These two philosophers were also not aware of each other’s work.
Confucius was born around 551 B.C., and died in 479 B.C., having spent his entire life in China. Aristotle was born around 384 B.C., and died in 322 B.C., having lived in Greece, or on one its small coastal islands. Both of them investigated a variety of topics, including an analysis of the structures of society.
As a huge number of different chemical compounds can made from a small number of elements — say, oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen — , and as variety of structures and machines can be made from a small number of simple materials like iron, wood, and stone, so also, both Confucius and Aristotle reasoned, the many and varied structures in society might be made up of a few basic relationships.
Aristotle posited that there were three atomic relationships out of which society is constructed: employer and employee, husband and wife, parent and child. A complex relationship like “son-in-law” is built by adding “parent and child” to “husband and wife.” Another complex relationship like “grandparent” would be the product of doubling “parent and child.” He writes:
Seeing then that the state is made up of households, before speaking of the state we must speak of the management of the household. The parts of household management correspond to the persons who compose the household, and a complete household consists of slaves and freemen. Now we should begin by examining everything in its fewest possible elements; and the first and fewest possible parts of a family are master and slave, husband and wife, father and children. We have therefore to consider what each of these three relations is and ought to be.
A century or so before Aristotle, Confucius had come to a similar conclusion. He thought that there were five basic relationships in society: ruler and subject, parent and child, sibling and sibling, husband and wife, friend and friend. A complex relationship like “cousin” would be a combination of “parent and child” and “sibling and sibling.”
Describing Confucius’s thought, Wing-Tsit Chan writes:
Raising the growing humanistic tendency to a greater height than before, he talked about life instead of death and about man rather than spiritual beings. He declared that “it is man that can make the Way great and not the Way that can make man great.” For him the ideal is the harmony of the perfect individual and a well-ordered society based on the mutual moral obligations of the five human relations between ruler and minister, father and son, elder brother and younger brother, husband and wife, and one friend and another, with filial piety and brotherly respect as the two fundamental virtues. Government is to be conducted through the ruler’s moral examples, and religious ceremonies are to fulfill moral duties. Confucius sharply contrasted the superior man, whose standard is moral principle, with the inferior man whose standard is profit. In short, his whole doctrine can be summed up as ethical humanism.
The startling similarities between Aristotle’s and Confucius’s analyses of society merit study. While their independent conclusions do not guarantee their correctness, they do point to some common element in the rational investigation of human social structures.
(The Aristotle text was quoted from his Politics, Book 1, Chapter 3, 1253b1.)
