Models of Humanism in Ancient China: An Explanation Centered on Early Confucian Ethics

Abstract

In China, humanism, especially within the framework of Confucian ethics, developed quite differently from humanist discourses in Europe. Therefore, it is important to understand the origins and development of Confucian ideas that place human beings at the center of culture and the cosmos. Through the lens of the cultural particularities of humanism, this knowledge can help us gain a more complex and multi-layered insight into the universal factors that make up human nature. This paper critically examines the foundations, development, and distinctive features of traditional Chinese humanism, which emerged within the framework of classical Confucian teachings. Beginning with an analysis of the Confucian view of the relationship between the individual and society, the author explains the conceptual origin and historical development of various models of humanism in the Chinese tradition. The paper then sheds light on the reasons for the transition from religions to humanities that took place in China during the Axial Age, and highlights various implications of this transition manifested in Confucian ethics and its search for a better social order.

1. Confucian Relationship between the Individual and Society

In order to better understand the differences that demarcate Chinese views of humans and their position in the world from European ones,1 we must first look at how the relationship between people and the communities in which they live was structured in the Chinese tradition. We must first ask what a person is in relation to another person, because if human beings are perceived as something that is supposed to possess an “essence”, then this essence is undoubtedly first manifested in the relationships they have with their fellow people, who are, after all, the same species.

Human beings live, for the most part, in societies within different cultures, where different languages are spoken and where they are shaped by different histories and values. All of this is also linked to the structure of the relationship that binds the individual to the society in which he or she lives. So here, too, we can put on the lenses of open reflection that will give us insight into the specific dimensions of Confucian societies, and ask whether (and in what ways) this structure differs from the basic relations between individuals and society as have been developed in the modern European intellectual history.

The Confucian society—and the underlying institutional order—saw the individual as a root of the state. The basic structure of such an order is explained in the Confucian classic, The Great Learning (Da Xue大學):

The ancients who wished to prove distinguished virtue throughout the kingdom, first ordered their states. In order to order their states, they first adjusted their families. In order to adjust their families, they first cultivated their individuals. In order to cultivate their individuals, they first remedied their hearts.

(Da Xue n.d., p. 2)

The Confucian societies were also societies of “shared experiences”, a world of individuals whose identities were constituted by their interpersonal relationships.2

These relationships were structured in accordance with the so-called five (basic rela- tionships (Wu lun 五倫); the political theory of original Confucianism is based on these five exemplary relations that originate in the family and are paradigmatic for all relationships within wider communities, including the state. Confucius’ successor Mencius defined these five relationships as follows:

Father and son should love each other and the relationship between ruler and subject should be defined by just proportionality. There should be distinction between husband and wife, relations between generations should be ordered according to the right sequence, and there should be trust between friends.

(Mengzi n.d., Teng Wen Gong I, p. 4)

Hierarchy in the sense of decision-making by the superior is only perceptible in the relationship between the ruler and subject, and in the relationship between members of the older and younger generations. In the first case, the very nature of the relationship is hierarchical, which means that the ruler is clearly superior to his subjects. However, in Confucianism, this does not necessarily mean that the latter must be absolutely submissive to the former; on the contrary, the Confucian definition of this relationship obliges the ruler to be just and responsible towards his subjects. Central to these morally defined interactions is the virtue of family respect or childhood piety (xiao 孝). This virtue, which is a constitutive element of children’s love for their parents and grandparents, is one of the cardinal virtues of Confucian ethics. In practice, it mostly means the fulfilment of children’s duties towards their parents. In the context of Confucianism, this kind of filial piety is important because the relationship between children and their parents and grandparents provides people with the first social environment at the earliest stage of life in which children learn to understand and respond appropriately to normativity within relationships. Thus, these virtues are first formed within the family, which means that they develop within the boundaries that encapsulate the duties and responsibilities of the individual. Namely, these are established on the basis of the different relationships between individual family members. Therefore, it is important for Confucian moral epistemology that family love and attachment be treated as a priority and take precedence over all other kinds of love. This basic attitude was also applied to the broader society and state, which had important implications for the Confucian concept of loyalty (zhong 忠).

With respect to how we should understand “things” then, the Confucian world constituted of the “myriad things” (wanwu萬物) refers in fact to all of the interdependent, dynamic events that constitute our shared experience, a shared experience in which we ourselves are included as active participants. In this Confucian “metaphysics” then, when we ask the question “What does it mean to be human?” the answer is that people are best understood not as “things” but as “events in history”, not as something that we “are” but something that we “do”, not ontologically as “beings” per se but as human “becomings”.

(Ames 2020, p. 172)

On the basis of such a processual, highly dynamic worldview, a model was developed in China that was called “All under Heaven” (Tian Xia 天下). This has recently been described in great detail in Zhao Tingyang’s famous book of the same name (see Zhao 2021), but it has also been analyzed and reworked by many other theorists specializing in Chinese intellectual and institutional history, such as Bai Tongdong:

To address the issues of how to bond a large state of strangers together, and of how to deal with state–state relations, early Confucians developed a Tian Xia model, while the Westerners developed the nation-state model and later, in response to its problems, the cosmopolitan model. According to the Confucian model, state identity is based on culture (rather than race) and is also based on a Confucian conception of universal but unequal compassion. Among states, a key distinction is between the civilized and the barbaric, and civilized states should form an alliance to protect the civilized way of life against the barbarian threat. A general principle of the Confucian world order is that it recognizes the sovereignty and the primacy of one’s own state’s interests, but limits both with humane or benevolent duties.

(Bai 2020, p. 969 )

However, further development of world civilizations that led to the globalization process was characterized by the dominance of the individual-based models. This development was rooted in the European model of modernization. In Europe, modernity was shaped by a view of the human person that was rooted in the individual, and in which the active and autonomous subject was highly individualized. Individualism is therefore a system based on the accentuation of the interests, functions, and rights of individuals in their relationship to society (Lukes 2020, pp. 1–3). The ideological foundation of humanist democracy as it has developed in the liberal societies of Europe and America is the concept of justice, in which the basic rights of the individual are only limited by the basic rights of other people, since in principle everyone is equal. This system, which is based on the equality in principle of all individuals, is essentially based on sameness. In Europe, as in America, it is based on the basic teachings of the Christian religion, within which all are equal before God (and before death), without distinction or exception (Arendt 1998, p. 235).

This equality is in fact the equality that is best expressed in collectivism, which we will discuss in some detail later. Actual equality, which is not only an ideal of Western political theories,3 but also and above all a basic sub-condition of Confucian morality and ethics, is something else altogether. Equality is an axiological term that is fundamentally different from the notion of equivalence, since equivalence can only be established on the basis of a pluralist conception of the individual, within which they are anything but equal.4

In individualist societies, individual human rights are usually (at least in theory) better protected than collective rights, because individualism is the ideological and conceptual pattern of a social order in which the individual is absolutely primary and paramount in the relationship between society and the individual.

In addition to the many advantages of protection, autonomy, and freedom for individuals (especially male individuals), this system also confronts us with many problems, including a lack of skills and opportunities for cooperation, a rise in egocentrism, a lack of mutual solidarity, a rise in social alienation, an over-relativization of values, loneliness, and so on. Nevertheless, individualistic social systems are advocated by a number of highly influential contemporary theorists of liberalism (or so-called liberal democracy), such as John Rawls in A Theory of Justice (Rošker 2021, p. 58).

Individualistic ideologies continue to dominate not only social theories, but also the lives of the people in what is called the Western world. At the same time, the misunderstanding prevails in the contemporary Western world that East Asian societies are collectivistic.

This belief is completely unfounded, because collectivism is also essentially a social system, itself based on and derived from the concept of the individual. The term collectivism has therefore been established as the counterpart of the concept of individualism, both systems being based on the human individual. Both systems are theoretically rooted in the ideal of individual freedom; while liberal individualism is a system that protects above all the material and physical freedom of individuals and their property, Marxist collectivism is based on the freedom of the individual, which is supposed to be fulfilled in socialist collectives because each person succeeds in overcoming the alienation of capitalism through their work, as well as public and private relations with their fellow human beings. But when liberal theorists (who are nowadays, of course, much more influential than Marxists) speak of collectivism, they do so from generalizing notions of mechanistically structured social systems in which individuals are only interconnected in order to achieve the goals of the most efficient production or utilitarian benefits for the social system as a whole (cf. Greif 1994, p. 913). They are thus dehumanized, and both their position and agency are defined by their dependence on the system—and certainly not by their dependence on other individuals or their fellow human beings. In fact, they are completely separated and isolated from the latter, because they are only connected to them as cogs in the system, i.e., only through their roles, functions, and the objects with which they deal. The relations among people in this system are not marked by their unique personalities, because in the system of the faceless masses not only are they all equal, but they are in fact the same.

Nevertheless, it is precisely this conceptualization of the interchangeable, unified, and individualized person that is at the same time the foundation of the equality of all human beings before the law, the basis of the concept of universal human rights, the solid foundation of the ideas that underpin the struggle for equal opportunities for all human beings, and so on. Nevertheless, on the basis of the concept of sameness, it is becoming increasingly clear that this is a generalization, and certainly not a true pluralist equality in the sense of axiological equivalence. As Hall and Ames (1998, p. 25) point out, and as noted in one of my earlier works, it is precisely

This kind of understanding of the individual on which ideas of autonomy, equality, free will and similar concepts can also be based. Such a Self belongs to the domain of the one-dimensional, empirical Self, or, in Chinese terminology, to the domain of the “external ruler” (wai wang 外王). But Hall and Ames also point to the fact that the notion of the individual or individuality can also be linked to ideas of uniqueness and non-repeatability that are not related to belonging or membership of a particular species or class. This is not, therefore, a question of the principle of equality, but rather of the principle of equivalence/sameness. Hall and Ames point out that it is precisely this understanding of the individual that is crucial to a better understanding of the Confucian concept of personhood.

(Rošker 2021, p. 65)

Both individualism and such liberal ideologies of collectivism are alien to the Chinese tradition because its history has seen the emergence of a completely different social system in which the relationship between individuals and society was not based on agreements between equals, but on relations between different members of society.

This specific relationship has influenced both the formation of the individual personality and the individual Self, whose consolidation and whose multiple forms, types and roles will be discussed later, as well as the structure and nature of the central ethics that has characterized the Confucian tradition, which has been at the forefront of ethical discourses and practices throughout Chinese history. This is the so-called ethics of relationality, or the ethics of relationism, which will be discussed in later parts of this paper, when we will consider the multiple ethical systems that have taken shape within Chinese and East Asian humanism.

Before that, let me draw attention to another fundamental difference that defines the relationship between the individual and the social community in the transcultural comparison between Europe and China. This is revealed in the criteria for regulating interpersonal relations in individualist or relational systems.

While in the European, Hellenistic-Christian tradition this relationship is regulated by agreement, convention and law, in East Asia the idea that justice and harmony between people can be achieved by means of codified, normative and universally accepted rules that are valid in all situations never seems to have taken hold. This becomes clear if we look, for example, at the concept of individual rights, which is as alien to the Sinitic tradition of ideas as the unconditional observance of collective considerations and duties.

The conceptualization of universal human rights has not taken into account the elements discussed in this paper, and is therefore a discourse that is mainly based on individual rather than communal rights. However, in this context I must, of course, point out that this does not mean that we can therefore defend those autocratic governments which do not respect any human rights, oppress and abuse their citizens and, in particular, the marginalized groups within their societies, without restraint.

2. Humanism as the Spirit of Human Culture

The word renwen 人文, which represents the root of the Chinese compound renwenzhuyi 人文主义, the modern translation of the English term “humanism”, first appeared as the conceptual counterpart of tianwen 天文 (Lee 2013, p. 12), which denotes the cosmic order or cosmic origin or standard5. This normative dimension of both words is expressed in the etymological meaning of the last part of the compound, i.e., in the syllable wen, which is the same in both conceptual counterpoints of this binary category,6 and which originally meant a gesture, but later also a pattern, often interpreted as a criterion, norm, and orderliness in terms of culture (Sturgeon 2021). In this kind of understanding, the term renwen 人文 can be understood as human (cultural) order, or, more simply, as human culture.

The concept of renwen 人文 first appeared in Chapter 22 of the oldest Confucian classics, The Book of Changes (Yi jing 易经, see chp. 22, Tuan Zhuan 1):

觀乎天文，以察時變；觀乎人文，以化成天下。

We look at the patterns of the sky, and thereby ascertain the changes of the seasons. We look at the patterns of society, and understand how the civilizing of people can lead to the fulfillment of the potentials in the political world of all under heaven.

According to the modern Chinese philologist and historian of ideas Chen Yunquan, human order, that is, the orderliness of human culture (renwen 人文), also contains creative potential, as it ensures the continuous creation of all that exists. He explained the first appearance of the characters that later came to characterize the term humanism as follows:

In our traditional history of ideas, the term renwen huacheng meant the idea that human beings are at the center of all that exists; therefore, their value and dignity must always be respected, and they must be given every opportunity to develop their initiatives and potential. All spaces and all things in the world must therefore be seen through the lens of human beings.

(Chen 2015, p. 49)

Chinese historians have labelled the earliest Xia, Shang, and Western Zhou Dynasties, which lasted until around the eighth century BC, “cultures of ritual and music” (liyue 礼乐). Confucianism itself was based on the pursuit of the most appropriate formulation and construction of human emotions, which at the time were almost equated with the notion of music, since the letter yue 乐 in the above term also has the pronunciation le, and in this case means joy or pleasure. These emotions, which in their most direct form were linked to urges and instincts, had to be cultivated for the needs of a “civilized” society, and this was done in what is now China through (“proper”) rituals and music. The gradual cultivation of the emotions led to their normativization, which again allowed the incorporation of reason into emotions:

文之以禮樂, 亦可以為成人矣.

A person becomes human only through such a process of cultivation through ritual and music.

(Lunyu n.d., Xianwen, p. 12)

Early Confucianism emphasized that “pleasure or joy comes from music” (yuezhe yue ye 乐者乐也) (Li ji n.d., Yue ji: 32); in this context, early Confucians were much concerned with questions about how best to regulate (or control) these feelings of pleasure and joy in a way that would benefit society as a whole (Cook 1995). To this end, music had to be regulated (read: selected and often censored), and Confucius himself is said to have stated (according to the Confucian Treatises) that people “can find pleasure in orderly rituals and music (le jie liyue 樂節禮樂)” (Lunyu n.d., Ji shi, 5). Through this kind of rationally-ordered regulation, it was possible to transform emotions into rational models, which was also said to allow for the fusion of mind and emotions (Li 2008, p. 251). In the Zhou Dynasty, ritual was a system of legalities and institutions that ensured social order by providing people with the criteria and norms of communal life, which gradually replaced religious ceremonies.

According to many Chinese scholars, during the so-called “Axial Age”, China moved from a culture of “primitive”, i.e., mainly naturalistic religions, to one based on the internalization of humanistic ethics.

While in the Shang era, popular belief in a god or supreme ruler (Shang di 上帝) or in Heaven (tian 天) did not yet contain any ethical elements, it is therefore—according to these theories—under the Zhou that it became linked to morality. In the time before the Zhou Dynasty, the concept of tian, meaning heaven, and then increasingly Heaven with a capital letter, was at the heart of these religions, which meant that it was taking on increasingly sacred and divine dimensions. By the 10th century BC, it was almost perceived as a form of anthropomorphic God. In this role, of course, he/it was not only the creator of men, but also their supreme judge, who judged human behavior and dispensed praise and punishment according to the morality or immorality, the appropriateness or inappropriateness of their behavior. In the Shang Dynasty, Tian became the supreme deity of the state religion, and this did not change significantly until the period marking the transition from the Western to the Eastern Zhou Dynasty (eighth century BC). According to Yang (2007, p. 3), the decline of this religion during this period is thought to have been caused by the nepotism, corruption, and inefficiency of the ruling elites. It can also be seen from many parts of the Confucian classic The Book of Songs (Shi jing 诗经) that during this period, anger towards Heaven was spreading, and people began to doubt it (yuantian, yitian 怨天, 疑天)—Tian as a form of deity was thus becoming less credible and more open to challenge among the majority of the population.

As Xu Fuguan has shown, the authority of the Mandate of Heaven (tian ming) had already been completely eroded by the time of the ruler You of the Zhou Dynasty. It can therefore be argued that the traditional religious concepts rooted in the early Zhou Dynasty had almost completely disintegrated. This was an extremely important turning point, indicating that Chinese society in this period had already entered what Karl Jaspers calls the “Axial Age”. However, we should be mindful of the fact that, unlike other civilizations, China did not develop theology during this Axial Period, but rather turned away from it.

(Yang 2007, p. 3)

In the light of Jasper’s Axial theory, China should therefore be seen as a notable exception to all of the “great civilizations” of the time. According to Jasper’s theory, doubt about natural deities and systems of natural religions became widespread in all materially-advanced cultures in the period between the eighth and fourth centuries BC, since it was directly linked to the level of sophistication of the means of production, i.e., technology. However, while such “primitive religions” were to be replaced in most other cultures by more highly-developed and complex—mostly monotheistic—theological systems, the questioning of natural deities in what is now China led to the disintegration of religion as such. The absence of deities prevented people from projecting their own fears and anxieties onto external higher powers; Xu (1987, p. 231) speaks of a “concerned consciousness (youhuan yishi 忧患意识)” in this context, which led to self-awareness—albeit painful and fear-ridden—and thus to intimate moral responsibility. Xu (ibid.) also contrasts this notion, which he sees as the beginning or origin of a specifically Chinese humanist mentality, with the concept of wonder or curiosity that emerges as the origin of European philosophy. This fundamental difference has also influenced the function and role of the acquisition of knowledge in both cultures:

The Greeks saw rationality as the typical or defining characteristic of human beings, and the love of wisdom as the source of happiness. Knowledge and the acquisition of knowledge were regarded as a leisure activity, pursued for their own sake. This characteristic of ancient Greek culture led to the search for objective knowledge and, in particular, to the development of metaphysics and science. Modern Western thinkers have inherited this tradition. But whereas the Greeks took “knowledge” as a kind of education, modern Western thinkers have transformed knowledge into something that represents a constant and persistent quest for power and authority through the conquest, possession and control of the external material world, as expressed in Francis Bacon’s famous dictum that “knowledge is power”.

(Ni 2002, p. 283)

Many contemporary theorists, such as Chen (1996, p. 4) or Téa Sernelj (2013, p. 72), point out that this was not a case of people recognizing their own limitations and therefore turning to the search for some transcendent infinite existence or monotheistic religion, but rather the opposite: what they recognized was the limitations of the deities. This was, in fact, the central reason why they stopped looking for a transcendent world and turned instead to the world of domestic reality, to questions related to the regulation of society, politics, and interpersonal relations (Sernelj 2022, p. 170).

3. The Significance of Humaneness

So instead of a “breakthrough to the transcendent”, in China there was a “breakthrough to the humanities”. While other civilizations in this period embarked on the path of “more developed” religions, China’s journey was therefore not towards monotheism, but towards a pragmatically defined search for an ideal social order. The reason for this is said to lie in the fact that, even before the onset of the proposed Axial Age, China had already undergone a major religious crisis, in which Heaven, as the supreme god and the highest moral authority, had lost its credibility. Therefore, since this morally defined religion of the early Western Zhou Dynasty had lost all its moral splendor, it would have been difficult to overcome the skepticism that had by then already prevailed in the broadest layers of the population, and to re-establish a theological mentality that would have allowed the development of monotheistic belief. It was thus replaced by a belief in the rational structure of the universe, and the former “Heaven” (Tian 天) was transformed into “nature” (ibid.).

In the contemporary Western societies, the historical details and concrete specifics of such historical developments in ancient China are still largely unknown. It is no coincidence, therefore, that the assumption that Confucius is somehow representative of the heavenly religion of the late Zhou period, which is supposed to be at the most primitive level of religious belief, still prevails here (Lee 2001, p. 199). Thus, even Hegel7, in his description of this “religion”, only stressed throughout that the concept of Tian was meant to be a mere notion referring to an otherworldly, immanent level of being, i.e., to a concrete social reality. Therefore, ancient Chinese thinkers—including Confucius, of course—were supposedly incapable of insight into ideas related to transcendence (Hegel 1969, p. 320).

In fact, the period between the last years of the Spring and Autumn Period (770-ca. 475 BC) and the first years of the Warring States Period (475–221 BC), i.e., the time in which Confucius lived (551–479 BC), was one of radical change in Chinese history, described in ancient sources as a period of “the dissolution of etiquette and the loss of music” (li huai yue beng 礼坏乐崩, Han shu s.d. Wudi ji, 73). It was at this time of radical social change that Confucian doctrine began to develop within a new historical context, but based on the traditional concepts of li (ritual) and yue (music). However, Confucius’ important contribution also lies in the fact that he established and developed a new ethical concept of humaneness (ren 仁), which has since been firmly established as the central and most important concept of Confucian humanism.

Ren is a type of interpersonal empathy. The Chinese character used to represent this concept consists of two basic strokes (or “radicals”). The first, on the left, represents a human being, and the second represents the duality or plurality within which all are equal.8 The basic meaning of this character therefore expresses that man can only exist in connection with other men, i.e., in (equal) plurality. No man is an island, and we are all vitally dependent on each other. Confucius interpreted ren as the ability to empathize with the Other, i.e., with one’s fellow human beings. It is a feature that needs to be nurtured and cultivated if we are to become truly moral human beings, and thus do our utmost to contribute to all of us living in a more empathetic and therefore better, more pleasant, more positively-oriented natural community.

Confucius is said to have established this concept on the basis of a deep reflection on the traditional notion of ritual (li 礼, cf. Chen 2015, p. 50). Thus, he interpreted ritual in direct relation to humaneness; only this allowed him to offer people the possibility of internalizing external social norms into a form of immanent moral consciousness. This is what he means by the following quotation:

子曰:”人而不仁, 如禮何?人而不仁, 如樂何?”

The Master said, “How can a man who does not possess humaneness perform the rites? How can such a person enjoy music?”

(Lunyu n.d., Ba Yi, 3)

In this context, it was not only important to limit and control human behavior through external rituals, for all this is not really possible (at least in the long run) unless one gains insight into the question of why it matters—even to oneself. The meaning of social morality can only be seen or understood if the virtue of humaneness is internalized. Only on the condition that we perform rituals and enjoy music on the basis of this kind of inner awareness can we actually develop a moral subject within ourselves that is both immanent and transcendent. But this, as Mengzi, one of the two most influential successors of Confucius, points out, can only be done consciously by the individual alone. This is evident in many parts of his seminal book Mengzi, such as the quote below:

仁義禮智, 非由外鑠我也, 我固有之也.

Humaneness, propriety, respectability, and wisdom are not brought into me from outside, but are inherent in myself.

(Mengzi n.d., Gaozi I, 6)

In Mengzi, then, it is the virtues that are conceived as the four a priori forms9; they are, of course, only the conditions of the possibility of the moral cultivation of the individual, and thus of the attainment of true humanity. Mengzi calls these forms the “four sprouts” (si duan 四段, see Mengzi n.d., Gongsun Chou I, 6). The formation of humanity through cultivation (wen) requires education, which includes axiological schooling (Bildung).

In the process of cultivation and moral life “in the Confucian way”, one could also point to a criterion that served as a kind of moral signpost for people to distinguish between good and evil. Many Chinese scholars (e.g., Chen 2015, p. 51) see this criterion in one of the four aforementioned Mencian virtues, namely the concept of yi 义, which represents justice in the sense of situationally-conditioned appropriateness.

To summarize, the normalization or (self-)control of instincts or urges could therefore, according to Confucius, be realized through ritual and music, the former representing the external form and the latter the inner core of the psychic experience of reality through sensations and emotions. Through the external form, it was possible to transform emotions and to encapsulate them in behavioral norms whose central criterion was humaneness (ren 仁). This was an important factor in the general influence of the Confucian school on the culture of the Eastern Zhou Dynasty, which saw the emergence of a specifically Chinese humanism under the concept of renwen 人文, literally meaning human order, human culture (or the culture of man). Even if Confucianism was a type of discourse that both advocated and was based on “human culture”, its interpretation of human existence was naturalistic, since it was interpreted through the cosmos, since man as such could never be separated from the natural world (ibid.).

Another important social or cultural concept of Chinese humanism is the concept of minben 民本, which literally means people as the base (or people as the root). This concept is often mentioned in the context of defining the proto-democratic elements of original Confucianism. Already in the oldest surviving collection of Shang shu10 historical documents, we find a quotation which emphasizes this central function of the people and thus of man as such:

民惟邦本, 本固邦寧.

It is only people who are the basis of a country. If the base is stable, peace will reign in the country.

(Shang shu n.d., Xia shu, Wu zizhi ge, 2)

An important concept that emerged during this period, and was also closely related to human beings and their central role in nature and the cosmos, was that of humanness (ren xing 人性). In the Confucian Analects, we find a quotation defining this concept as that which is common to all human beings (Lunyu n.d., Yang huo, 2). However, the two most influential followers of Confucius’ teachings interpreted this concept in diametric opposition to each other. While Mengzi argued that what is intrinsic to human beings, i.e., humanness, is good, Xunzi held that it is selfish and that the goodness in humanness is necessarily artificial, i.e., instilled in us from the outside through socialization and education. Since socialization and education are always fundamental and central throughout Confucianism, we cannot be surprised that Mengzi placed as much importance on education as Xunzi did; even if humanness was good in his view, it was only imperfectly present in humans from birth, and thus only through appropriate cultivation and socialization could it blossom and develop into the proper goodness of a moral personality.

4. Conclusions

It is in this unprecedented emphasis on socialization, education, learning, and cultivation that the importance of culture for Confucians becomes particularly apparent. And, as we have seen, for them it was culture that in a sense completed the human being, placed not only at the center of existence, but also in the position of the most sacred and inviolable cosmic entity.

Given the dominance of the Confucian state doctrine in China, which in many respects adopted the philosophy of the original Confucianism (even if it also abused and often completely fabricated it for ideological purposes), the Confucian type of humanism is the dominant discourse within all the types of humanist ideas that have developed in the Chinese tradition. While this by no means implies that this type of “cultural” humanism was the only model of humanism in the Chinese tradition, it is certainly the most enduring and influential, and one that—despite its flaws and inconsistencies—undoubtedly offers great potential for enhancing the value of humanist traditions on a global scale.