Essay On Gentleman

A gentleman in the twentieth century is considered a man that is courteous, polite, and honorable. Confucius had the same definition of what a gentleman was but he precisely described what a man had to do in order to be considered a gentleman. In the Analects of Confucius, a translation by Chichung Huang, he translates Confucius teachings about life. There are four main things that Confucius applied to his teachings: culture, wholehearted sincerity, truthfulness, and moral conduct. His teachings are like laws in order to keep society humane; Confucius calls it the Way of humanity. A gentleman falls into all the categories but one thing that a gentleman values the most is moral conduct. The gentleman’s virtue represents a high understanding

Gentlemen are capable of committing mistakes but the difference with a gentleman and a small man is that the gentleman will be sincere about his error and correct it unlike the small man who tries to cover up his mistake. One of Confucius disciples said, “The gentleman’s errors are like eclipses of the sun and the moon. When he makes one, everyone sees it; when he corrects it, everyone looks up to him” (Huang 182). The gentleman is someone that people look up to because they’re usually morally good so when he makes a mistake everyone who looks up to him sees his error. In order to continue to be virtuous and admired, a gentleman fixes his mistake and then again everyone who looks up to the gentleman can see his moral accomplishment. The small man makes mistakes but unlike the gentleman he does not fix it. Confucius depicts the small man’s effort after a mistake, “When the small man makes a mistake, he always glosses over it” (Huang 179). The small man is not truthful like the superior man. The small man does not even make his mistake known to society, instead before anyone sees his error, he tries to conceal and cover it. Confucius also makes it known that gentlemen in this quote are superior to small men because small men are untruthful Therefore, according to Confucius, to be a gentleman means to be truthful even after humiliating