“君子不器。” explained!
Division of labour has been applauded for its contribution to social progress. But, today, it has gone too far.
In education, students are forced to select a career path from a young age. In workplace, jobs have become ever more specialised, and job titles ever more segmented. Society requires us to perform some hyper specialised functions in one small area.
To make things worse, the advent of AI has demonstrated that many functions do not need humans to perform any more. Many industries have been turned upside down, such as animation or coding.
It is not surprising that we humans are overwhelmed by a level of vulnerability and confusion that we have never collectively felt before.
It is time to look at what Confucius has taught us in The Analects, recorded thousands of years ago. He said, 君子不器, “A virtuous person is not a tool”.
器
It literally means a vessel or a tool. The extended meaning is a fixed or limited purpose. To extend the meaning further, it refers to people whose mind is confined within narrow boundaries.
不器
Not a tool.
This is the goal of self-cultivation, which we aim not to become a highly specialised “tool”. It is to become a complete and sensible person with limitless potentials and adaptability. The value of such a person is not measured by “functions” or “roles”. Instead, it depends on this person’s own agency.
君子不器
A virtuous person is not a tool.
It is not that Confucius objected to the idea that people acquire specialised capability to work on certain tasks or jobs. In fact, he himself had personally recommended his students to fill certain roles with designated responsibilities in various places. What he objected to was that people’s mind and personal quality were confined. What he advocated is that people should not be defined by a single label or a single function.
Damages of becoming a close minded “tool”
We are often identified with our job titles. This becomes shackles to our identity. When our industry is going through changes, or when our jobs become obsolete, what we encounter is not merely a career crisis. It is a profound identity crisis and a collapse of ourselves as who we are.
This crisis has its roots in the highly specialised trainings and learnings that we have gone through since an early age. These trainings and learnings have become a cage to our minds, and trapped us physically. When a tide has turned, we realise that we can not apply the same rigid framework to solve all pressing issues. Our body paralyses.
How an individual becomes 不器
There is a limitation to what an individual can do. For example, nobody alone can change the current education structure, which has been in place for hundreds of years. There are so much vested interest that prevents any meaningful changes in a short time.
What Confucius is teaching us is that we can consciously make some improvements and limit the damage on a personal level.
The goal is not to be good at one specialised area, with a couple of more or less specialised areas as add ons. The goal is to be good at some core capabilities, such as learning and communicating, and at the same time, to have a broad spectrum of interests in human knowledge in order to become good at using different criteria or paradigm to think.
Specialised jobs can change. But the core capabilities and broad interests can enable us to survey these changes from a vantage point and find a suitable path.
Conclusion
Confucius wanted us to become a complete person.
As the future has become more uncertain and more unpredictable, the riskiest thing is not that our skills are no longer needed. It is that our mind and thinking have become monotonous and fixed.
What we need to pay attention to is not a perfect resume for one particular job. We must pay attention to how to open up our minds, widen our views, and enrich ourselves to become resilient and adaptable.
In the future, we don’t know what kind of “tools” society will need. But we can always become a person who can create and use different “tools”.
Dive Deeper
This article is part of an e-course, The Self: 5 Lessons from Confucius for Cultivating Inner Peace in a Noisy World, which uses quotes from The Analects to help us anchor and develop ourselves in the fluctuating digital world.
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