/lit/ - Literature

yes

>>16238585
Confucians are based, legalists btfo. Taoism is like stoicism to confucian platonism.

>>16238611
How did the Confucians btfo the Legalists?

>>16238618
Metaphysically, legalists lost their state but confucian principles are timeless such as the salt tax debate. Moral realism is better than relativism.
Speaking of which what's a good intro on Chinese philosophy that doesn't suppose they're separate from philosophy altogether? Like uses western philosophical terms

>>16238625
It's debatable whether the Legalists actually left after the fall of Qin Shi Huang or whether they merged with the Confucians when the Han dynasty sprang up. Debatably their philsophy of rule, stripped of some of its bite, is more prevalent today than Confucianism is.
>Speaking of which what's a good intro on Chinese philosophy that doesn't suppose they're separate from philosophy altogether? Like uses western philosophical terms
I'm not familiar with any book that does that but there has been a lot of comparison between Confucian ethics and virtue ethics so you could probably find some stuff there. Maybe David Wong has written something about it too.
>Moral realism is better than relativism.
Does it matter which is better or which is correct?

>>16238720
yes, I think one is more representative of reality than the other so if I'm engaging with it I'd like to find what chinese philosophy can offer for my metaphysics.

It's sad how nationalistic other philosophy groups can be. They risk making themselves inaccessible and irrelevant. Reality is reality and chinese philosophy is philosophy and can be studied as plato can be.

>>16238816
Haha, well you've run into an ardent Moral relativist. I just thought your use of 'better' was ambiguous (could be interpreted instrumentally).
I think it is somewhat understandable that Chinese philosophy is less studied, as the style of their argumentation (or general lack of it) doesn't fit well with Western approaches. They have quite parable normative theories, but their attention to metaphysical and metaethical matters is comparatively lacking. They had a metaphysics, but were generally uncritical of it and didn't give nearly a comprehensive study as someone like Aristotle. They're more comparable to pre-socratics in their metaphysics.
I suspect that the Confucian ideals stifled further debate and development of chinese philosophy after the hundred schools. There was some change with the introduction of Buddhism, but otherwise it was just Confucianism or Neo-Confucianism for 1000's of years.

>>16239014
Nice hard to argue w them imho but I have a lot of tools I can use to analyze philosophy w and I wonder how developed it can be and how to make a philosophical historicism given Indian philosophy, laam and african.

Arise my thread, from the depths of the catalog.

bump

>>16238585
Taoism is nice, haven't read anything about the others

>>16240708
Yeah Taoism is pretty chill.

>>16238585
Xunzi was right, Mengze was a utopian Platonist who made sure Confucianism can never progress beyond the apparent dissonance between theory and reality thus legitimising tyranny and oppression way before the commies took over.
Han Fei and Shang Yang were based. People need to be contrlled, bc unless they are refined by moral work (as Xunzi exhorts the reader to do) morality is not enough to keep them to devolve into anarchy. I havent read ShanDao.
Laozi and Zhuangzi are great reads but I took them more as mystic poetry (like Rumi ) then straight philosophers.
Mozi was basically the Chinese analytic philosopher getting bent over by categorical implications in language. As such he is a great prototype of the sophistry of western analytics. ans like them lacks any piratical merit.

> t. hobbyist

>>16241802
Mencius was an enemy of tyranny and one of the few philosophers who actually thought the ruler should improve the lives of their people. I don't think its utopian to believe that people have the capacity to act morally right if they are guided to do so. Xunzi was to dour on the capacity of human goodness. I don't know how you can call Mencius a tyrant and then turn around and call Shang Yang and Han Fei based when they literally created the most bald-faced philosophy for tyrants in the history of political thought. It isn't a coincidence that the shortest lived dynasty in Chinese history was also the only explicitly Legalist one. Legalism represented cruelty exceeding all possible tolerance, which ironically made it terrible at it's raison d'etre—the maintenance of power; it was the system that grasped at power the hardest that caused the people to fall into anarchy, not the one which trusted in their potential for goodness. Mencius well predicted the problem with legalism, which is the problem with all tyranny: when people follow you only because they fear you, the second your back is turned they rise up in revolt; but when people follow you 'with their hearts', your position is far more secure than anything fear could provide.
Shen Dao is mostly fragments. If you have access to a university library databases you should be able to read it (i remember reading in some rando's dissertation). It wouldn't take more than 20 minutes and in while there is some interesting fragments, you can find most of it in Han Fei.
anyway, i have to sleep now. good night.

>>16241802
Xunzi may have been right, but he makes for extremely dreary reading. Han Fei was ultimately right because the Chinese will never develop a sense of morality. The Confucian mask of Chinese governance will always hide the legalist heart. Mao's great crime was going mask off.

Additionally his works are more enjoyable to read than the others.

This thread is very bad. Here is a hint for all of you: Confucianism is not like Christianity. Its content cannot be reduced to a few major texts written by Confucius and his students. Understanding Confucianism requires an understanding of not just its initial figures, but also the long exegetical tradition that was developed on top of their work. For instance, the forms of Confucianism that were made into official state ideology in Japan, Korea, and the Ming and Qing dynasties were based on the work of Zhu Xi, who was a Song-era Confucian exegete. Wangming Confucianism was also influential, but not quite on the level of Zhu Xi Confucianism.

>>16241950
I am saying that Mengze was -as I understand but correct me - anti-tyranny the same way Rousseau was, believing that man is inherently good and its only society that corrupts him. So if we had a perfect society that enables the inherent goodness to blossom in mans heart there wouldn't be any crime or evil. But if you look at any part of history or just Chinese history it should be self evident that this is incorrect. Now when you try to implement it the non-compliance of the people will require force to quell any social upheaval. And I took his criticism of legalism as a tacit admission that he knew that unless he is right about the inherent nature of mankind this will necessarily end up with Legalist government of a Confucian mask.
The Legalists were the most cold-hearted assholes I grant that, and I may have gotten carried away. But it's really interesting because in the West the "End justifies the means' is still frowned upon and was never accepted. Even today realpolitik still needs moral justifications to be palatable and electable for the people.They were the realist reaction to the real problems that came up when you try to implement a utopian idea, because the end goal was the same a "harmonious society". They just realized that the Saint-Simone utopian socialism is impossible so they tried to get there by Stalinist oppression.
the only thing I can really point to as a difference between the West and Chinese philosophy is the invention of individual responsibility.
>sleep tight anon

>>16242076
We are in agreement.
> will never develop a sense of morality
why do you think it looks like this to us? The only difference I can point to is that in the West individual responsibility to moral action always preceded the group, while in China the individual was since ancient times viewed as a derivative of the collective. That's why I think that even their non-esoteric philosophers look at them like "look the worthless many". What do you think? Am I pseuding too hard?

>>16242199
do you have a good book on confucianisn as a philosophy?