Berkley Center

There is a common misconception that philosophy is an intellectual game played by people with too much free time. In reality, great philosophy inevitably arises in times of crisis, when people are led to ask questions like: What has gone wrong in our society? What would a healthy society look like? How can we transform our sick society into a flourishing one? Consequently, it is unsurprising that, in our own contentious and uncertain era, we are once again seeing intense interest and passionate debate over philosophical and literary classics, from the Odyssey to the Analects.

The Analects is the collected sayings and brief dialogues of Confucius and his immediate disciples. It has been a seminal work in East Asian thought for over two thousand years. When Westerners read the first translation of the Analects into a European language in the seventeenth century, it started a Confucius craze among Enlightenment intellectuals. Since then, every generation rediscovers how Confucius speaks to their time and their problems.

My favorite passage in the Analects is 2.15, in which Confucius says (in Erin Cline’s excellent translation), “Learning without reflection is a waste. Reflection without learning is a danger.” This saying is elegantly simple yet profound. “Learning” in Confucianism is not merely about acquiring technical skills, or memorizing random facts. Learning means learning to be a better person. The notion that one can learn to be a better person is something that we often lose sight of in contemporary education, but this is a point of agreement between Confucians and classic Western thinkers, going back to Plato and Aristotle. Learning from classic texts under the guidance of wise teachers is traditionally thought to help transform naïve but well-intentioned youth into sophisticated and morally committed adults. Part of what makes a work a “classic” is that people can return to it, generation after generation, and learn insights about virtues and vices, about human nature, and about our place in the universe. But even the greatest classics cannot perform their magic alone. The student has to do more than just memorize and regurgitate what they have read. They have to engage in reflection, which involves thinking about how the lessons of the classics apply to them and their lives. Confucius’s most talented disciple described the daunting task of engaged learning: “The more I look up at it, the higher it seems; the more I drill down into it, the harder it becomes. I catch sight of it in front of me, then suddenly it’s at my back. The Master matches me step for step; he gently leads people forward” (9.11).

So, on the one hand, it is crucial for the student to engage in active reflection upon what they learn from the classic texts. But Confucius also stresses that reflection undisciplined by learning is a danger. Why? One Western model of learning, made famous by Descartes’ Meditations, is that of the solitary intellectual, sitting alone in a room, systematically questioning everything they have been taught, and only believing in the ideas that seem “clear and distinct” to their own subjective mind. Alexis de Tocqueville, writing in the eighteenth century, famously said that “America is therefore one of the countries in the world where philosophy is least studied, and where the precepts of Descartes are best applied…Everyone shuts himself up in his own breast, and affects from that point to judge the world.” While this Cartesian model did help to inspire many of the intellectual achievements of the Enlightenment, it ultimately led to our current climate, in which the average person might consider themselves better informed—based on memes and thirty-second videos—than experts with years of study, on every topic from epidemiology to evolutionary theory. Nowadays, scientists even have to work to convince many people in the United States that the Earth is not flat!

In contrast, the Confucian model is that reflection is most valuable when you actually have something worthwhile to reflect upon. Those who have learned and then reflected upon the classics—the best that has been thought and said—are more likely to recognize “clever flatterers, skillful dissemblers, and glib talkers” (16.4) for what they are. Those who take seriously the moral lessons of the classics know that they must “be broad-minded and resolute, for the burden is heavy and the Way is long” (8.7). The Analects is itself one of the greatest and most influential of the classics, and it handsomely repays learning from and reflecting upon it.

Despite its great intrinsic interest, first-time readers of the Analects encounter two stumbling blocks. First, the books of the Analects (really the size of chapters) do not have any obvious thematic structure. A passage in Book 15 may be crucial for understanding a passage in Book 4. Second, the contemporary reader often needs a little help to fully appreciate the context and implications of particular passages. Erin Cline’s delightful new translation of the Analects answers both needs. She arranges the passages by intuitive categories, including “Learning & Wisdom,” “Filial Piety,” “Self-Cultivation & the Way,” and “Governing.” In addition, her introduction and interpretive notes provide just the right level of guidance and contextualization for the English-speaking reader. Cline has given us the Analects translation we need for our time!