#子曰: "Gentlemen do not instruments", why are gentlemen not instrumental #
Confucius was a sage of ancient China and had a profound impact on Chinese society, especially as the founder of Confucianism, his position was very important, and later generations of Confucians often took his words as a guideline.
But the biggest drawback of the book "Analects" is that every sentence in the book has a specific context, and it is all for a certain thing, a certain scene, a response or an exclamation.
However, the Confucians of later generations had to take these words out separately, sentence by sentence as a code of conduct and ideological guidelines to interpret, this interpretation of the specific context, to a large extent distorted the original meaning of Confucius, sometimes it is likely that Confucius made a complaint or Confucius casually said a sentence, which was also recorded by the disciples, becoming a problem that the disciples in later generations could not understand.
For example, Confucius said that a gentleman is not an instrument, this sentence can easily be seen as Confucius said that a gentleman should not stick himself to a certain skill, and a gentleman should have a higher ideological pursuit, not just an instrument.
Later generations of Confucians often used this sentence to defend themselves for not being able to do anything, saying that Confucius did not advocate that a gentleman become an expert in a certain aspect, but that the pattern should be higher and the thinking greater.
This is actually one of the biggest misunderstandings about Confucius, confucius lived in an era in which gentlemen and villains were concepts of identity, not moral concepts.
When Confucius said that gentlemen are, they refer to those who do not need to engage in productive labor and have a relatively high status hierarchy, and they do not need to engage in specific productive labor in the first place.
In the Analects, someone asked Confucius how to cultivate the land, and Confucius was very unceremoniously intimidated, and some people said that confucius looked down on the peasants, but in fact, this was Confucius's understanding of each performing his duties.
In Confucius's time, people of different ranks needed to do different things, and the etiquette that needed to be followed was different, and gentlemen should not discuss how to plant in this land, and gentlemen had things that gentlemen should do.
Gentlemen are not craftsmen, and should not limit themselves to a certain craft, which in Confucius's time was very in line with the ideas of society, and Confucius was not wrong.
The mistake is that the later Confucians did not understand that Confucius's era was different from theirs, and after Qin Shi Huang ruled the whole country, the system of dividing feudalisms had been eliminated, and there was no longer a nobleman with a completely fixed identity in the traditional sense.
Gentlemen and villains also slowly changed from the concept of identity to the concept of morality, so the gentleman in Confucius's mouth is completely different from what later generations understand, and you mechanically say that Confucius said how a gentleman should be, which is obviously a misinterpretation of Confucius's meaning.
Later generations of Confucians, because they all had to recite the Analects, were very familiar with the words of the gentleman, which led to a large number of intellectuals who were not interested in specific techniques.
This also leads to the fact that many of China's technologies have not been inherited, a large number of outstanding talents have gone to read and write, and those who are engaged in scientific and technological content are often those at the bottom, even if they occasionally have new technologies and inventions, they cannot write books and pass on their experience to future generations.
This is also the reason why many technologies in China are interrupted at every turn, Confucius used gentlemen not to use tools, and circled what intellectuals should do, resulting in the backwardness of Science and technology in China, but this can not be blamed on Confucius, mainly because the Confucians of later generations have distorted the good scriptures.