The early Chinese philosophical school most focused on moral self-cultivation, Confucianism,1 reserves an important place for humility.
Interestingly, though the virtue is an important one for Confucians, they do not address it directly as an independent virtue, but rather through the consideration of related virtues.
Below, I offer the general contours of the early Confucian view on humility, its link to notions of proper self-concern, and argue that Confucians do not place it as a specific separate virtue alongside the oft-discussed concepts of ren (humaneness), yi S(righteouseness), xiao ⅛(filiality), or other important virtues, because its primary role is to facilitate the development of these virtues and enable harmonious social interaction. I consider a number of possibilities for terms in early Confucian texts translatable as ‘humility’, arguing that none of them can be unproblematically translated as ‘humility’ across the board, even though all of them are associated with humility in a number of key ways. I argue that, for the early Confucians, humility was connected to trust, deference (to those in superior positions and with greater knowledge), and communal concern (exemplified by the concept of ren).In this paper, early Confucianism is represented primarily by the Analects (LunyuJ^sa'), the collected accounts of the statements of Confucius (Kongzi AL^)2 with occasional dependence on the Xunzi, a slightly later Confucian text.3 Confucianism is of course far more robust than just the teachings of Confucius, and the Analects, while an important text in the tradition, does not enjoy the status of scripture akin to what we find in Abrahamic religions, nor can it be considered the foundational statement of Confucian ethics. It does, however, lay out themes that the later Confucian tradition adopts and develops, and can be justifiably read as offering the basic contours of the Confucian ethical tradition, including many of its core concepts.
I argue here that a Confucian conception of humility is based on the reduction of a certain kind of self-concern seen as deleterious to the social project and ultimately one’s own individual thriving (which cannot ultimately be separated from that of the community), along with an augmentation of a more positive kind of self-concern that the Confucians think is instrumental in bringing about social harmony. Like views of humility found in Buddhism and in Abrahamic religious traditions, early Confucians held that the effects of certain kinds of self-concern can be corrosive, and that the development of a particularly social- and other-directed self is a necessary counterweight to the human tendency to generate a particular problematic conception of self. We can find the roots of such a view in the Analects, though the view is developed more fully, as I explain in the final section below, in the Confucian text Xunzi from the late Warring States period. In the section below, I consider a number of concepts in early Confucianism that can be associated with humility, in order to form a picture of the role of humility, and how it connects to other virtues and the issue of the harmonization of the self and community. I address the latter issue in the following sections.
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