The Decline And The Revival Of Confucianism In The Qin And Han Dynasties

It is well known that the history of the decline and revival of Confucianism in the history of the Qin and Han Dynasties.But few people pay attention and think the entanglement of cultural inheritance and political innovation under this history.More specifically,few people think about that the inconsistency between the old culture of Confucian inheritance and the new political form led by the legalists.Although people do not understand the existence of cultural psychology and cultural memory,under certain conditions,cultural psychology and cultural memory will inevitably recover and show great strength.The legist in the state of Qin implemented political reform,replacing the hereditary system with prefectures system,and realized the unification of the country by means of war.However,the legalists rejected the hereditary system of the Western Zhou dynasty and advocated the view of history,and this is the negation and abandonment of traditional culture.Li Si and the Emperor Qin burned books,with officials as teachers and against private schools.These cultural despotic policies temporarily hit the Confucian intelligentsia which inherited traditional culture as its own.But the consequences are serious.Because they lost the sense of identity and belonging of the Confucian intellectuals to Qin dynasty,they lost the possibility of forming common values of different groups.It was a huge mistake that the Emperor Qin and the legalists tried to obliterate the old culture by destroying Confucian education.Qin Shi Huang's grand unification regime was in a dangerous state of cultural and political inconsistency.With the rapid destruction of the Qin dynasty and the establishment of the Western Han dynasty,scholars criticized Qin dynasty's ruling ideology,and traditional cultural psychology and cultural memory soon wake up and form.Due to the fact that the emperor hereditary system is the biggest blood relationship,and people have deep kinship consciousness,in the early period of the Western Han dynasty,the feudatory system and hereditary system were resurrected,and the cultural classics of pre-Qin were reemphasized.Although the Qin dynasty existed for a short time,its institutions and culture were also partly deposited.The Western Han dynasty inherited both the culture of the Western Zhou system and the cultural inheritance of the Qin dynasty,for example,the feudatory system is in parallel with the prefectures system.HanConfucianism and his officials criticized and reflected on the joint actions of the Qin dynasty and the Legalism,which indicated that they had a common collective memory.In the framework of history,they formed the common values and code of conduct,the present and traditional docking,again with the help of the pre-Qin Confucian basic kernel for the moment all members and national political institutions can accept ethical values and moral principles;At the same time,they also seek and affirm their own identity and form the cohesive and continuous structural power of cultural memory.This cultural memory supports the revival of Confucianism,which enables the formation of classical culture and the relatively independent intellectual class.At the same time,Confucius,the representative of the inheritance culture,became known as the "king of Su" after he was consecrated by his disciples in the pre-Qin period,thus forming a cultural authority with relative political authority.Scholars use this to criticize and regulate realpolitik in order to guide the value orientation of society.Cultural integration requires free and extensive exchange and discussion to form a common cultural memory and identity at the whole social level.Emperor Wu of Han,by government agencies,set up the Five Classics,Doctor of the Classics,the Imperial College and Study of feudal states,finally unified political cultural fusion,and secures new political ideology and culture.Reviewing the history,we found a truth that although legalism in Qin and later the Qin dynasty has some fundamental political reform and thoroughness,but by the end of Han dynasty,the political reform in considerably back,this seems to be shown as a kind of historical regression.The essence is that politicians and thinkers at the time did not take an invisible force into account,which is the power of culture.This power is an entanglement between political innovation and cultural inheritance.If politicians and thinkers can take this invisible force into account when they are in political reform,political repetition and social upheaval and disruption may to seem less bad.