Episode 159: Confucius on Virtuous Conduct (Part One)

0:00 Mark: Our question for episode 159 is something like, what can the perspective of ancient China add to our understanding of ethics? And we read the Analects of Confucius, compiled somewhere between 475 and 221 BC shortly after Confucius death in 479 BC. To get the reading and more information, Please check out partiallyexaminedlife.com My name is Mark Linsenmayer sleeping during the daytime in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:25 Seth: This is Seth Paskin in Austin, Texas.

0:27 Wes: This is Wes Alwan trying not to be glib in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:32 Tsu: This is Tsu Chan Toh trying to understand how to enter into discussion with you guys in Berlin, Germany.

0:41 Wes: Well, as long as you stand beside your word, I think I'll try.

0:46 Seth: Do your utmost.

0:47 Mark: Or should we just dispense with the translations? Some of these translations just for all these hard concepts like doing your utmost, they just, they use the ancient Chinese words and just let you figure it out. So we'll just, we'll just start with that. Let's just completely alienate the listeners. Well, thank you, Suchen, for joining us. Yeah, tell us a little about who you are and your background. I know you're not a Confucius scholar, but you're someone that grew up reading this text.

1:14 Tsu: Yeah, I am from many places. I mean, I'm ethnically Chinese, but my father is Chinese diaspora from Malaysia and my mom comes from Taiwan, Han Chinese ish from Taiwan. And so I grew up within this kind of context and I probably don't have to sort of say everything about how deeply influential culturally Confucianism is to so called Chinese culture. So I grew up with that and my father put a huge emphasis on knowledge of the classical texts. And so we spent a lot of time memorizing, studying Confucian texts, not just this one and actually this one least for some weird reason.

1:55 Mark: Did you read the Book of Songs? The ones Confucius tells you to read?

1:59 Tsu: Well, we don't really have the one that he had.

2:02 Mark: Oh, okay.

2:03 Tsu: But we have a version of it later compiled. So yes, I mean I have some knowledge of that. We studied a lot. The Great Learning and the Mencius. It was sort of like Saturday when perhaps other kids participated in sports and things like that, that we spent Saturday studying Chinese classics. So that was my growing up and

2:25 Mark: we are not culturally knowledgeable enough to know how geeky that actually was for your culture.

2:30 Tsu: I mean, I think it was pretty standard for his generation. I was born in 1980, and I think in my generation it's sort of like, wow, your dad makes you do that. And so if you meet other adults, they'll sort of pat you on the head and say, wow, how knowledgeable you are. It's kind of a cute thing as well for him to sort of be able to parade his kids who know Confucius can quote Zhuangzi, you know, things like that. My father is extremely conservative as well, so he has all these ideas about what it is to, you know, how it is you're supposed to raise your children. So that was sort of in my past. And then I ended up studying philosophy in university and encountered these texts again as an adult and then sort of interacting them in a totally different way.

3:13 Mark: But you finished teaching in Hume and stuff like that, right?

3:18 Tsu: I'm a Leibniz scholar. I mean, in general, I'm an early modern scholar. I do Galileo, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz. I'm generally interested in philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics. That's what I wrote my PhD on. I was always told to study Chinese philosophy because I was Chinese and I could read the text, although the texts

3:38 Mark: here are not the same characters at all. Right. It's not Mandarin, it's not Mandarin, it's

3:45 Tsu: the roots of Mandarin and sort of the way Latin would be related to Italian. So an Italian modern Italian reader could pick up a Latin text and say, well, I know how to read every word of this sentence, but I don't really know what it means. So the words are the same in a way, but they have a different meaning. The syntax is different. So in college when I was applying for graduate programs, they said, you should study Chinese philosophy. I had some marginal interest in it, but then it was sort of like, you're Chinese, thus you should do Chinese philosophy was the thing I really wanted to get away from, so I ran to the 17th century European philosophy instead. And that's sort of how I actually ended up in that field.

4:28 Mark: Well, we're just glad that we have somebody. Of course this is going to be sort of dilettantish and us butting our heads in a culture that we don't have any background in. But that's just par for the course, for the podcast. But having somebody that grew up in the tradition. Plus the introduction to our book, our translation, it's the Analects of Confucius: A Philosophical Translation by Roger T. Ames and Henry Rosemont Jr. And then the Stanford Encyclopedia and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I also spent some time with this Robert Andre LaFleur books that matter, the Analects of Confucius Lecture Series. So, Seth, what was your way into this? How did you make sense of this? What was your initial reaction?

5:05 Seth: I think the introduction to the book was helpful, but talking about thematically, trying to align a lot of the sayings with who Confucius was speaking to, and that what would seem to be different answers to the same question are really just specific and particular interpretations or guidance that he's giving to an individual based on their own personality. So they're not necessarily conflicting, but rather are all different applications of the same principles based on what the individuals needed. The piece that I didn't understand that's kind of thematically throughout the whole thing is the notion of him training people for government, but not being in government himself, and that being selected for a government post was really important. And yet he seemed to be resentful and that. I didn't quite get the context for that.

6:03 Tsu: Yeah, I think that's really one of the key conundrums surrounding Confucianism as a tradition. One of the main tropes in Chinese history and Chinese, let's say, intellectual tradition, is this figure of somebody who really is full of moral insights and wanting to serve some lord or some sort of state for the greater good, and then entering into government service and then finding the politics to be too corrupt or the power struggles to be too aggressive for them, and then them becoming hermits and then just complaining. Also within the same time period as Confucius, you have Qu Yuan, who was famously one of these type of scholars who wanted to sort of serve the government, but then was pushed out by other corrupt officials in a power struggle.

And then he basically becomes hermit, writes a bunch of texts complaining about their lot in life, and then kills himself. And the villagers who sympathize with him went and tried to dig his body out of the lake. And that's where you get this tradition of the Dragon Boat Festival, because these villagers went in with their boats to try to pull his body out of the lake. So you have all these traditions based around this figure of the kind of malign scholar who would have otherwise brought about the greater good. So it's definitely a theme. It goes all the way to the revolutionary period.

7:28 Mark: Wes, do you have any opening statements or do you want to orient us further?

7:32 Wes: I didn't do the great courses thing, but I found the Internet Encyclopedia philosophy article very useful. The introduction, I thought was useful. As well, there were some things I thought which were a little kind of overstated. This section on metaphysics with reference to language and I actually found annoying. I find the. I don't know, the translation is a little bit. We can discuss that.

7:52 Mark: Well, let's just throw out the one example of ren.

7:56 Wes: Right.

7:57 Mark: That's translated here as authoritative conduct. One of the various levels of impressive person is the authoritative person in this translation, and that is translated as benevolence or humanity.

8:10 Tsu: Or. I saw.

8:11 Wes: I think there's someone who translates it co-humanity, which I like.

8:16 Mark: Right. You can give an analysis even, like pictorially of like, oh, it looks like two people standing together or something like that.

8:23 Wes: Well, it's a symbol for person. And then two.

8:26 Mark: Yes, there you go.

8:28 Wes: So I don't know, Suchen, maybe you can explain is authoritative conduct or person. Does that get at the essence of it?

8:35 Tsu: Yeah, I mean, I think with a lot of these words. Right. Like, just to step out of this particular text. I mean, any text. Right. An ancient text, we only know the meaning of the words through the way it's used in those texts. And the Greek use of oikonomos and the contemporary economy are the same word, but they have different meanings because of the way in which they're used in the text. So to say what ren is isn't a way to say what the text, what this text say ren is, if that makes sense to you.

9:05 Mark: Yeah, he was innovating about it, so it almost doesn't matter that much. Like, it's good to know what the other implications of it, you know, like

9:13 Tsu: if you look up a proper Chinese dictionary, you would have all the uses of ren in Confucius. Right. So it's. Yeah, I mean, vaguely. It's a kind of like, you know, your Menschlichkeit, you know, like your humanness, your virtue. Some might say that might be a more intuitive understanding of it. But it isn't exactly virtue in the sort of Greek sense. It's associated with love as well. Like love for one, you know, those who surround you. So, yeah, all of those things collect to form this kind of semantic feeling of that word.

9:50 Wes: Yeah. I think what I was reacting to is just in the secondary sources I had looked at, when I see that association with love and benevolence and humanity, I wonder if authoritative conduct or person is.

10:04 Tsu: Yeah, it's the right translation.

10:06 Wes: Yeah. Or if it's the translators trying to be too clever by half. Maybe.

10:11 Tsu: Yeah. Maybe also the fact that Confucianism is something that then gets reinvented several times. And ren means something slightly different. Right. So it has something of this sort of primary, how do you say, comportment.

10:27 Seth: Right.

10:27 Tsu: So you first you have ren and then you learn li. So you have a basic orientation towards the good, if you will, or a basic orientation towards virtue or love. And then you learn the proper way in which to employ them. This ren. And this of course will become very important for the philosophical psychology of somebody like Mencius, who's the next authoritative Confucian thinker. And so this dispute about whether or not human nature is originally good or originally evil is something that rages on for then millennia. But ren, it's a kind of pre. Political, maybe pre ethical sort of orientation towards goodness. It's very compartmental. It isn't something that conforms to a set of rules, but a kind of behavioral type of thing. So I don't know exactly where that sits.

11:20 Wes: Yeah, what you're saying there, I think. Well, actually I was reminded of Levinas and this idea of a sort of this fundamental moment of facing others and ethics sort of growing out of that. But yeah, so I think the point of interest here is whether when we talk about li or ritual propriety, I think in this translation the question is whether that sort of thing, you might see that as that's just sort of this dead thing that's transmitted through tradition and at a certain point no one even knows why they do it anymore and that it's just the rules. And so. Yeah, so I think it's an interesting notion to say, well actually there's this ren, which becomes the source of that. So I think that's an interesting idea and maybe that's something that Confucius is sort of challenging, sort of the common conception there maybe, Although I'm sure it's hard to tell.

12:13 Mark: So just another introductory thought here. It's very rare for us when we're doing ethics, to actually talk about ethics as opposed to metaethics, because for philosophy, metaethics, you know, why would there be ethical obligations in the first place? What does that mean? You know, how do those relate to human nature? Are they objective? Like those are sort of more interesting seeming questions than simply what should you actually do? But what we get in this book and what makes it a little hard for us and a matter of, you know, you have to sort of intuit these or derive these meta.

Ethical conclusions reading into the text. Because what we actually get, for instance, verse 13 here, chapter 1, verse 3, the Master said it is a rare thing for glib speech and an insinuating appearance to accompany authoritative conduct or to accompany Ren. Okay. So we get lots of individual little things like that. And in fact, one of the chapters is all just here's how the exemplary person dresses. Here's exactly, you know, how you bow on entering the room. Like some fairly detailed and for us, anachronistic, you know, not particularly interesting often stuff.

13:24 Wes: Yeah. So it's got a. There's a lot of straightforward ethical pronouncements and you could look at this as sort of self help in some sense. So I think the point, Mark, you're trying to make is that there's not much ethical theory or metaethics here. It's the sort of thing that we have to try to infer from the sort of recommendations that the Master is making.

13:46 Mark: And some of those come just, you know, why the introductions to the book was in some way more interesting than the book. Just what you were saying about the character of Ren. Oh, it's the co. Humanity. It's a sign for person and the sign for two. And I think one of the things they might have said in here about why is it authoritative conduct is because, well, first of all, it's the fundamentally social nature of humanity that you can't even really talk about one person and their conduct apart from the existence of other people. So that's just sort of a different model of virtue.

Another reason that they mentioned why they didn't use benevolence or something like that, or why they didn't use compassion or something like that, is because they want to avoid psychologism. That the whole Western tradition is fraught, you know, as we've seen with Cartesian dualism. So like Rorty, like Eva Brann's book, this is another one that's looking back to something that is outside of our current conceptual schemes, our current cultural schemes, to get at what these underlying assumptions that we have now are by just seeing a way of using language that does not use them at all.

So that's pretty interesting. Also just the notion of, well, Ren is your humanity. But that makes it sound like it's just, you know, human nature. It's something you have, but no, no, Ren is something you have to achieve. So in a sense, becoming authoritative, achieving Ren is realizing your humanity. It brings up this Aristotelian sounding teleology. So this is all just stuff reading into the character, which if you just read the book by itself in this English translation, you would not get any of that.

15:16 Tsu: Yeah, I mean, I would say that even for somebody within the confucian tradition, reading it 200, 300 years afterwards, they would also strap the same struggle because obviously the times were different. And so in a way, the Confucian tradition is constituted by generations upon generations of people having this exact problem.

15:40 Mark: Seth, tell us more about your. Were you inspired by the specific ethical, as opposed to meta ethical teachings in here? You said there's a lot of stuff at least you felt like quoting.

15:49 Seth: Oh, gosh, yeah. Well, I mean, it's a very quotable book, for sure. I have many, many, many things I was going to try to tweet out over the course of the week, but I'll have to just come back behind. You know, I want to just say something, though, about this notion of propriety. There's an uncharitable way to look at it as ritual and think of it in terms of that being sort of like a straitjacket. Like, well, you know that you have to stand here and bow, stand at this particular distance from your quote unquote betters. But I sort of thought of it in the same way we, when we talked about Burke, and Burke thought of tradition as kind of the stabilizing force and that, you know, it's the thing against which we react, but you react against it with respect.

And, you know, I guess I can imagine that the rituals need to evolve or that there are. Part of the ritual propriety is the ability for certain actors inside of that system to establish new rituals or change rituals, which would have to happen in a dynamic political space that was going on at the same time. So I want to acknowledge that.

16:58 Tsu: I think that is one of the biggest problems within Confucianism as a kind of philosophical question, precisely because Confucius saw his age as a decadent one. And so the question is, how do we return to a time when people had more tendencies towards embracing good things rather than bad things? And so he singled out the decay of ritual as one of the, let's say, the symptoms of his age. So the fact that that is so prominent in the text is really due to his whole view of his own time and the attempt to try to restore virtue in his society. So the question is, how do you do it?

So is ritual an organic extension of moral virtue which can be cultivated through reading the odes and things that you can learn? Or is there some other thing? Does there need to be a righteous ruler? Are there political conditions for the re. Establishment of morality within the land? So all this hearkening back to the Zhou and the hearkening back to some earlier time when people knew, just instinctively, in a way, knew exactly how to act versus now, when all of these morals have become decadent, we need to underline them. Whereas the people in the past would see it as natural to mourn for three years the death of a parent, now we have to explicitly underline, do this mourn for three years.

And so does that make sense in terms of how Confucius was situating himself as a thinker in his time?

18:34 Seth: Yeah, no, I think it does. And I think that's the part that I'm seeing. The sort of flexibility is that he mentions in numerous passages. He says, you know, when I say dao, but that's not the right way. I think you just said it differently. When the dao is prevalent or prevails. Right. There's harmonious order and one who is authoritative. I don't know what terminology we decided to use for the authoritative person or,

19:01 Tsu: you know, which passage is this? Exactly.

19:04 Seth: I have to find it. But there's a couple where he says, when the Tao prevails, the authoritative person does X. When the dao does not prevail, the authoritative person does. Why? Like, for example, it's okay to speak your mind openly when the dao prevails because the righteous rulers will understand that you're gently instructing them in good behavior.

19:24 Tsu: That's 5, 21, I think.

19:25 Seth: Yeah. So, you know, I think that it indicates a nuance and a recognition of the relationship with the other, but also the context of what's happening socially and politically to guide the way that you should behave. And so I don't think of the propriety in the sense of being kind of such a strict straitjacket. The filial stuff did seem more of a straightjacket to me. And I know the two are related, but.

19:53 Tsu: Right. So I mean, to be a little bit more comparative here, you could sort of think of there being something more primordial in terms of human behavior associated with ren, and then li as the li as being something that coordinates human society on an ethical life. And then there's fa, which is law. You have law, which is prohibitive. Don't do this, don't do that. And so you have three levels of social coordination. One that is a little bit more. And I'm using scare quotes here, organic as part of just your behavior. And then at the second level, which needs to recognize established rules like the rights, and then the stronger intervention of the state that says you have to pay this many taxes and you have to not do this and not do that.

So three different levels. Plato's Republic is also trying to deal with some of these questions. Right. If you think of yourself as living in a time where everyone is unethical and everyone thinks they know what they're doing, but they don't, how do you create the conditions where you can move towards a city of virtue? What kind of resources do you have? Do you begin with the individuals? Do you begin with the state? On what stakes do you place your bet? Right. And so it's just a kind of given of society to see him as embracing the rights, as one of the places that mediates between sort of given human behavior and on the one hand, and then like laws on the other.

21:22 Mark: So Shen, can you tell me just another sort of cultural background question? He's writing, as you said, in a time where he thinks that he's being a light of virtue in a sea of non virtue, that he has to look back to the ancients for models. Given that this is, you know, this is even used on civil service exams even now. Right. Like the actual Analects. But of course it was, you know, a number of hundreds of years before this became sort of the state sponsored thing and it wasn't even continuous, it kind of went in and out of fashion. Were there points where they felt like, oh, now that we have the unified Chinese Empire with the emperor with the mandate of heaven, now we actually are in a state where the ruler is governing successfully according to Confucian norms and thereby, you know, has the ministers in place that can sort of advise him and cover all the different things.

And this virtue that is very contagious, as the text says many times, therefore at least to the local governors and you know, maybe there's some, there are going to be bad apples running around, but for the most part the state is ordered. Did they actually feel like they succeeded at some point or was it always this? No, we still have to look way, way back to the ancients. We're always falling short.

22:40 Tsu: So the period of Confucius and the period right after Confucius, the Warring States Period ended in a very bloody way. And the establishment of the first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, didn't solve the political problems of China. And so in a short decade, the first emperor, the dynasty was actually ended. And this is the same emperor who burned all the Confucian classics, murdered politically, persecuted anyone who would quote from the Songs and such. So I mean basically the history of the Analects is heading towards a fiery and bloody not end, but like a big comma. So the Way in which people used philosophy after that point was always, I would say there's a strong dimension of propaganda. And even today's government in China uses Confucius and Mencius as propaganda, right, to sort of justify what they're doing.

23:36 Mark: And does that kind of ruin that connotation? Or is it just this is so historically rooted, like Nazis ruin Nietzsche for a lot of people.

23:44 Seth: Right.

23:45 Mark: But can modern propagandists ruin Confucius for you?

23:48 Tsu: Yeah, maybe, maybe. I mean, I think of it in a tarnished way, actually. Me personally. I mean, and this goes all the way down to funding, right? Like which professors get hired, which scholarly projects are funded by the government, right? Like they want to promote a kind of neo Confucianism as the counterpart of so called socialism with Chinese characteristics. So the big counterpoint to Confucianism is Taoism, right? Emerging literally at the same time. And so I think there were people that said, look, that stuff doesn't work. We need to embrace a more laissez faire approach to politics.

And so there were dynasties that embraced Taoism, especially Zhuangzi, and for a lot of different contingent reasons. So there's always a back and forth, back and forth. But one of the key aspects is that the establishment of an intelligentsia whose goal is to participate in government was really established more or less right after this period. And these guys took on the model, like I said, at the very beginning, of complaining. So you can see there's a lot of complaining in the Analects and the history of Chinese intellectual essayism is basically complaining about the government.

So was there ever a time where they thought that, okay, we're pretty close to re establishing the classical dynasty of Zhou, I don't think there was ever any agreement to that. And when emperors themselves and the ministers say, oh, now we have restored finally the virtuous society, it was always generations and generations of propagandists, right? So you have to sort of take it in a mix.

25:25 Mark: Wes, do you want to propel us to the next chunk? Do you have a saying we want to start with or something on virtue?

25:33 Wes: You wanted to do virtue. Yeah, I'm just sitting here thinking about propriety still.

25:37 Mark: Sure, yeah. No, that's certainly part of virtue. And it's the weirdest part for us that we should have only.

25:41 Wes: So I'll tell you what I thought of when you guys were talking about earlier about ritual. I thought about something in De Tocqueville, actually, or it was because Seth mentioned Burke and I remembered there's a very famous quote from De Tocqueville. So I'll just read it. Men living in democratic countries do not readily understand the utility of forms. They feel an instinctive contempt for them. Forms arouse their disdain and often their hatred, as they usually aspire to none but facile and immediate enjoyments. They rush impetuously toward the object of each of their desires, and the least delays exasperate them.

This temperament which they transport into political life disposes them against the forms which daily hold them up or prevent them in one or another of their designs. That started me in thinking about. So these forms. He's talking about everything from manners to other sorts of kind of social rituals. We engage in things which don't rise to the level of moral commandments, Thou shalt or thou shalt not, but play a very important role in the cohesion of the social fabric. And ultimately, Tocqueville thought it was very important, you know, as important as institutions and other sorts of things to kind of sustaining democracy.

It's something that we don't want to give up, even though the democratic attitude tends to undo them. So I was just thinking about one of the. You know, what is the function of propriety, ritual propriety? What is it doing? And I think in the same way that Tocqueville talks about forms, maybe what it's doing is it's something about desire. So it stands in between us and desire and simply acting on our individual desires, let's say. So if we want to start out with a passage, we could go to. It's on page 74, 1.12, where he's talking about the function of li.

Master You said achieving harmony is the most valuable function of observing ritual propriety. In the way of the former kings, this achievement of harmony made them elegant and was a guiding standard in all things large and small. But when things are not going well, to realize harmony just for its own sake, without regulating the situation through observing ritual propriety will not work.

27:55 Mark: So you picked a complicated one by throwing in the harmony.

27:57 Wes: I know, I know. Well, I was just thinking of. Let's leave out the second part of that. But I just. I'm bringing up the harmony just because it's. Again, thinking about the function of li. Part of it is to. When we talk about maintaining harmony, we're also talking about hierarchy, right? We're talking about the things that lead to sort of filial virtues, filial piety, let's say, you know, that's also something that's related to sort of standing between us and our own individual desire. And for Burke, as you know, Seth mentioned Burke, this idea of hierarchy was also very important in actually maintaining the relatedness of individuals. You sort of thought the fabric couldn't be the fabric unless those relations were there. And those relations are inevitably hierarchical. So anyway, that's what was on my mind. I don't know if that's a good way to start us off or not.

28:46 Seth: You know what you're making me think of too, Wes, in saying that? There is also a common thread through here where he's always talking about the common people, the general public. So there's definitely a notion of that the general populace needs to be guided and ruled. And he makes the claim in several places that that's better done through the moral character of the rulers than through laws. That's part of the harmony you just described. The hierarchical harmony is that not everybody can be an exemplary person and exert that moral force. So you, you know, part of the hierarchy is to make sure that the persons who are responsible for governing and ruling do exert that force, because they are the ones that bring everybody else along in that path.

29:31 Mark: There's an explicit passage that I don't have noted that is like, if the rulers have this virtue, then it will flow out to, like, just the chain between.

29:40 Wes: Ritual 2.3 is one of them. They're all over the place. But so the master said, lead the people with administrative injunctions and keep them orderly with penal law, and they will avoid punishments, but will be without a sense of shame. Lead them with excellence. Or what we calling. Is it de? Is it pronounced de?

30:00 Tsu: Yeah, I guess is more strictly translated as virtue. It's sort of like the good deeds.

30:05 Mark: Yeah, but it's the same as. The same as like te in the te of Piglet, right?

30:10 Tsu: Yeah, it's the te of Piglet. Yeah. Because of Dao de. Because of the Tao Te Jing, this classic of the dao and the. Yeah.

30:18 Wes: So lead them with excellence or. Or virtue, and keep them orderly through observing ritual propriety, and they will develop a sense of shame and moreover, will order themselves.

30:29 Tsu: I think there is some philological debate about whether or not that was original to the Analects, because one of the rival schools at the time was the Legalist school, which is the school that eventually became the ruling ideology of the Qin emperor, which is to say, make laws clear, make punishments clear, and make rewards clear. And if you have a society completely governed by clear laws, prohibitions and rewards, that everyone will be organized. It's kind of. How do you say, hobbesian hierarchy, where everyone's place in society is neatly cut out by laws and so everything's clear, you can effectively administer your state.

And they were the main rival school against Confucian and the Confucian school. Later disciples might have put that in there to sort of make Confucius say something explicitly against the legalists and basically pointing out to the weak points. Well, the blind spot of legalism, which is that well beyond laws, you need to have something like some kind of innate affective dimension to morality, which is shame. Right. Or what we were calling authoritative behavior, which is in a way the opposite of shame. So there needs to be something organic arising out of feelings and comportment that is more than just, you know, laws that top down.

31:48 Wes: Right. Which is interesting because on one account. Right. Wasn't he a. I forget the title. He had something to do with directing prisons. Right. Or am I making that up?

31:59 Tsu: He was a librarian, wasn't he?

32:01 Wes: The. Something of. Well, the Minister of Crime. Minister of Crime. That's it.

32:06 Mark: Yes, that's. Yeah, it's not clear that that actually happened, but yeah.

32:10 Wes: Right.

32:10 Mark: That's one of the things that maybe was a job.

32:13 Tsu: Well, I mean, so a state that's properly administered by the highest Confucian ideals will still have prisons. Right. But it's just that he's arguing that it's not enough to have clear punishments and words.

32:24 Wes: The other passage, it's also very famous. 12, 19. It's on page 158 of our translation. So Ji Kangzi asked Confucius about governing effectively, saying, what if I kill those who have abandoned the way to attract those who are on it? If you govern effectively, Confucius replied, what need is there for killing? If you want to be truly adept, the people will also be adept. The excellence of the exemplary person is the wind, while that of the petty person is the grass. As the wind blows, the grass is sure to bend. Again, this is one of many passages where ruling in many ways is about setting an example.

The power that's simply invested in one's moral authority. And I will make another connection here just because I kept relating this to other things I was thinking about, but it made me think of, in the Western tradition, the tool of classical rhetoric, of persuading people. I've been thinking a lot about this just because I think in many ways our politics, people have abandoned this dimension of persuasion, and I think they don't believe it's effective. But so in classical rhetoric, you make appeals to emotion, you make appeals to reason, but there's also this, the ethos component of it, which in a way is a demonstration of, unless I'm making an illegitimate connection of de or of one's moral authority, basically an important part of persuasion is actually sort of demonstrating one's authority as a person.

And you can do that even in speaking, but of course doing it through behavior, I think is the most powerful part. So in that classical tradition of rhetoric, you can sort of demonstrate that even in speech. So that's what I thought of, and that was my way into understanding the sort of power of virtue and the way why Confucius might think it's something that you can actually use to rule without necessarily killing, without punishments, without penalties. Not that I'm saying we get rid of those things.

34:21 Tsu: No, no. I mean, I think that's spot on. And it's also spot on not only in the Confucian tradition, but across all of the thinkers of the period. Whereas de has this kind of rhetorical way, and it's also in a way effortless. Because if you are such a kind of person, if you are a junzi, if you are a.

34:41 Wes: What is it translated as exemplary person.

34:44 Tsu: Exemplary person. Right. That people naturally gravitate towards you and your speech will naturally be accepted by others. And I think that connection is really spot on. Taoism also has this component as well. And so the two schools will fight over what exactly that is. So there is a very interesting passage. Basically the idea is that the proper ruler doesn't have to do anything. They simply sit there on the throne, oriented towards the North Pole. That's exemplary de. Right. Like the person for whom virtue is effortless, so that they don't have to do anything specifically. They don't have to sort of say, well, okay, you know, here's the five step plan to virtue. They simply just do it effortlessly. Right. And so these different schools will fight out exactly what it means to be

35:37 Mark: that two One is, the master said, governing with excellence can be compared to the North Star. The North Star dwells in his place and the multitude of stars pay it tribute.

35:47 Tsu: Right. So whereas the last passage that you read had a sort of ecological metaphor. This has a kind of astronomical metaphor. Right. Like the North Star doesn't move.

35:55 Wes: Sounds like the. The unmoved mover, in a way.

35:58 Seth: Yeah.

35:58 Tsu: And that's the ideal of ruler in Confucian tradition. Right. The ruler that simply, effortlessly just is. And they don't have to do anything specific.

36:07 Mark: We just had read Boethius, which also was trying to say, well, you know, despite how crappy things look really everything is ordered so that excellence is rewarded. And if you're virtuous, then you will be happy, not only sort of by definition, but by you will discover. You might think that. So this goes all the way back to Plato. Another one of the passages about that 1220, which, again, reading this in the context of Confucius, was not famous at the time. You know, he had some followers, but he had spent some time traveling around trying to get some government to hire him to be an advisor and, you know, no takers.

So he eventually just settled down and he had his followers and was revered by them, but his, you know, really didn't succeed in the way that he wanted to until far after his death. So here's him talking about fame in 1220. Zizhang inquired, what does the scholar apprentice have to do to be described as being prominent? What can you possibly mean by being prominent? Replied the master. One who is sure to be known whether serving in public office or in the house of a ruling family, answered Zizhang. That is being known, said the master. It is not being prominent.

Those who are prominent are true in their basic disposition and seek after what is most appropriate. They examine what is said, are keen observers of demeanor, and are thoughtful and deferring to others. They are sure to be prominent whether serving in public office or in the house of a ruling family. As for being merely known, they put on appearances to win a reputation for being authoritative. While their conduct belies it, they are wholly confident that they are authoritative and sure to be known whether serving in public office or in the house of a ruling family.

It hits both ends like, well, fine, if you want to define being prominent as being known, well. But come on, to really be prominent actually has to involve virtue. So we saw something very similar to that Boethius but then trying to like a good apologist. But it will be the case that somebody who is virtuous will become known. It's just inevitable. So. But if they don't, it's not that. It's some familiar psychology here.

38:04 Tsu: Was it west that was talking about Tocqueville? It made me think of something like political correctness, kind of modern analog to ritual propriety in the sense that political correctness within institutions it may appear at first to be a kind of straight jacket. I think was set that put it in those terms maybe. But you know, I mean if you had a colleague every day that used the N word all the time, they may be good in all the other ways, and they might just be coming From a perspective of ignorance, or they might not care, but it creates a very disruptive working environment or kind of institutional context. But it's not illegal. Right. In the strict sense, to use the N word. So we might maybe think of ritual propriety as a kind of analog to the way we do have ritualistic rules concerning what language is appropriate for the office versus somewhere else or something of that nature.

39:01 Wes: Yeah. And I think you could elaborate even further on that. There's even more subtle distinctions to be made. So the way people speak to each other at the workplace is much different than they would speak to each other socially. And I don't even just mean willingness to say more of what's on their mind. I just mean the whole syntax of it is different. There's a little bit more of a formality. And that has something to do with tension, I think, created by hierarchy. And the way we deal with that through certain formalities in speech, it can be very subtle.

39:34 Tsu: Right. I mean, so when you teach a class full of undergraduates, let's say, and you know, some of them refer to you in a very official form, formal way, then you can have in a way a very nice relationship with some separation between you and your student. But then if you had a student who perhaps didn't care about these kind of rules and just wrote an email saying, hey, dude, can I get an extension on the assignment? Or something like that, and to immediately make you some kind of friend or a buddy, it creates tensions within a working relationship. Right. So. And I think most people recognize that these rules exist, but they don't play that kind of a role, let's say, in American society.

40:17 Wes: Yeah, well, a lot of it happens unconsciously. Right. A lot of it is just. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, the word boundaries came to mind while you were giving that example. So that we have boundaries, we can actually have relationships. And I mean, boundaries are not just a way of separating ourselves from others irreconcilably. They actually make relationships possible. Because the collapse of those boundaries, the getting too close, it's ultimately self destructive. It destroys, can destroy the relationship.

40:45 Mark: So I very much looked at this reading, kind of like the way we looked at Burke, that he's extolling the virtues of a different way of life or a way that was more common in the past, where things were more formal and you can sort of see the advantage of that or where they were more hierarchical. You know, he doesn't concern himself with defending hierarchy because that just was not even in question, but that I could just see. Okay. Well, recognizing what the virtues of the old system was like, still, we have chosen the other path. You know, sort of we're inevitably going down the path of having to make up rules more or less as we go along, having to, you know, not have this monolithic culture that we can turn to as a common support.

Like, are there rituals that we can create? Or can we somehow repurpose the spirit of some of the advantages of these old customs and the customary way of relating to each other while still maintaining our freedom in the same way? With Burke and Tocqueville, you know, there was the feeling of, well, yeah, okay, not having a democracy, not having rule by the people. There were some advantages of that. You don't have the same kind of catastrophic mistakes, perhaps if you have a government by the qualified or something. But we have chosen this other, more democratic route.

So how can we make the best of that and overcome the dangers that come with that?

42:08 Tsu: I mean, there are many places where in the Analects, Confucius says a certain lesser duke or lesser minister who has a line of 18 performers. And that as a kind of, who do you think you are if the emperor only has so many, do you think you are entitled to having the same amount of dancers as the main ruler? And, you know, all of these indications to sort of say, if you are not convinced that we live in a decadent, fallen period, then look around you, because the rights stand as a metric in a way as well. There's an epistemic function to it because you can measure a society according to the degree to which it fulfills certain ritual requirements or criteria.

You know, in the same way that maybe switching from one working in one university or in one state to another, you might find that students in another state just simply disregard or just don't care professor's authority in class and tends to treat them like kind of a buddy versus another place where you feel well respected as a teacher, the ritualistic or those kind of limits allow you to measure the moral starting place of a time or a place.

43:24 Mark: So, Suchen, I know we're only going to have you for the first half here. Were there any other. A couple more passages in particular that you wanted to pull out that are particularly important that we can discuss?

43:34 Tsu: Not necessarily. I mean, maybe passages I really like.

43:37 Mark: Sure.

43:38 Tsu: And one of this has already been mentioned. So this is 5 21. Basically, he's speaking admiringly or positively about this person Ning Wu, who says that basically when the states or the country that he was in was doing morally well, he acted the part of wise men. He could serve in a state that was morally upright, but when bad times befell the state, he would act like a stupid person so that he wouldn't be employed or employable by the bad government. Right? And then he says something, Confucius says, something really, really interesting and funny as well.

So he says his wisdom, his knowledge, and his way of conducting himself can, in the positive sense, can be learned, but you cannot learn his stupidity or his foolishness. Right? And in contemporary Chinese, that's to sort of say, oh, you know, that person's really stupid. Don't be like that person. But actually, Confucius mean that the way in which he acted stupidly was something

44:35 Wes: you can't learn, and it's something that's good in that context.

44:39 Tsu: Right? The way in which he was able to conceal his abilities is something which is so beyond what anybody can learn. And so you can learn wisdom, you can learn knowledge, you can learn perhaps even morality, but the ability to negotiate difficult, tough political times is something you, you can't learn that somehow it comes from somewhere else.

45:02 Mark: Well, you can't learn directly from as a result of instruction. You can learn through practice.

45:08 Tsu: Exactly. You can't learn exactly by looking at him. You know, you have to learn by, in a way, striving to be virtuous. And so that's a very nice intersection, and it reveals something of Confucius notion where knowing and learning intersect with behavior. I found this initially in our thing under epistemology, because there's a lot of sort of moral epistemology here to sort of say, okay, here's a very complex moral situation. This person acted in this way. Is that the right way to act, or is that not the right way to act? And so many, in many cases, you have him sort of commenting on the way certain individuals acted. I just particularly enjoy this passage because stupidity or foolishness is something that is highlighted as something that in a positive light. And it's a little bit of irony in there, which I very much.

46:04 Mark: Let me just read the passage because just to show how much helpful interpretation just went into what you just said. The master said, as for Ning Wuzi, when the way prevailed in the land he was wise, when it was without the way he was stupid, others might attain his level of wisdom, but none could match his stupidity. I didn't really know what that meant, but I thought it was a slam on him. I thought it was like, he's a leader, not that. Anyway, there are other ways of interpreting that, but I Like yours better.

46:29 Tsu: There are many ways of interpreting that, and actually that's why it really matters. The traditions and the lineages of the Confucian tradition. So other traditions would read it differently, and you sort of have to go through the entire thing and look at different commentaries. Yeah, but maybe I just stop there and just point to Confucius thinking about moral behavior in a very complex way, where you have possibly ambiguous and a very dialogical way of interacting with students. So if you can imagine Confucius talking to his students about this. Right. Because Master said it's always addressed to students. And you know what kind of reaction that might provoke and what kind of conversation might ensue.

47:14 Seth: Yeah. There are less pronouncements, more as an invitation to discussion, which.

47:19 Tsu: Yes, yes.

47:20 Seth: Which makes sense, given that the moral focus is on social aspects and learning. We haven't mentioned this yet, but there are a number of passages in here as well where he says something like, if you have this without learning, then it can be perverted if you have this without learning. You know, all the virtues are useless without learning to back them up because, you know, they can become vanity.

47:44 Wes: Or 17.8 is one of them. There's a few.

47:48 Seth: Yeah, that's the one I was thinking of.

47:50 Tsu: Yeah, that's good.

47:51 Mark: The six flaws that can accompany the six desirable qualities of character. So just the first one. The flaw in being fond of acting authoritatively, in other words, Ren without regard for learning, is that you will be easily duped, which I'm not sure I understand.

48:04 Tsu: That it leads to naivete because you love the two indiscriminately or without further consideration.

48:12 Mark: So benevolence is a better. Compassion is better for Ren in that particular sentence anyway.

48:17 Tsu: Yeah.

48:18 Mark: Without regard. The flan. Being fond of. Fond of, acting wisely without regard for learning is it leads to self indulgence. Again, acting wisely. G. Maybe that's not a good translation there, because why would that lead to self indulgence? Acting wisely without learning.

48:35 Wes: Well, being fond of acting wisely.

48:38 Mark: Okay. All right.

48:40 Seth: Well, the next one actually might make more sense. It says the flaw in being fond of making good on one's word without equal regard for learning is that it leads one into harm's way. So if you sort of blindly try to fulfill every single promise without backing that up with learning, you would potentially do something stupid. Yeah.

48:58 Mark: And he says elsewhere that, you know, the ancients, they were very hesitant to say anything because they didn't know that they could. They were worried about being able to make good on Their word. So like that's a. That's one of the main virtues. And not being glib. The first thing that Wes started off with in his introduction is the opposite of that.

49:17 Wes: Yeah, I thought it would make a good ground rule.

49:19 Seth: Actually.

49:20 Wes: We didn't read the ground rules, but no glibness. The anti glibness thing I thought was it would be just a good way to remind ourselves of a ground rule that we don't usually adhere to.

49:30 Mark: But we will not be glib unless it is more entertaining.

49:34 Wes: Exactly.

49:35 Mark: That's really the way it works.

49:36 Wes: Exactly.

49:38 Mark: Unless Suchen has to go, then we can be glib.

49:40 Tsu: Yeah, I have to go pretty soon. And thank you for this. This is a fun discussion in a more comparative context. You could also point to the few times that the Analects mention gods and demons and spirits and things like that. The view is basically that, well, we don't know if God exists. Just leave it aside. Like things you can't know, things you can't really do anything about. We don't really talk about those things. Basically it's if you respect the gods, then you leave them alone. It's a particularly dry, laconic one.

50:12 Seth: One of them.

50:12 Mark: 11:12 this is probably not the one you were thinking of, but it's related to this at least. It's not that you necessarily can't ever theorize about this, but you in particular the student, are probably not advanced enough to worry about it. Zilu asked about how to serve the spirits and the gods. The master replied, not being able to serve other people, how would you be able to serve the spirits? Zilu said, may I ask about death? The master replied, not understanding life, how could you understand death?

50:38 Tsu: Right, yes. No, I mean, this is not the particular passage I was thinking of, but this is a very paradigmatic passage for how Confucianism views the spiritual realm or the issue of ghosts and gods. It has a kind of Epicurean analog where basically, you know, Epicurus would sort of say, well, if God existed, then why would God care about you? You know, just don't worry about it. Leave it aside because it leads to all kinds of corruptions. Yeah, it was a nice discussion with you and I hope to maybe catch up at some other time.