What is the difference between aristotle and confucius

Different departments work with the common goal- to make profit. All departments, therefore, need each other for proper functioning of the organization. According to Confucius, people need each other to become virtuous. Confucius rejects the notion that excellence is tied to reasoning and advocates for the development of the whole person through inter-dependence.

Aristotle states that independence leads to the development of virtue and happiness. People become independent by reasoning, and function to make a meaningful contribution in the society.

However, Confucius states that human beings increase self-cultivation by exercising creativity. Therefore, people can attain happiness by investing themselves in relationships and being useful to others. Aristotle and Confucius virtue ethics aim at living a good life- attaining happiness. The two philosophers, however, differ in their approach to morality.

There is a need therefore to integrate both Aristotle and Confucius virtue ethics. Firstly, human beings are dependent, that is, they depend on others for support, as Alasdair MacIntyre states. Secondly, people become independent by exercising the freedom of thought and reasoning as emphasized by Aristotle.

Thirdly, human beings can move beyond dependence and independence to inter-dependence. Therefore, while people can act independently, a good life involves cultivating relationships with others. MacIntyre, Alasdair C.

Chicago, Ill: Open Court, Peters, Michael A. EBSCOhost, doi Interestingly enough, Foucault finds the same dialectic in Hellenistic ethics, viz. Foucault also maintains that moral practices are "not something that the individual invents by himself. They are patterns that he finds in his culture. For both Merleau-Ponty and the Confucians human freedom and creativity happens right at the intersection of this internal-external dynamic. Merleau-Ponty, Wittgenstein, process philosophers, and the pragmatists all join most ancients in their fusion of the inner and the outer, refusing to dichotomize subject and object.

Morally inferior people may either be indifferent and indiscriminately like anything; or alternatively, they may easily be swayed to hate those whom the group hates. What is appropriate, according to Confucius, is that people love virtue and the virtuous person and hate the lack thereof. In a note to his translation Chan clarifies that "hate" in this passage "means dislike, without any connotation of ill will. In his discourse on the four beginnings, Mencius states yi originates in the sentiments of "disdain and dislike.

Some people continually misjudge how to act and relate to others. For Aristotle this would demonstrate a serious failure in practical reasoning and ultimately an inability to establish lasting friendships.

Returning to the aesthetics of virtue it is significant to note that personal preferences have more to do with matters of taste than issues of morality. A person might, for example, being fully justified in criticizing a person for an immoral act, but many may not like the way he did it. It was not, as the British would say, "good form.

Bad manners are not wrong because they are immoral but wrong because they lack aesthetic order: they are inelegant, coarse, or worse. Confucian li makes no distinction between manners and morality, so an aesthetic standard rules for all of its actions. Aristotle on the Perfect Life. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Mealing, P. Aristotle, Confucius, Ethics and happiness. Indianapolis: Hackett publishing. Comparison between the Views of Confucius and Aristotle. Accessed November 11, Download paper.

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So Yu has a keen eye for interesting parallels, yet he avoids mischaracterizing the views just to force them into lockstep with each other. Given the scope of Yu's project, it is likely that any reader familiar with one or both of these thinkers will disagree with some of the details of Yu's interpretations and comparisons.

I will point to two disagreements that I had, though I would like to make two general points first. First of all, I do not regard these inevitable disagreements as a weakness of Yu's treatment. By providing us with a wide-ranging interpretation of Aristotelian ethics, a wide-ranging interpretation of Confucian ethics, and a wide-ranging comparison of the two, by staking out clear positions on many of these issues, Yu is facilitating a very productive scholarly discussion in which many of these particular disputes are put in a broader context.

Secondly, I recognize that my list of nits to pick may be idiosyncratic. Other scholars may well agree with Yu on these issues and disagree with him on others where I thought he was going in the right direction. First of all, I have a concern about Yu's claim that Aristotle's conception of eudaimonia is ambiguous between acting well and living well.

This is the claim that drives Yu's analysis in Chapters 6 and 7. My concern is that Aristotle would not want to maintain a distinction here that would allow him to move back and forth between two different notions of happiness.

My reading of the function argument NE i. A genuinely human life is characterized by a certain sort of activity rational activity , and so a good human life or, living well for a human is characterized in terms of doing that activity well, or excellently, or virtuously.

This does leave Aristotle with the challenges that come along with identifying living well too closely with acting well, and so perhaps it is difficult to say how far down this road he ends up going, but this does seem to be the Aristotelian road. Secondly, it seems to me that Yu overstates the difference between the two thinkers when he claims that the highest good for Aristotle is virtuous activity "but not the possession of virtue," p.

He argues that "from Confucius' point of view, it is disturbing that Aristotle compares a virtuous life to a sleeping state. Yu may well be right that there is a contrast to be drawn here, but I would regard it as a contrast in emphasis more than substance, and that both thinkers would regard both virtue and virtuous activity as vitally important. As Yu points out, Confucians do not tend to draw this distinction, but this is because "they seem to assume that if the agent possesses virtue, then when in a position to practice it, he will do it.

If asked about a virtuous person who lived her whole life asleep, it seems to me that Confucius' response would not be to insist that such a person lived a life of undiminished value, but he would be puzzled over how such a life could be considered a virtuous life. Yen Hui's life may have been without major achievement or external goods, but presumably it was not without extensive virtuous activity.

In the passages cited by Yu on p. These all seem to be examples of him exercising his excellence, not just possessing it.