by Melvyn Bragg
On the one hand, Alexander Broadie observed, there was Hume writing his philosophy, in the course of which he was declaring the external world, and therefore all his friends, to be a fiction, a product of his own mind, as mentioned earlier; and, on the other hand, he was leaving his writing and going out and playing backgammon and talking with his friends in the common sense world, in the real world.
ALEXANDER BROADIE: As far as Reid is concerned, what this demonstrates is that there is something desperately wrong with Hume’s philosophy, because it is not a philosophy that you can live. If you actually do think that your friends are products of your own imaginative activities and that’s the end of the story, then you can’t possibly treat them in the kind of way that nature forces you to treat them, namely as other centres of consciousness and centres of moral principle.
It was an essential part of the philosophical insight of the common sense school that there should be a unity between the life that you lived in the real world and the philosophy that you theorised about.
There was a paradox there as, in a way, Hume and Reid could be brought together.
MELISSA LANE: There is a wonderful nineteenth-century Edinburgh story that said that really what happened was that Reid was shouting out very loudly, ‘We must believe in an external world,’ but whispering, ‘We have no reason for our beliefs.’ And then Hume was saying very loudly, ‘We have no reason for our beliefs,’ but then whispering, ‘But we must believe in an external world.’ There is a sense in which, one can argue, are they in some ways saying the same thing?
Having suggested ways in which Hume and Reid were very similar, there are also ways in which they are very different, on some points.
MELISSA LANE: In this question of this relation to God and miracles, Hume had argued that we have no grounds on which to believe in ancient biblical reports of miracles because there is no reason for us to trust that testimony unless we have experience of its reliability. Reid countered that, saying testimony is just as basic a way of knowing about the world as our senses are, and we can’t escape having a principle of believing in testimony.
Immanuel Kant was influenced directly by what he had heard of Hume. He claimed to have been inspired by this idea that it was the way our human nature was constituted that gave us our most fundamental beliefs about the world and responses to them, and he turned it into a very powerful system of thought.
A. C. GRAYLING: He did it on the basis of a crucial change. Whereas the empiricists before his time had asked: where do our ideas come from? Kant said: don’t ask that question, ask instead what work do they do?
The utilitarians, Melvyn suggested, would seem to have a lot to offer common sense philosophy, with Jeremy Bentham’s An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789). There, though, Melissa Lane saw a paradox.
MELISSA LANE: In one way, one might say that the utilitarians are looking for the one, big, great principle of common sense that they think no one can deny, which is that the rule of our actions should be to do that which increases the greatest happiness of the greatest number. But, on the other hand, they didn’t think that that was something everybody actually did agree to, they thought that was something that people might disagree about.
The other thing that happened was that one of Reid’s successors, Sir William Hamilton, developed Reid’s ideas in the nineteenth century, and John Stuart Mill, one of the great utilitarians, launched a blistering attack on him in a book. It was probably that attack that really put paid to common sense philosophy, at least in Britain.
The common sense ideas influenced G. E. Moore, a twentieth-century Cambridge philosopher, who made a very similar argument to the one that Reid was making.
MELISSA LANE: He said that, if we have the proposition that there is at present a living body, which is my body, it would just be lunacy to deny that. And he held up his hand and said, ‘You can’t deny that this is a hand.’ That feeds into some of the ideas of the later Wittgenstein as well.
Moore titled of one of his works In Defence of Common Sense and he was a direct inheritor of this tradition, A. C. Grayling added, and Wittgenstein in his last work, On Certainty, was also an inheritor, via Moore, of Reid’s ideas.
A. C. GRAYLING: But there is a famous case in which Moore, having used such examples as, ‘I know that I have a hand here, and another hand there, and I know that I have been close to the surface of earth all my life,’ and so on …
MELVYN BRAGG: ‘Almost all my life,’ he says.
A. C. GRAYLING: Yes, almost … he was giving a lecture at an American university in a great hall, the walls of which were hung with curtains, and he said, ‘I know with absolute certainty that there are windows behind these curtains.’ And, in fact, there weren’t.
CONFUCIUS
In the fifth century BC, a wise man called Kung Fu Tzu said, ‘Study the past if you would divine the future.’ This powerful maxim helped form the body of ideas that, more than Buddhism, more than Taoism, more even than communism, has defined what it is to be Chinese. It is a philosophy that we call Confucianism – Confucius is the Latinisation of Kung Fu Tzu – and, as well as asserting the importance of learning from the past, it embodies a respect for hierarchy, ritual and self-cultivation through learning. Confucius said, ‘Learning without thought is labour lost; thought without learning is perilous.’ But who was Confucius and how did his ideas manage to become the bedrock for a civilisation?
With Melvyn, to go over 2,000 years of Chinese past in the hope of divining the future of Confucianism, were: Frances Wood, retired curator of the Chinese collections at the British Library; Tim Barrett, emeritus professor of east Asian history at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London; and Tao Tao Liu, emeritus tutorial fellow in oriental studies at Wadham College, Oxford.
Confucius was a kind of itinerant teacher, Tao Tao Liu began, from a class of people who were coming to the fore, the Shi, which is variously translated as the ‘scribes’ or the ‘knights’, people who were not inheriting a great deal from their family but belonged to the noble houses.
TAO TAO LIU: They were well educated, and they went around trying to find a job of their own, and they propounded their own ideas. He wasn’t the only one at that time; in fact, there were quite a lot of other people propounding their own ideas.
Much of the material about him was written down not by Confucius but by his disciples. There are references in Daoist texts to him going around with those disciples; some of the other schools tended to laugh at him, saying he was not going to get anywhere.
TAO TAO LIU: [His system] put a great deal of emphasis on human interaction, and a human society. He said that he was a reformist, not really an innovator. He said that people are the most important, and you should think about how you treat people with love, or humanity. The word Ren, as it has been called, is the sense of caring, if you try to translate it that way.
Frances Wood underlined this statement of Confucius, that he was not the great innovator, even if we sometimes think of him that way. He was expressing views that were commonly held at the time.
FRANCES WOOD: It is simply because his disciples wrote down what he said that we have this body of literature, which gives us the idea that this is something very important. He has stressed the importance of family, family relations, relations with people within society and so on, but he was just saying what pretty well everybody knew. He was reacting to what he saw as the breakdown of an ideal system. This ideal system lay in the past.
Rather than ideas of reciprocity, and people being nice to each other, Frances Wood highlighted the concern Confucius had about statesmanship. He believed things should be right: let the ruler be a ruler, let the subject be a subject. There was a right way to behave, and that went all the way down through society.
MELVYN BRAGG: Let the ruler be the ruler, the minister be the minister, the father be the father, the son be the son and then the states are stable. All male, by the way.
&
nbsp; FRANCES WOOD: We can come to women. Whether you can rescue your sister-in-law from drowning if it involves touching her hand was a big argument. The idea was that it was actually so improper for a man to touch a woman’s hand, if he was not married to her, that it would be better to leave her to drown.
There was an almost Christlike idea of Confucius from Tao Tao Liu, Melvyn summarised, and a very strict hierarchical idea from Frances Wood, and there was also the part of Confucianism to do with government, which made him attractive to bureaucracies. Confucius believed that the key to good government was education, which put him in a minority when sheer efficiency was increasingly valued, especially as the Zhou dynasty was breaking up and its former vassals were beginning to compete to take its place.
TIM BARRETT: These rising powers put a premium on efficiency, especially military efficiency. To talk about rituals, to talk about kindness in human relationships, this all seemed very remote. However, Confucius look[ed] backwards towards the institutions, towards the texts concerning better times in the past. He was laying the foundations of an educational curriculum, which conveyed a cultural heritage.
In the short term, possibly to his contemporaries, certainly for a few centuries thereafter, Confucius’s approach looked plain silly. However, once China was unified and there were no more enemies to fight, it became important to find a way to keep the empire together. The solution took some time to emerge, but held good for a couple of millennia thereafter.
TIM BARRETT: [This] was the idea of having an elite who were all brought up on the same sort of education, familiar with all the same texts and so forth, held together because of their cultural knowledge, and who, through their cultural knowledge, gained the kind of prestige that, at least in settled times, allowed them to dominate local society.
There were said to be 100 competing schools in the time of Confucius, yet his ideas survived to be taken up by the first Han emperor in about 200 BC. Survival was thanks to that large body of work of the disciples, recording what he said, something that did not happen to other philosophers who vanished without leaving much of a system.
FRANCES WOOD: [They are] always in the form of these little ‘the master said this’ or ‘in response to questions from so and so, he said this, that and the other’. He spoke about all sorts of things, some things have already been mentioned; he also said odd things like ‘a gentleman should never wear scarlet at home’. Lots of anecdotes about him were repeated; it was said that he couldn’t sleep if his mat was not straight.
This body of material about him and his gnomic sayings were to form the basis for the examination system that created the bureaucracy in China.
The bureaucracy itself came from the heritage of those who were striving for efficiency. The theory of bureaucratic management, Tim Barrett said, was not in itself Confucian but, ‘After the experience of autocracy under the terrible first emperor of China (the man with all those terracotta warriors), they were looking for something that would make that kind of totalitarian bureaucracy more bearable.’ To have people in the bureaucracy who had been examined for their knowledge of the Chinese heritage, rather than their ruthless efficiency, was a way of achieving that goal.
Later, in AD 600–900, Buddhism was in the ascendant in China. The Tang dynasty marked a period of unification after lengthy civil wars. People may have been disappointed that they had an imperial government that did not, at that stage, seem to work, and they were looking for solutions at a more personal level, and that looked as if it could be Buddhism.
TIM BARRETT: What it offered, above all, was an answer to questions as to what happens after death, a personal salvation, a chance of remedying the situation. Even if you end up killed in a battle, there is a chance of a further incarnation. In particular, the number of people who died in the fighting who were not cared for as ancestors within the Confucian setting, the wandering ghosts – who would take care of them? Buddhism offered that possibility.
The Buddhism that arose in China, especially Tang China, was very different from the original, rather ascetic preachings of the historic Buddha. The Chinese transformed Buddhism enormously so that it would fit in with the Confucian family setting.
FRANCES WOOD: For example, Buddhism should be a monastic religion. That means it takes you away from your family, and you have got the problem that you must stay within your family because you need to look after your elderly parents, and you also need to keep feeding the ancestral spirits back for three generations.
In a Confucian family, obligations to your ancestors meant you should be at home, offering sacrifices, offering food to them, incense and prayers, informing them what was going on in the household, and you could not do that if you were away in a monastery.
Silk painting depicting Confucius lecturing students.
FRANCES WOOD: This is putting it very simplistically, but you get the development of Zen, which is sudden enlightenment, which is through self-cultivation; you don’t have to go into a monastery, but you can become a Buddhist and you can achieve enlightenment through your own cultivation.
There was some reaction against the foreignness of the new ideas, Tao Tao Liu suggested, and the Chinese retrenched a bit. There was a form of neo-Confucianism, starting from about the tenth century up to the twelfth, culminating in a great thinker, the ‘Thomas Aquinas of Confucianism’, who was Zhu Xi and who lived in the twelfth century.
TAO TAO LIU: He had a rather different interpretation. He made Confucius less of a state institution, and made it much more the idea that everybody can participate. He tried to get from the much more politicised ideas of Confucianism to the idea that, within each person and within each household, you could have a sense of what is right, and everybody knowing their places and so on.
The continuity between Confucius and Zhu Xi was possible because of the literary culture in China, where so much was written down. Back in the Han dynasty when Confucianism was first being adopted by the state, before they had invented woodblock printing, they had the Confucian texts carved in stone.
FRANCES WOOD: Then you would take rubbings from that with paper, so that people could have copies of it. They always had this great thing about the correct text and, whatever the fate of the cult at any time, you have got this continuous re-examination of the texts, and re-examination of one’s heritage, one’s past.
Melvyn mentioned The Book of Songs, which he understood was a key Confucian text even though a lot of the songs in it were bawdy. Confucius himself never actually denied people’s appetites, Tao Tao Liu said, and that included sex and food and general shelter. The Book of Songs really contained folk songs, as well as hymns and poetry, and described the whole of life.
TAO TAO LIU: He thought that this really took poetry, and the arts, as an expression of things that are perhaps too deep emotionally to be expressed easily in verbal form. He loved music as well. I don’t think one should get an idea that Confucius was somehow a purely dull old stick. There is one record of him actually getting so enraptured by some music that he didn’t eat or sleep for three days.
While Confucianism was embedded in China and had been for millennia, the arrival of the industrial west in the nineteenth century had a disruptive effect. It broke up the entire Confucian world. China regarded itself as bestowing civilisation on its neighbours, like Korea, Japan and Vietnam, and, when these countries fell under colonial influence or went their own ways, there was a blow to Confucian self-esteem. It was unclear whether Confucianism would be able to create a society that was fit to survive in the modern world.
TIM BARRETT: Once again we see some of the slogans that had dominated China, in the terrible period after the life of Confucius as it moved towards unification by brute force. Originally, perhaps in Japan, but then in China, too, as these countries perceive themselves as under threat in an immensely competitive situation, [we see] the slogans ‘we must enrich the country, strengthen the army’. These became, once again, dominant.
It was an awful new wo
rld, he added, but one that had echoes in east Asia of times long distant.
In the twentieth century, Mao attacked Confucianism and, in the Cultural Revolution, attempted to eliminate the past and Confucianism along with it. There were some successes but, on the whole, the plan did not really work.
TAO TAO LIU: In many ways, Mao himself was a bit of a Confucianist; he was a great believer in hierarchy, you knew your place, and, as far as he was concerned, he was at the top of the tree and everybody else was somewhere on different rungs well below it. He also actually went against the Confucian spirit of being fairly catholic in the ability to take on various aspects; he just decided that everything had to be one politically correct voice.
One of the areas in which Mao seems to have been trapped in a Confucian way of thinking was when he tried to transform China through his own personal efforts.
TIM BARRETT: One of the distinctive aspects of Confucianism was this belief that great people can transform cultures. Confucius looked back to earlier sage kings and, in his turn, was looked back to as a sage himself. Although Mao’s idea of what China should be like may have been more than coloured by Marxism, the effort single-handedly to transform China, and the effects of failure on him personally in making him more and more autocratic, bear an uncanny echo of earlier problems in trying to act as a sage and single-handedly transform a whole society.
Tao Tao Liu noted that Confucianism was still observed in places like Taiwan, Singapore and Malaysia, where there is a sense of upholding the old traditions and the old Chinese-ness. It may spread back to China as a mark of being Chinese and, considering the strength of the family and responsibility of the family, there are ways in which Confucianism has never vanished from Chinese life.
