Review | Confucianism: an American professor and believer on its insights about life and how to apply them
- Stephen Angle is an American professor of philosophy and a believer in Confucianism. His new book is a prospectus for the … the what, exactly?
- Neither religion nor philosophy, the code to live by that Confucius supposedly bequeathed the world is made up of commonplace ideas anyone might have
Growing Moral: A Confucian Guide to Life By Stephen C. Angle pub. Oxford University Press
As its title suggests, Stephen C. Angle’s new book is not simply an introduction to Confucianism – although it functions very well as that – but a prospectus for it.
Angle, professor of philosophy and East Asian Studies at Wesleyan University, in the United States, introduces a personal note at times, remarking on the impact his Confucian beliefs have had upon his own life. Nevertheless, he admits that in the competition to survive in the world of ideas Confucianism has not proved to be the fittest, even in its Chinese homeland.
Most self-identified Confucians now live in South Korea, and even there they are a small percentage of the population.
But as any first-year philosophy student will tell you, neither the number of people who believe a claim to be true nor the antiquity of that claim have any logical implication whatsoever for its validity.
And Angle is keen to dignify Confucianism as a philosophy, although it quickly becomes clear that this is a title it does not merit. But his main purpose in doing so is to distinguish it from religion, unless “religion” is understood in a far broader sense. Confucius was not a prophet. Confucianism contains no supernatural element, and it has a distinctly unreligious willingness to coexist with other schools of thought.