Family Love in Confucius and Mencius

Abstract

Most thinkers both in Confucianism and in Christianity agree that love is the most fundamental feeling, on which humans set up their system of moral values. They further concur that love roots in or originates from “family” or “family life.” However, there is a crucial difference in the family patterns that the two traditions respectively hold. In Christianity, God is conceived as the Father. He is a “Supreme Being” or an “anthropomorphic deity,” creating or fathering all humans. He loves humans universally, simply because they are all his children, and all have divine souls. In recent centuries, some Christian thinkers have added that humans should treat each other equally, for they are all brothers and sisters from the same family; they all enjoy the same glory brought to them by the Father. There is no doubt that they viewed this idea as providing a solid religious foundation for the Western idea of equal treatment of people in public life. In parallel, Confucius believes that the acquisition of love completes a natural process; love begins with the love between “father” (a gender-biased way of referring to parents) and his children. It occurs from the first eye contact between father and his baby. Looked at from the baby’s side, this brings to it a sense of warmth, safety, and pleasure. As the child grows, this sense is internalized as a feeling of love that, in turn, leads to the concept of love. For the Chinese nation, mainly composed of atheists and religious skeptics, this discovery presents a truth, simple and convincing. In addition to their emphasis on the naturalness of love, Confucius and Mencius developed, on the basis of family love, a coherent system of ethics and a consistent theory of politics and government. This is the most fundamental contribution that the Confucianism made to the Chinese nation, and to peoples who do not accept the doctrine of God as the only Father. This helps to account for its survival and long-lasting influence in human history. The universality of Confucian Love is based on an empirical fact that every human being has a father, and all fathers presumably love their sons and daughters. This provides a possibility that all humans can naturally experience from family life a similar feeling of love, and can naturally understand a variety of moral virtues related to love. At the same Dao (2008) 7:51–55 DOI 10.1007/s11712-008-9041-5