The Private and the Public in the Republic and in the Analects

Abstract

Plato’s Republic and Confucius’s Analects are two founding texts of political philosophy in the West and in China respectively. In spite of many differences, Confucius and Plato were facing a common problem: the threat of the private to the public. But they offered apparently radically different solutions. In this chapter, I will first present both models and then compare them with each other. In Section 2, I will discuss how the Analects deals with the issue of the private and the public. The Analects consists of apparently scattered and brief conversations. To tease out hidden messages in the Analects, I will also use many passages from the Mencius, another important early Confucian text, with the assumption that these passages are consistent with and can be considered an elaboration of the related themes in the Analects. Given the limited space, I cannot justify this assumption, and have to take it for granted. So, ‘the Analects’ used in this chapter is a symbol that represents certain strands of early Confucian thought, especially that found in the Analects and in the Mencius. With this caveat I will show that, although recognizing the conflict between the private and the public, the Analects pays more attention to the elements of the private that are constructive to the public, and uses the private as the natural locus of instilling people with public-mindedness. Where there still remains conflict between the private and the public in the mentioned texts, it will be resolved in a contextual manner. But I will also show, very briefly, how Han Fei Zi, the early Chinese Legal thinker, challenged the adequacy of Confucian solutions. If Confucian solutions are indeed inadequate, we may have to search for another model. This leads us to the discussion of the model put forth in the Republic. In Section 3, I will show that the Republic understands the private mostly as a threat to the public, and tries to suppress it nearly completely in order to protect the public. But this proposal also faces some fundamental challenges, which early Confucians would have, and Aristotle actually did make.