Age of Chinese Thought

The ideas of Confucius were adopted as a basis of policy and institutional order by the Han Dynasty, and Confucianism remained in large measure the official philosophy of governing throughout the imperial era. In contrast, no Western philosophical develop attained so close an association with government. The distinction is delinquent in large measure to the supremely practical prescriptions of Confucianism itself. Confucianism gave mount up to both a set of workable political determine and a class to implement those values in a way that Western political philosophies, to a greater extent idealistic (in the everyday, non the theoretical sense) failed to do. Thus, Confucianism shaped Chinese public intent more intimately than any philosophy shaped the public life of the West, while other Chinese philosophical positions (Taoism and afterwards Buddhism) survived for the most part as complements to the Confucian mainstream. The intent of this essay is to inquire into the phylogeny of Chinese thought in the classical period, the forms that thought took, and their consequences for later Chinese history.

A persisting mystery of history is that, in the space of a few generations around the year cholecalciferol BC, sometimes called the Axial Age, schools of critical philosophical thought appeared in widely separated--and, so far as we know--mutually culturally isolated regions of the Eurasian continent (Schwartz, 1985, pp. 2-3). The Buddha in India, Isiah in Judea, and the classical Greek philosopher

not be loyalty given even though orders are given.'

world. May those supra and below (the king and

Michael, Franz. (1986). China Through the Ages: History of a Civilization. Boulder: Westview.

Mencius further developed the ideas of Confucius, and in particular developed in much more explicit terms the innovation of a professional class of scholar-officials, chosen by merit, and entrusted with the responsibilities of government. It was in this developed form that Confucianism would eventually become the official philosophy and conceptual foundation of Chinese imperial government.

mandate ... [Michael's ellipsis] ...

macrocosm king,

The most radical of all the responses to the turbulence of the Contending States took an only dissimilar form. All of the other schools of thought, from Confucianism to Legalism, were pre-eminently public philosophies. All took for given(p) that the business of the educated man was to hold emplacement; they differed fundamentally in the courses of action they recommended to him in his official capacity. Taoism went in an entirely different direction, toward withdrawal and privatism. The Taoist did not seek office; instead, he sought escape from the violence, corruption, and cynicism of public life. As a Western philosopher would recommend during another age of senseless violence, the Taoist would cultivate his own garden.

The civil disruptions of the third century AD brought an effective end to the Roman usage of civil government; thus, when the Empire itself was fragmented by the barbarian invasions, no option remained by which it could be re-constituted. A Theodoric might retain a Cassiodorus or a Boethius as ministers, but there was no "bench strength" of officials upon which barbarian rulers--who mostly sought to spare Roman institutions--could draw. Secular education disintegrated, having no strong tradition to sustain it, and Charlemagne and his successors were left only with churchmen, ill-adapted
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