Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

There were three key elements in his thought. The first was tao, The Way. He never defined this too closely – like Plato he believed that intuition served a role here. But the Chinese character tao originally meant a path or a road, the way to a destination. Confucius meant to emphasise that there is a path which one ought to follow in life, to produce wisdom, harmony and ‘right conduct’. He implied that we intuitively know what this is, but often, for narrow, selfish reasons, pretend we don’t. The second concept was jen. This is a form of goodness (again, echoes of Plato’s ideal forms), the highest perfection normally only achieved by mythical heroes. Confucius believed that an individual’s nature was pre-ordained by heaven (a word he used widely in place of an anthropomorphised god) but, importantly, he thought that man can work on his nature, to improve himself: he can cultivate morality, hard work, love towards others, the continued effort to be good.¹³¹ One should be (as the Buddha also said) gentle, polite, considerate always, in conformity with li, the mores of polite society. This inner harmony of mind, he thought, could be helped by the study of music. The third concept was I, righteousness or justice. Again, Confucius was wary of defining this idea too closely, but he affirmed that men can learn to recognise justice from everyday experience (as Plato said we can learn to recognise Beauty and Goodness), and that this should always be their guide.

The Taoist religion is in many ways the opposite of Confucianism, though it still shares many similarities with Aristotle and the Buddha. Some believe that the founder of Taoism, Laotzu, was an older contemporary of Confucius. Others contend that he never existed: the words lao tzu mean ‘old man’ and, say the doubters, the Lao tzu, the book – the most-frequently translated work in Chinese – is an anthology compiled by various authors. Whatever the truth of this, whereas Confucianism seeks to perfect men and women within the world, Taoism is a turning away from the world, its aim being to transcend the (limited) conditions of human existence in an effort to attain immortality, salvation, the perpetual union of several different soul-elements. Underlying Taoism is a search for freedom – from the world, from the body, from the mind, from nature. It fostered the so-called ‘mystical arts’: alchemy, yoga, drugs and even levitation. Its main concern is tao, the way, though that name is not really applicable because language is not adequate for such a purpose (as with nirvana in Buddhism). The tao is conceived of as responsible both for the creation of the universe and its continued support (as with the primal sacrifice in the Vedas). The way can only be apprehended by intuition. Submission is preferable to action, ignorance to knowledge. Tao is the sum of all things that change, and this ceaseless flux of life is its unifying idea. Taoism stands against the very idea of civilisation; its view of God, as the Greeks said, was that he was essentially unknowable, ‘except by the via negativa, by what he is not’.¹³² To think one can improve on nature is a profanity. Desire is hell.¹³³ God cannot be understood, only experienced. ‘The aim is to be like a drop of water in the ocean, complete and at one with the larger significant entity.’ Laotzu speaks of sages who have attained immortality and, like the Greeks, inhabit the Isles of the Blessed. Later, these ideas were ridiculed by Zhuangtzu, a great rationalist.¹³⁴

In all cases, then, we have, centring on the sixth century BC, but extending 150 years either side, a turning away from a pantheon of many traditional ‘little’ gods, and a great turning inward, the emphasis put on man himself, his own psychology, his moral sense or conscience, his intuition and his individuality. Now that large cities were a fact of life, men and women were more concerned with living together in close proximity, and realised that the traditional gods of an agricultural world had not proved adequate to this task. Not only was this a major divorce from what had gone before, separating late antiquity from ‘deep’ antiquity, it also marked the first split that would, in centuries to come, divide the West from the East. In all the new ethical systems of the Axial Age, the Israelite solution stands out. They, as we shall see, developed the idea of one true God, and that history has a direction, whereas with the Greeks and in particular with Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism, the gods stood in a different relation to humans as compared with the West. In the East the divine and the human came much closer together, the Eastern religions being commonly more inclined to mysticism than Western ones are. In the West, more than the East, the yearning to become divine is sacrilege.

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