OK, I'm not a scholar of classics, but I've got some philosophical background and the more I think about this question the funnier I find it. I don't mean that in a mean way, but it really is a bit of a fish-explaining-water problem.

You're posting this question in an online forum dedicated to 1. educating the public by 2. asking questions and answering them.

Philosophically, this is known as a kind of elenchus (in an admittedly broad sense), or better yet as maieutic ("midwife") questioning, but nowadays most people know it as the Socratic method.

So if you're asking an expert a question and evaluating the answer, perhaps continuing to ask clarifying questions until you reach a valid, satisfactory conclusion, you are using the thought technology of Socrates. The question itself ... well, that's kind of funny, isn't it?

It should also be pointed out that Socrates didn't really leave writings; most of what we know comes from his student Plato, although there's also some stuff in Aristophanes (a playwright) and Xenophon (a historian).

This is especially important because one of the fundamental qualities of Western thought - philosophy and science - is that it goes through a constant process of refinement by asking questions and finding ways to assess their validity. The scientific method - pose a problem (question), offer a possible answer (hypothesis), assess its validity (experiment), draw conclusion - is based on the same structure as the maieutic elenchus. This is leaving aside the questions about fact versus truth... but you get the general idea. There's a chain of askers-of-questions going back to a point before the askers wrote their questions down.

(Note: There was a similar question-and-answer structure outlined in China by Wang Chong, to the point that he's sometimes credited as an "inventor of the scientific method". But he was sort of out of mainstream or "average people" awareness until the 20th century.)

There's also another element, which is harder to talk about (maybe someone like /u/Tiako or /u/keyilan can get into it), which has to do with the way ancient Chinese texts used the figure of Confucius as a stand in for "the sage" or "the accomplished person." A lot of what's credited to Confucius, or held up even as Confucian ideals, probably was only written hundreds of years after the Analects (his book of ethical teachings).

For instance, he was around in the 5th century BCE (died 479), turns up in a few chapters of the Daoist classic Liezi in the 4th century BCE, and by the Han Dynasty, 2nd century BCE to 200s CE, was credited with miraculous powers.

He may have written commentaries on the (much older) Yijing, or those might have been an even later, Han-era addition - the commentaries credited to Confucius don't seem especially Confucian, and his other writings don't mention key concepts in the Yijing like wuxing (five elements) or even yin and yang. He gets lots of credit for stuff.

Confucius was, however, very concerned with ethical behavior and propriety - one of the cornerstones of his teachings was [li](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_(Confucianism)), right behavior. Socrates, while concerned with goodness, was more interested in finding out why things were - his ethics were based on knowledge and study, "the examined life."

If you'd like sources beyond the above links, I'd recommend Wing-Tsit Chan's Sourcebook of Chinese Philosophy for Confucius and, I don't know, a good copy of Plato's Phaedo (I think mine was published by Allyn & Bacon, but can't recall the translator right now).

Are the remnants of Socrates ideas or lets rather say for the sake of the discussion Platon really "relegated" to philosophers ? The use of the word "idea" e.g. in my last example suggest otherwise. The whole theory that something like "ideas" exist is platonic and from my experience widely spread even in the uneducated and philosophically unlearnt areas of society.

Also platonic ideas survive not simply in philosophy, but in books millions of people read. Goethes Faust, a book almost every german kid in the last 60 years visiting the higher grades of school read, is full of aspects of platonism and other philosophical schools.

Also our western idea of a soul shares many aspects of platonism and every single great christian writer from antiquity to this very day has at least read Platon.

What I'd give you is the fact, that platonic political ideas are not very widespread anymore in these days: to be fair though, they never caught on as much as confucian ideas did and the question is, if "politeia" really is a political work. Also platonism sure is hidden in nowadays societies self awareness.

Its remnants still exist though, even if borrowed under a thin shell.

Well Plato was deeply influential in Christian thought (such foundational matters as the nature of God and the Trinity is deeply bound up in Neoplatonism) and given that people in the West have killed and died over Christianity I need to somewhat question your premise.

I like this question because there are so many ways of breaking it down and answering it. First of all, I would suggest that Socratic or Platonic propositions continue to have influence today in roughly equivalent ways that Confucian ones might (that is to say, neither exist in some essential form but continue to permeate texts in perceptible and imperceptible ways).

I'm not sure which TED talk you watched but I assume her argument might be grounded in the idea that your average educated Chinese person can probably quote from, and is probably more aware of concepts from canonical Confucian texts such as the Four Books (The Analects, Mencius, The Great Learning, and The Doctrine of the Mean) than your average educated European and the works of Plato. (Could anyone chime in about the prevalence of classical philosophical texts in the Greek education system?)

The part that interests me is, what is meant by Confucian? Have 'Confucian ideals' been stable since their inception? I don't think so.

For example, for a long time The Analects were not nearly as esteemed as a source of Confucian learning as the Five Classics. It is only in the Sui-Tang period that The Analects rise in prestige. They are eventually fixed in the canon as part of the Four Books by Zhu Xi in the Song Dynasty, some 1500 years after Confucius is held to have lived and spoken the teachings compiled in The Analects. So when we talk about Confucian ideals, I think it's important to know whose Confucius we are talking about, or the Confucius of which texts.

It is because of the historical ambiguity of what is meant by Confucian that I think is a result of its sublimation into state orthodoxies throughout Chinese history (it goes without saying that it continues to this day) that confusion arises when we try to talk about Confucianism in a general sense. In this way, a comparison with 'Christian ideals' may be more fruitful, given historical similarities in their being used for political ends.

Suggested reading: Michael Nylan, The Five Confucian Classics, 2001

A follow-up question: To what extent was European/Christian philosophy influenced by classicism and the revival of Greek ideas in the Renaissance, etc? Wouldn't that still count as Greek philosophical ideas surviving to present-day?