Confucius's Journey To Self-Enlightenment

The journey of self-enlightenment is an unending process; nowadays, instead of ignoring the problem, one is encouraged to reflect upon himself and learn from his mistake. Both Confucius and St. Augustine embrace this philosophy and use their mistakes as a pedestal to improve themselves and attain the highest understanding. The concept of self-reflection is an essential part of Confucius and Saint Augustine’s path to enlightenment, their different education background and life philosophies have created very different processes of how one would attain self-improvement: While Confucius has an idea of how a virtuous man should be and one should follow the three virtues to reach enlightenment, Saint Augustine is unclear about his path to God, as he is a man of rhetoric and felt the need to understand God before committing himself to Christianity.

Confucius regards education as the only way to self-improvement and morality; he believes that if one were willing to learn, he will naturally find the way and become a virtuous man. It is Confucius’s desire to obtain The Way, which leads him onto the journey of seeking wisdom. Confucius says:

At fifteen, I set my mind upon learning; at thirty, I took my place in society; at forty, I became free of doubts; at fifty, I understood Heaven’s Mandate; at sixty, my ear was attuned;

While Confucius believes that the journey to advancement is through the unending pursue of knowledge, Saint Augustine believes that the only thing that one needs to truly achieve self-improvement is God, and the education that is forced upon oneself is a distraction from attaining the ultimate knowledge of God. However, in modern society, it is difficult to determine what is truly the right path to self-improvement, or as Nagel would say: “the difficulty of justifying morality is not that there is only one human motive, but that there are so