confucius and Pericles both had some similar political values. Confucius and Pericles both opposed tyranny. They believed in a strong aristocratic government with no dictators. Confucius and Pericles would most likely agree on the features of a good government, a good family, and a good servant of the state. Both Confucius and Pericles wanted a strong superior state for their country.|||Your comparison is a bit like that drawn by Fluellen in Shakespeare's play Henry V - that Macedon is like Wales in that there were rivers in each, and salmon in the rivers.



Pericles led a tiny state with serious devolution of much political decision-making to the citizen body. His main concern, shaped by the current military and social situation (read the Epitaphion on the dead of the early Peloponnesian War - Thucidydes gives it almost in full) was with adherence of individual citizens to the ideals of the State, cultural as well as political and military. He does not comment much on family life and piety, except to commend the modesty of Athenian women. He was also the man who created the layout of the Acropolis, much as we have it today, with the intention of using subject cities' tribute to create employment and prosperity in Athens, and to centralise power there. In short, he was (despite the small scale of the land he ruled) an interventionist in the grand manner. He was not a philosopher: he was a politician and a soldier.



Confucius saw things differently. He never ruled or led anything, but was an official in a huge and mighty empire where power was, as a matter of principle as well as expediency, centralised. His main concern was with private virtue and with family piety. How (he seems constantly to have asked) can a state be justly governed, where the citizens do not observe these? Confucius does not state or imply a Chinese national ethos, still less a normative ideal such as governed Pericles' vision. In any case, in such a large and diverse empire it would have been futile to propose a single cultural pattern. Confucius' philosophy aimed to build well-being in detail, from the bottom up, starting with the virtue of the individual citizen and his family.



If you abandon wide-ranging and almost meaningless generalisations and look at the detail, you can see that the two men, though both notable, were in fact very different characters.

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