The world that made Confucius – and the China he made

“Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” This famous 11th thesis from Karl Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach is engraved on his tombstone in Highgate Cemetery in London.

It was meant to be a refutation of another famous saying, by G.W.F. Hegel: “The owl of Minerva takes flight only when darkness falls.”

This poetic but enigmatic remark is from the Philosophy of Right. It means understanding always arrives too late; philosophy can only teach about the past, never the future: “When philosophy paints its grey on grey, then has a form of life grown old, and with grey on grey it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known; the Owl of Minerva first takes flight with twilight closing in.”

Dusk or twilight is probably a better translation than darkness.

Marx and the Left Hegelians were, mostly, revolutionaries who looked to the future but the elderly Hegel and his followers on the right looked to the past and were often accused of being conservatives defending the status quo. As much as the French revolution, the schism between left and right Hegelianism, between hope and nostalgia, created the modern political distinction of radicalism from conservatism.

But two millennia before, Confucius charted a very different path. Long after his death, when most other equally worthy rival philosophies had fallen by the wayside, his teachings became the state ideology (from the Han dynasty onwards) that charted the future of dynastic China.