Reviewed by John Butler
21 March 2015 — Bertrand Russell once remarked that he didn’t write about Confucius because he found the Chinese sage “boring.” If Lord Russell had lived long enough to have read this book, he would definitely have changed his mind and gone out to buy a copy of the Analects. Russell was not a fan of non-systematic philosophers, being himself a mathematician and a man with a razor-sharp logical mind, thoroughly western in outlook.
He believed that philosophy began with the Pre-Socratics in Greece, somehow forgetting, or ignoring, the fact that Confucius (c. 551-479 BCE) was actually an older contemporary of Parmenides of Elea (c. 520-460 BCE) and Heraclitus (c. 535-475 BCE), perhaps the two best-known Pre-Socratics, and one of only two Chinese philosophers (the other is his intellectual successor, Mencius) to be granted the dubious privilege of having his name transliterated.
Unlike the Pre-Socratics, whose works exist only in fragments, Confucius’s thoughts may be read in the Analects, which, as Schuman tells us, “probably contains more original material from Confucius” than any other book, even if he did not write the whole thing himself.
And neither Parmenides nor Heraclitus can be said to have created a world, as Schuman claims Confucius did.
This book goes a long way to establishing the Chinese sage as an important and influential thinker, someone whose ideas need to be studied by anyone who wants to understand China, not just its past, but its present and probably its future as well.
People who ignore Confucius, it would seem, do so at their peril; Schuman tells us twenty-five hundred years after Confucius first expounded his ideas, they remain ensconced within the societies of East Asia, having survived endless political upheavals, economic metamorphoses, and a torrent of foreign doctrines.
There is this little man on the front cover of the book, dressed in a voluminous robe, shuffling along with his mouth half-open and an armful of scrolls—that is the great sage, unimpressive, perhaps, yet somehow sure of himself, and not, it turns out, the least bit boring.
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Schuman’s intentions in this wonderful book are quite straightforward. We need to know exactly what Confucius’s teachings were, and this can only be done by peeling away the centuries of interpretation, adaptation, and outright, sometimes purposeful misreading to which the sage was subjected after his death. He was revered and reviled, even exhumed and scattered to the four winds, but he never disappeared entirely. Tyrannical emperors and maniacal Red Guards couldn’t destroy him, and he still shuffles quietly along in the conscience of today’s China as well as surfacing in the ideas of politicians, educators and business leaders from Seoul to Singapore.
Even the present communist government in China has enlisted him, and Schuman has a chapter entitled “Confucius the Communist”. Outside China, Korea in particular, is an interesting case-study for Confucius scholars, as there were ties to Confucianism lasting all the way to the end of the Korean monarchy and beyond. It is no exaggeration to suggest, as former American ambassador to China John Huntsman states on the back cover, that “China is incomprehensible without this intellectual framework.”
The Chinese, we sometimes find to our cost, do not “think like us,” and some understanding of what they do think like can only be gained, Schuman believes, if we have some understanding of Confucius.
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