Socrates and Confucius on the intellectual and the meaningful life

By: Fadil Sahiti

Many consider Socrates and Confucius to be "twins" in the history of philosophy. Both lived in similar times and held comparable views. Each was the founder of a great philosophical tradition. Although none of them left behind anything written, their ideas had a substantial impact on their respective civilizations, both Western and Eastern.

Of course, the value of their philosophy can hardly be summed up in a short essay like this. I want to single out two features or concepts of their philosophy.

Socrates had a unique concept about the intellectual – moral intellectualism. Basically, this concept is based on equality between people, individualism, intellectual modesty and scientific content. An intellectual is not one who believes he knows a lot, he said; wisdom is not measured by the amount of accumulated knowledge, but by the awareness of how little we know. The educational and educational goal of an intellectual is not the desire to emphasize superiority, scientific or philosophical superiority over another, but the cultivation of self-critical awareness and critical thinking in general. Socrates equated morality with knowledge, goodness with wisdom. He who is wise, he said, is also morally good. Ignorance is responsible for every moral error because no one acts against his knowledge.

On the other hand, the philosophical tradition of Confucius is related to more practical aspects of life. His saying that "man has two lives" is well known. real life begins when we realize that we only have one to be given meaning". It is a kind of metaphor that seems to tell man that he is mortal, that life has a limit, therefore it must be fulfilled with meaning. When we are young, we have an almost "annoying" belief that we will not die; we believe in justice, we have the illusion that our parents do not make mistakes, that we have the best, most moral teachers, etc.

As we age we begin to lose many of these beliefs. We begin to learn that life is not as easy as we have been led to believe. We understand that our life is a kind of anxiety, Sartre would say, that we are united with anxiety. This is because we are forced to choose by ourselves, as we choose what seems the most selectable among the multitude of "selectables". Everything else is a lie and hypocrisy. It is an escape from the truth and "I". Not only anxiety, but we begin to understand that we are abandoned, alone, without stable, indisputable and absolute values. "We find neither in ourselves nor outside of ourselves an opportunity to seize". We don't even find an excuse. There is no determinism; we are abandoned. We do not find values ​​or orders that will justify our behavior; we find no excuses or excuses. We understand that we are free, even condemned to be "free". We are responsible for everything we do in this world, that we have to choose.

Desperately, we must stop giving meaning to life, says Confucius. There is no other way. We must learn and rely on what depends on our will, on the totality of possibilities that make self-realization possible. "When we want something, there are always elements that are likely." Here there is truth only in what depends on you, on me, not on the other! Where I am not, there is no absolute truth. There is no "possible". "No god, no purpose can adapt the world and its possibilities to my will." The possibility is with "me". We must act "without hope".

Only when we learn that self-realization depends on ourselves, only then do we begin to live in the real world. /Telegraph/