Ep. 314: Mengzi (Mencius) on Moral Psychology (Part One)

0:00 Mark: Foreign. You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 314 is something like are people naturally good? And we're looking at the Mengzi, AKA Mencius, a Chinese Warring States philosopher in the Confucian or Ru tradition from the late 4th century BCE we focused on books 2, 4 and 6 of the text. For more information, please see Partially Examine the this is Mark Linsenmayer pulling my sprouts in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:36 Seth: This is Seth Paskin practicing humaneness in Austin, Texas.

0:40 Wes: This is Wes Alwan sparing the Ox the Axe in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:45 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey climbing a tree in search for a fish in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:50 Krishnan: This is Krishnan Venkatesh suffering from allergies in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

0:55 Dylan: Welcome to the podcast and we know

0:57 Wes: that Mencius has had a lot to

0:58 Mark: say about yes, lots of you started the Eastern classics program at St. John's can you say a little more about what that's all about?

1:07 Krishnan: I did not start the Eastern classics program at St. John's but I have been involved in it at the beginning. When I first arrived at St. John's in 1989, it turned out that a group of older tutors, group of senior tutors, kind of like venerable Johnnies, right? The first generation in Santa Fe were working on starting an Eastern classics program and that surprised me. A lot of I just happened to jump on the bandwagon at that time, 1989, and I think I'm probably the last survivor from that generation. They were interested in it from various perspectives.

I mean, one one was that several of them were practitioners of various Eastern things. There was a physicist who was also a tea master, tea ceremony master. There was a dean who was a Aquinas and Kant scholar who was also interested in Japanese martial arts and religion. There was a Go master, you know, different kinds of interests. But also I think the dominant motivation at that time was a des see the other side of the same questions. In particular, the investigation of Indian philosophy dovetailed very nicely with say thomistic philosophy or 19th century German philosophy about what was ultimately real about God, different ways of thinking about those things.

So they were very interested in that. The Chinese philosophy, obviously from the St. John's interest in political philosophy, that was of interest to them too. They were very conscious, and I think we all were at that time, that when the college was started, there was no thought of confining it to great books of the West. Not that the west is one thing, but it was a Great Books program simply. There's a conversation between Jacob Klein and Leo Strauss in which they, they said they wanted a Great Books program simply, but they couldn't do the Asian text just because of the language difficulties at that time.

There weren't enough. There weren't enough translations and there weren't enough resources for studying the language. And so plus also the fact that those don't really belong in the same conversation and, you know, different conversations, different traditions that we need to respect to keep the integrity of the, of the programs, you know. So the committee then decided not to pursue incorporating Eastern text into the undergraduate curriculum, but have a separate program where the integrity of these traditions could be respected, to do it responsibly, as it were.

3:19 Mark: I think one of the reasons we're feeling a little more comfortable introducing these things, or if I don't know, we've done about one Eastern episode a year in our 13 years here. So this is the first time actually that we sort of bore down and we've done. This is our fourth in a row now. Two on the Dao de Jing and one on Mozi, really as preparation for this. The way that seems to make most sense to us. I'm not sure how this dovetails with the respecting the tradition, but like to try to make them speak to Aristotle, to the Western thinkers. So that if we're doing ethics, we're doing ethics.

Like we understand there's things you have to work around in terms of the theological tradition that's going on in the area at the time. We have the same issues with. We haven't done that much medieval philosophy because it's hard to get over the fact that it's so God centric. Or, you know, we just poked into Islamic philosophy and have the similar issues, but there are always points about moral psychology or secular interpretations or, you know, something that, you know, in this text that we're about to talk about, there's very obvious, like everyday moral applications, like what is a legitimate job that you can feel okay having, or are you dirtied by the fact that you're being paid for this?

Like, that's something that's not dependent on just being familiar with Chinese culture. So I could see a program that just says, oh, we're going to have Plato and Aristotle and Confucius and Lao Tzu, and that's fine. And I'm not sure why that in itself, given that Heraclitus is just as foreign to us as Confucius. Like both require knowing Some history, knowing some tradition that are outside contemporary Western thought.

4:53 Krishnan: Yeah, I can imagine that too. I mean, it's very exciting. I mean, obviously the many, many overlapping questions, you know, the big questions like why be good should you ever fight a war? You know, all those are prevalent in almost every tradition that you can think of. But why be good is a big one for the Confucians. Part of the reason that we kept the programs distinct was that there's the issue of translation. You know, whenever you study an ancient text or something from a very different language, you have the vocabulary issue of words that seem to carry the same meaning or seem to be synonymous with certain Western terms, but then are ultimately untranslatable because they overlap somewhat but not fully.

So that translations then pick one way to translate the term. For example, with Mencius and Confucius, if you translate ren as humaneness or benevolence, then you run into certain issues that when Confucius then describes ren as, it's to do with study and wanting to learn, right? And then you know that benevolence and humaneness doesn't quite get it. And I think that it really helps the program you get, not that this is the only way of doing it, but it really helps the deeper understanding of the text to have it concurrently with the study of Chinese and to give the books enough time so that you can hear underneath the translations, you can hear what exactly the distinctions are between the words and how this is not quite like the word virtue, not quite like the word nature, and there's no word in Chinese for law, things like that.

It requires developing a sense of nuance and sensitivity with a text. Although I do get that there is a strong appeal and good reasons for a bloody minded approach to the text. You're just putting them together and trying to make them speak to each other. That is almost inevitable. I mean, any student coming in to the program is going to be thinking about questions that the books that they're familiar with and the books that they're encountering now speak to each other. And that comes out at the college that comes out in the unending after class conversations about these things and the occasional extra spontaneous seminar.

We call them guerrilla seminars.

6:49 Dylan: One of the things that I find on my mind when I'm reading through a lot of these is trying to decide if the kind of uncomfortableness that I get or sometimes dissatisfaction when I'm reading it is any different than the dissatisfaction I get in reading other kinds of things that are just older and have a kind of Sacred text is the wrong word. But there's a kind of way of speaking, storytelling, first person, declarative kind of. This is the way things are sagely kind of presentation. And you get some of this in Epictetus and older stuff. And so when I'm reading through Mencius, which is much less poetic than someone like Vasu and so in that way sort of less sacred texty, I find myself just trying to reflect on.

Is it just that it's just an older, different way of speaking about these things that has refined over time that I'm used to more, I feel more comfortable sort of commentary or explanatory, expository kinds of discussions? Or is there something unique about the tradition?

7:55 Krishnan: Both or all of those. Confucius and the Dao de Jing, they're best treated in the same way that we would treat something like the pre Socratics, you know, so they.

8:04 Dylan: Like Heraclitus.

8:05 Krishnan: Yeah, like Heraclitus. Before there was a tradition of argumentation or dialectic. You did a program on Mozi, right? The Mozi when you did that. So you realized that Mozi provides arguments and for the most part they're stupid sounding because they're kind of like.

8:21 Dylan: We noticed that. We noticed that for sure.

8:25 Krishnan: The way I like to read someone like Mozi is to remember that this sounds like. And probably could have been, probably was actually the master's arguments being reported back by a not very bright and drunk disciple or by an enemy, right? So you don't have to look behind the words. I mean sometimes it's like some of those, well that Aristotle refutes where you don't have the original text and so you have to flesh in what the original arguments might have been much more intelligent than he presents. So the Mozi, once you make allowances for the apparent inebriation of the argumentation or treat it like one of Dostoevsky's buffoons in a way that are rambling on.

But there's a kernel of wisdom in there, there's a kernel of insight. So then you seek for that what's underneath the text? What's there that's being garbled. So Mozi, he's quite a wild ride. But what he does is that for the first time he makes arguments in Chinese philosophy. And when he makes an argument, it basically forces the Confucians then to argue, which is why you have the arguments in Mencius. Mencius tries to give reasons. Xunzi is another one major Confucian that you should have a programmer. But he also gives arguments. So it's credit to the Mohists.

They're the first ones to provoke argumentation in the Confucians. But argumentation is not a big thing in Chinese philosophy in general, partly because there's a lack of trust in reason. I don't think that's the case, but in many there's a lack of trust in reason. And one of the things that it's important to remember is that in the west we have a kind of vast tradition of axiomatic mathematics that begins fairly early. And what that does is when you study the Greek geometers and when you study the arithmeticians, what you see is that is a kind of backbone example in the west of the power of reason to discover things.

Not just to make arguments, but to discover things and to discover big things, like about the structure of the universe, the order of the heavens. And the west had that as the central model for the power of reason, which is why Plato is so enthusiastic or even dependent on geometry as a kind of implicit spine to all thinking. Now, India and China didn't have that. So what is it like to grow up in a tradition where that doesn't exist? How do you think then? What is your attitude to reason?

10:42 Mark: You think what your superior wants you to think. That's at least something that was explicitly made in Mozi, and that I wasn't sure if Mencius disagreed. If your superior is doing something wrong, you remonstrate with them. Mencius certainly recognizes that rulers can be bad rulers. That's what half of his thing is about. You remonstrate, you give your advice. If it's ignored, probably you just leave. Maybe if they have the same surname as you, in other words, you're in the line, then you could maybe depose them. But that seems like, for the most part, the hierarchy is unquestioned. Like that is a fundamental ordering principle. And maybe that's a truly disruptive thing about the idea of reason, that it is at least theoretically accessible to everyone, or at least to anyone that's had the proper instruction in its use. And so it cuts across rank and wealth.

11:28 Dylan: This, I think, is actually articulates much better my discomfort with it, because I realize when I'm reading these, particularly because of the emphasis on figuring out the world and having a way that is understood in terms of an ordering and hierarchy and the strength of the roles, particularly with respect to individuals, and the absence of the notion that, well, reason can crawl across all of those things. That is probably what makes me the most uncomfortable, because I'm definitely in this. You Know, I'm a physicist by training, and then I'm a partisan of the power of science to figure things out, and that that is part of the inheritance that any person can have.

And so then to me, that is like a straight line to something like liberal democracy. That intertwining and the friction that I see with the political philosophy and I guess maybe the lack of. I don't want to say lack of reason because it doesn't feel like it's unreasonable, but it has something to do with. Maybe it's the particular form of reason embodied in mathematical argumentation and mathematical discovery that, as you said, is missing.

12:39 Krishnan: I mean, Mencius does say at one point that if the ruler is a depredator, that he's not a ruler, but he's a thief, and it's okay to capture a thief. There's something about Mencius that is, in a way, universalist and appeals to something that transcends the power hierarchy. The constant recurrence throughout the book is that the ruler is the one who visits the sage, right? The ruler seeks out the sage. That's the hierarchy in Mencius. So the grasp of certain principles I would translate as heart, mind. The Chinese word for mind is xin, which is also heart. There's a sense that the rational and the affective faculties are the same. They have the same center. So with Mencius, the transcendent principles have to do with certain moral roots that are not purely accessible by reason. You have to be able to be moved by another person. That's the primary ethical foundation.

13:32 Seth: I wanted to comment on that and throw back to Dylan because I am sympathetic to what I find in these texts to some extent, but I struggled to gain some kind of emotional connection to it because, for exactly the point you mentioned, Krishnan, which is in our tradition, there's an appeal to reason and a faculty in the individual. Like, this is your path out. When I read this stuff, and I see, especially in Mencius, this connection between the emotional, that there's a emotional motivation or to these virtues. I think of Hume, you know, I think of sentiment.

I think of this. This type of thing. And I'm very sympathetic to that. But because. Because there's no intuitive appeal to, like, my faculty of reason. It's an appeal. We talked about this in our last episode, maybe to tradition or to history or to models of behavior, you know, the kings of old and that sort of thing that we don't have a connection to. I struggle sometimes to find my way. But I was very sympathetic to the Taoist Stuff we read, I struggle a little bit. I appreciate the emphasis on familial and ancestral responsibility and respect, how that translates to the political sphere, obviously is difficult for somebody from the west to digest, But I want to find that hook.

You know, I'm trying to find that thing that says that I can say, ah, okay. You know, I understand the appeal he's making when he tells the story of the king who spares the ox and whatever. Like, I'm trying to figure out how to connect to that type of persuasive

15:04 Krishnan: speech, this emphasis on filiality. I call it filiality rather than filial piety. Because filial piety makes it sound Roman. Right? It's like making statues of your ancestors. I don't think so. The one word in Chinese is xiao. So filiality, a certain kind of respect for the elders, maybe even for tradition, is not necessarily reverence. The Confucian emphasis on the primary relationships, the fundamental relationships, I found what it helped me to do was a kind of mental reset. So instead of the Aristotelian model of happiness being attained through the practice of virtues, through the practice of your excellences, when you think about the Mencian model, and I think he amplifies this from Confucius, it might not simply agree with Confucius, is that if you are not good at fundamental relationships, your relationships with your parents, with the children, with your spouse, if those relationships are terrible in your life, you are not going to be a happy person.

So your relationship with your parents becomes unreconciled by the time they die. There's always going to be a gap in you. There's something that's missing. For me, the power of Confucian thinking is that moral life is embedded, entangled, inseparable from fundamental relationships, because we are fundamentally relational. And that might be. When you kind of meditate on this. A key difference between Chinese philosophy and Western philosophy is that we are fundamentally rel. And what does that mean? Is that the roots of those primary relationships go deep into our hearts.

So Mencius knows that relationships between children and parents are very difficult, right? He knows that they're the most difficult things, like the Greek tragedians knew, you know, and we're embedded in that in a way that our access to virtue, our access to excellence, in a way, has to go through those, you know, and that's the soil in which the rest of our being arises. I mean, how we see things, how we think about things, our fears and anxieties, all are embedded in those relationships. So I Think the confusions start from there, right? Supposing you're right there, which means that your daily, your momentary interactions with your parents are going to be key to how you think about everything.

As I grew older, I found myself thinking more and more about that, about how right that was. Particularly after my parents died. It strangely brought me closer to someone like Mencius. And this was not through in spite of anything I might have thought about Mencius, this affected me more closely. Then I realized that in some ways this way of thinking is closer to how I actually think and feel about my ethical practice in daily life.

17:33 Dylan: The way you're characterizing it resonates with my experience of reading it. That takes me right to certain really sort of pragmatic aspects of Peirce's pragmatism where there's a kind of notion of interconnectedness that's one of the reasons that our ethical lives, in fact, for many pragmatists perspectives, all of the ways we think are sort of emergent characteristics out of the world. And that interconnectedness is distinct from what we're talking about with Mencius, where you have primary interconnectednesses. But still it resonates with me on that, this notion of circles of interconnectedness, that the further away you get, in sort of a very straightforward way, you're less connected in Mencius than you are.

And it's something kind of obvious. It's one of the ways in which he disagrees with the Mohists of this sort of much more universal aspect of ethical obligation. For instance, you know, in a very straightforward way, you would lie to the police about your brother being in your house. If you were a Confucian, in fact, you would be expected to do so such that you should never expect someone to turn over their brother, whereas somebody else would say, well, of course you should turn over your brother because he committed an unjust act.

18:44 Mark: I have a quote I can throw in here from 5A1. This is talking about a guy named Shun. Because he was not in harmony with his parents. Shun was like a poor man with no home to return to. To have the approval of the men of service of the realm is something everyone desires. Yet this was not enough to dispel his sorrow. To have the love of women is something every man desires. And Shun had as wives the two daughters of the sovereign. Yet this was not enough to dispel his sorrow. Wealth is something everyone desired. And he had the wealth that comes with possessing the realm. Yet this was not enough to dispel his sorrow. And it talks about honor, the approval of men. The reason why all this stuff was not enough to dispel his sorrow was that it was a sorrow that could be dispelled only by being in harmony with his parents.

19:24 Wes: So let me throw in another quote here because there's quite a bit in 4 about this concept of filiality and serving the parents. So 4 a 27 because I like this Krishnan, this idea of the way you articulated it made me think I hadn't really given this enough thought from reading the text. But the idea that relationships come first and that there's something, there's a real ethical insight in that, you know, being someone who's studied psychoanalysis extensively, that's sort of the, the overall gist as psychoanalysis develops. Historically there's even a school called relational psychoanalysis.

But the concept of the object quote unquote in object relations is the idea that if we want to talk about moral psychology, we have to talk about the internalization of relationships and how that affects one's, you know, general patterns of relating to others. And it's really, ultimately it is also a virtue ethics. But anyway. 4a 27. The most authentic expression of humaneness is serving one's parents. The most authentic expression of rightness is following one's older brother. The most authentic expression of wisdom is knowing these two things and not departing from them.

The most authentic expression of ritual propriety is regulating and adorning these two. The most authentic expression of music is in taking joy in these two. What is it about serving one's parents in particular that is the most authentic expression of humaneness? Because, you know, this is in direct contrast to the Mohists for whom, you know, universal love is the thing.

20:52 Krishnan: Look at the two sentences after you've read. I'm reading from the Hinton translation. Once joy wells up, how can it be stopped? And if joy can't be stopped, hands and feet soon strike up a dance of their own. So if you do all these things right, you're just going to end up dancing for joy. It'll be, you know, so the organic in Mencius is such a strong image thread, you know, that organically, you know, happiness comes out from dedication, you know, right minded dedication to fundamental relationships, you know, that's very. So this is the path to happiness is to do these right.

21:21 Wes: Getting along with your parents is a really tall order. It seems like starting with the most difficult thing. Right.

21:28 Dylan: And I think it's worth pursuing. I think your implication, Wes, is why parents versus dedication to any number of other things or in fact, just dedication. What is it about it being your parents that makes a difference?

21:42 Wes: The creature creator.

21:44 Dylan: Sure.

21:44 Wes: Relation. Right. And this comes up in, you know, we've seen this come up in many places, but including one of my favorites is Plato's Crito, right? Where in a way he says, I am constructed of the laws of the state. You know, so the creature creator relation can be the idea of the formative influences of one's parents, which may be what's going on here, I'm reading into it, but. And then there's the formative influence of your particular culture, of the social, of the state of God. Right. That the ultimate creator, creature relation is between God and humanity.

So that is a distinct. And maybe that's one possibility of why you would focus on the parents, right. Arguably they have the most profound influence on you in making you what you are. And so that influence is something you have to come to terms with. And you might think, well, they really me up, so what do I owe them? What kind of filiality do I owe to those grounds, right. Of my being? If I'm thinking, thinking about this ontologically, maybe I want to rebel against that. So then the question becomes, well, is there some filiality that I owe regardless of that?

And how do I grasp that?

22:52 Dylan: I like where you ended up there, Wes. I think Mencius is clearly coming down on that's part of filiality is we owe something intrinsically to those origins and those particular origins near us. And it comes forth as a kind of obligation. And you see that played out in the political philosophy, right. In the hierarchy is where obligation ends up being. It ends up being a two way street. It is the source of obligation.

23:20 Krishnan: It comes from a reverence for the fact that you are not your own origin.

23:23 Dylan: Yes.

23:24 Krishnan: And it's voiced in Paradise Lost, when Satan becomes the paradise. And in the west we have the story of Oedipus. The guy who marries his own mother in a way becomes his own father.

23:36 Wes: Yeah. And Sophocles makes a lot of that out of that. And Milton does too. It's like a logical paradox almost. It's like the way Sophocles puts it is sowing in the same field from which you came. Right. He's both sower and sowed, and it's almost as if he sowed himself, which Sophocles associates with his hyper rationality and lack of respect for the empirical, for data. That's a whole other thing. And I think in Milton, you know, it's this paradox of rebelling against one, one's own grounds, as if that were possible. Right. It's, you know, Satan has the absurd idea that he can defeat this thing, he can defeat God, even though without God he couldn't possibly even exist. So it's a crazy idea, you know, it's like embracing a logical contradiction.

24:16 Krishnan: But yeah, yeah, yeah, it's the archetype, the self made man.

24:20 Wes: Exactly.

24:21 Krishnan: Taken literally. But I think that, so you start with that reference. And by the way, I think that Mencius is the one, you know, so, so this Emperor Shun becomes the archetype of filiality. And I think Mencius is the one that picks that up from the histories and makes that absolutely central. So after Mencius, in a way, you can't go back in Chinese tradition. Not every Chinese philosopher agrees with this. Dao de Jing Zhuangzi and then the political philosopher Han Fei Zi doesn't place the same respect on filiality. So it took a while for this to become Chinese central to Confucian cultures.

Actually, it took a while for Confucius to become central to East Asian cultures. You know, at the time of Mencius, clearly people thought he was ridiculous. And after, when you read Sima Qian, the records of the historian, you see, people scoffed at Confucians for their idealism. I think Mencius, he wasn't an idealist. He may have been quixotic, but he grew up in a very ugly time. And he keeps emphasizing how difficult Shun's parents were. And I think that's really important in Mencius. You know, you have parents who tried to kill him multiple times, abused him throughout his life.

25:27 Dylan: That's a tough relationship.

25:28 Krishnan: It's a very tough relationship, you know, so Mencius is well aware that there are terrible parents out there. And this is a difficult burden for children to bear. One of the things that strikes me is that it's Shun. So Shun is the one who gives you, in a way, an image for the fact that, okay, you're not your own origin. You also didn't decide on your parents. That's one implication of that. Your parents brought you to being and you're stuck with them. If not physically, then mentally. You can be troubled by them all your life. So there are your parents and this is the relationship that's given to you.

Your siblings too maybe, but harder because your parents, you can't change, you won't change them. This is the relationship that's given to you. They have all the power too. So then the question is, how do you live with A relationship that is given to you in all their naked brutality and faults. So you have to live with them and you have to find some way to respect them, to love them, to stick with them. The parents, and I think Mencius emphasizes throughout becomes a toughening matrix for future life, particularly as a statesman, because as a statesman, you have to love what's given to you.

You might not be able to change these people at all, but you have to bring them up, you have to take care of them. And so Mencius is very aware, and I think this is one of his perceptions, is that the secret to life is to learn how to love what's given the people that are given. And so that's the training that your parents. It's a very fierce ethical training that depends on maneuvering around what can't be changed. I think that's why it's important.

27:02 Mark: You're adding perspective with this story about Shun's parents trying to kill him to the passage I've been staring at for the past couple of minutes. It's the one right before what you were just reading. 4A 26. Mencius said there are three things that are unfilial, and the greatest of them is to have no posterity. Shun married without informing his parents out of concern that he might have no posterity. The noble person considers that it was as if he had informed them. So first just that you better have kids. So there's sort of objective things like this is how to honor your parents is because it's not just they're whimsical.

Maybe they want you to just serve as their servant for their whole lives and have no life of your own, but it's actually sort of the objective duty to your parents to go and have kids. And even though it is entirely customary. And there are other passages that say, yeah, of course we want everybody to fall in love to have kids, but if the kids sneak around and drill holes in the wall to see the members of the opposite sex as well, examples, well, that's bad. You got to obey the forms. But it sounds like I'm filling in the details here that maybe Shun's parents were going to be unreasonable about this, so he was able to go behind their backs, marry without informing them, as if he had informed he did the job because they were being unreasonable.

It does seem there is some room, as you're saying, for I did my duty, I did my due diligence to my parents. If they didn't accept it, well, I might be sad for the rest of my life. But objectively, I'm okay.

28:24 Krishnan: It's what people tell me about kids, you know, give them what they need, not what they want. Same approach to your parents. There's a beautiful one in 4A19. And it's particularly the anecdote in the second half that I find really beautiful. So when Master Zeng was caring for his father, he always served wine and meat. When he cleared the table, he always asked who the food should be given to. And when his father asked if there were leftovers, he always said there were. His father died and eventually Master Zeng was cared for by his son, Zeng Yuan.

Zeng Yuan also served wine and meat, but when he cleared the table, he never asked who the food should be given to. And when his father asked if there were leftovers, he always said there were none so that he could serve the food again. This is called caring for mouth and body alone. But Master Zeng's way is called caring for the essence. In serving family, Master Zeng should be a model. The power of this is if you come to mention through Confucius, then you know that these Zengs are extremely important figures. So Master Zeng was one of the main disciples of Confucius.

He recurs through the Analects. He's famous as the one who threshes out Confucius comment that is one thread through all his teachings. He is the most dutiful, in a way, the most anxious of all the disciples. Every moment of his day is dedicated to serving the master's precepts. So in some ways the most doctrinaire Confucian, but absolutely devoted. His father Zeng Yuan was the one in the Analects who was playing the zither when Confucius asked the disciples, if you got him into power, what would you do first? And all the disciples say something like, first I reform the army, I would reform the law, I would do this to this.

And Zeng Yuan was the one who says that he's going to take the zither. He's going to take the young men down to the river and he's going to play music, they're going to dance and enjoy the spring rice. And Confucius says, okay, you're the one who's got it. So Confucius sees that Zeng Yuan is the one who's got the telos of civic life, which is a kind of joy, a sense of beauty. He's the one who's being cared for by Master Zeng. And the situation is powerful because this is a human Being caring for his aging parent. Right. You think about what that means.

You know, they don't have any money. Confucians are always poor. He's taking care of his parents probably by himself, probably cleaning his father, feeding his father, and dealing with probably a very cantankerous old person in pain. And so when you put yourself in that situation. So Master Zeng is the one who will not reveal to his father that they're poor. Right, that there are no leftovers. So this concern for the dignity of your parents, Mencius says this is the essence, that's the substance of it, concern for their dignity. The poignant things to me about this story is that the youngest Zeng doesn't seem to have any understanding of that, or he is passive aggressive.

You know, he's the one who will tell poor Master Zeng the upright confusion when he's on his deathbed, that no, we don't have leftovers, we don't have anything left, we're poor. And so this youngest Zeng doesn't seem to have imbibed his father's teaching or he's in a way hostile to his father. So the Confucian, the teachings of Master Zeng have not permeated down through osmosis to the younger son. And that's tremendously poignant. There's a limit to the power of influence. Even your son doesn't get it. His story is so rich. But the sense that it's the dignity that's the crucial thing.

31:35 Mark: Yeah. Which maybe is a way of reinterpreting what I was just saying about. He talks in other places about don't care for me, like horses and dogs, if someone is paying you. Just referring to that ethical issue throughout here, you know, we've got the relation between you and your parents. You also have the relationship, especially if you're a teacher like Mencius, between you and your employer and likewise between the ruler and the subjects that taking care of them. So what I was just saying about, like doing your due diligence objectively on the Mohist grounds, it's, are you feeding the people?

Are you enabling them to procreate? Are you fulfilling those material needs? And it's all about the materiality. And if it doesn't matter what your intentions are, if you can't get the job done, then you're failing. Whereas for the Confucians, it seems more. In fact, there are lots of times where, you know, should you take bad employment if you will starve otherwise? Well, it's at least something to debate. The material is not all there is to it your duty to the dignity of other people is much higher than your duty to merely see them fed.

32:35 Wes: Right? So 4B13. Caring for one's parents while they are alive cannot be considered a great thing. It is only through performing the rituals that honor them appropriately in death that one does the great thing. Sorry, Mark, is that speaking to your point? Or maybe you're thinking about rulers towards subjects.

32:50 Mark: I was, I was making a very, very general point that sort of runs throughout all this stuff. The Mohist point about the funerals. If you interpret the Mohists as very straight ahead consequentialists, then why are you wasting. The only reason to have funeral rights at all is because A, I guess they do persist as ghosts and so you don't want to piss them off, but it's also to express your affection or something. And you're going to feel bad if you just put your dead parent in a cardboard box. So there are certain minimal. But you don't want to go overboard. That's just wasteful. Like who is it actually benefiting? Whereas it does seem like what you're talking about, Wes, that the funeral rites are all about the dignity of the people and the dignity of something. Clearly, since Mencius does not talk about ghosts is something that transcends their individual intentions and wills and desires.

33:39 Wes: I mean, it's a cultivation of a certain type of character in oneself, right? You engage in those rights. Those are acts of filiality and humanity and respect. And if you weren't to do that, right, you would be cultivating a kind of viciousness or you would not be cultivating your sprouts.

33:56 Dylan: This is really important, right, because it makes the filial piety. It's easy to think of it as something about the person that you're showing respect for, but you're highlighting the fact, Wes, that it's really about yourself. It's about cultivating yourself through those acts. So the acts of filial piety is really you cultivating your sprouts. Cultivating yourself. It's like being virtuous. Cultivating virtue in Aristotle is a kind of self excellence. It's not about the object, it's about the self.

34:28 Wes: That line directly contrasts consequentialism. I need to worry about the well being of my parents and that's why I'm doing this with. No, this is about. There are two ways to get that contrast with consequentialism. One is the focus on deontology, on obligation and duty and things like that. But in this case it seems to Be more of a focus on it could be that as well. But there's that element of virtue, I think as well, you know, the virtue ethics component here.

34:52 Dylan: And then those things with deontology join up. Right. When you think of it as becoming yourself is articulating your obligations. I mean, I'm not saying it's not quite becoming a full human being is articulating those obligations.

35:06 Wes: Yeah. For Kant, it flows out of rationality. Right. And for the virtue, you know, for an Aristotelian virtue ethicist, rationality is a critical component of what makes us who we are and what defines virtues and so on. So I think you're right. Those link up.

35:18 Krishnan: I think that's right. Look at this one just before the one about the Zengs, number 18 in 4A. This is another one that's very beautiful. So Cho said, why is it the noble minded never teach your own children the way people are? It's impossible, replied Mencius. A teacher's task is to perfect the student. And if the student doesn't improve, the teacher gets angry. When the student gets angry, the student in turn feels hurt. You demand perfection, but you're nowhere near perfect yourself. So father and son would only hurt each other. And it's a tragedy when fathers and sons hurt each other.

The ancients taught each other's children that way. Father and son never demand perfect virtue of one another. If they demand perfect virtue of one another, they grow distant. And nothing is more ominous than fathers and sons grown distant from one another. This one really spoke to me from the point of view of every relationship that I'm in. If you spend 80% of your time criticizing the other person or correcting them, the relationship effect gets ruined because you don't, you're sticking little nails in them. It's experienced as an assault on dignity.

It's interesting. This goes from the father to the child or the parent to the child here. So in a way, not quite filiality, but the same respect for and cherishing of the sacredness of dignity without which no relationship is possible. In a strange way, it is about cultivating the self, but the self is inseparable. The people of the fundamental relationships. Right. The particular people. This one struck me as so. Right. Yeah.

36:39 Wes: You're pointing into the primacy of these relationships. So that's kind of the ethical primacy of these relationships. If you were ethically rigid, you might think, well, it's all about right and wrong, regardless of I have to hold my father to this standard and report him for impiety or something like that. But yeah, here the relationship is primary. And I was just thinking you could translate all these into self relations as well. Right. So self attack as being moral masochism, you know, as being an attack on one's own dignity. And it's actually quite common for people and they are being hyper ethical, but they don't think that their primary ethical obligation is. Would actually be to be nice to themselves or to respect themselves or something like that.

37:20 Dylan: The one that you just read about, the teaching resonated a lot with me, just from my own experience of coaching my kids, like when they were really young. It wasn't compromising. I didn't feel any tension with it because you're just basically just sort of the occasion for kids to run around playing soccer or something like that. But if you're doing something serious where you're trying to really cultivate a kind of, maybe in this case athletic excellence, I think there's a real tension with being the parent of that person. There are people that do it, but it just strikes me as I wanted to be the person who was supporting my kid, not trying to train them.

37:57 Krishnan: It's a very different relationship when you have spirited children.

38:00 Seth: You.

38:00 Krishnan: You don't need one more thing to fight about.

38:06 Mark: Wes's comment about the relationship between piety and being nice to yourself makes me

38:11 Wes: think of four a 19 filiality and being nice to oneself.

38:14 Mark: Yes. Mencius said, of all forms of service, which is the greatest? It is serving one's parents. Of all forms of vigilance, which is the greatest? It is vigilance over one person. Why is that? Well, it's because if you lose control of yourself, you can't serve your parents. It ends up being instrumental. The niceness towards yourself or respect or vigilance toward yourself. Self discipline ends up being instrumental in your primary duty. But in effect, even though the protection of one's parents is the most important one, the thing you have to worry about first is yourself, because otherwise you can't do the primary thing.

38:47 Krishnan: In a way, the most Mencian texts in the west are the novels of Jane Austen, because both see the cultivation of a kind of sensitivity, the ability to be moved, the awareness of the whole of a situation. Right. The awareness of the particular person you're dealing with and what they need and the cultivation of your own self, the sensitivity to your own self that's most displayed there, the daily centrality of those preoccupations. You know, for a thoughtful person, this is what we actually spend most of the day kind of like wrestling with that is better treated in the 19th century novel in the west than in philosophy. Hume is moved by this one thing.

39:24 Wes: She's also translating what might be harsh criticisms of people right into gentle teasing. Right? That's the whole tone of her send up of the silliness of certain characters. And so human beings are fallible, but it's okay. And it's even funny.

39:39 Dylan: Just in Pride and Prejudice, the whole challenge of the father finding spouses for all of his children, right. And a kind of obligation that comes from that. And there's funny things about it, but there's also real world consequences of it. I mean, that's sort of what Elizabeth's. Part of Elizabeth's challenge, right, is her sister Lydia going off with the wrong kind of guy ends up causing real problems for Lydia and for the rest of the family. But this isn't a podcast about Jane Austen. This episode is about Jane Austen. We have to be careful about our rules. We're dropping a text that we haven't done at all.

40:10 Wes: But you could listen to the episode of Subtext that I did with Aaron on that. But anyway, all right.

40:17 Mark: With that plug, I know you have to run. Thank you so much, Krishnan for joining us for this and giving us, you know, this really good general orientation of how to read these kind of texts in comparison with Western texts.

40:28 Krishnan: Thank you for having me.

40:29 Wes: Yeah, thank you.

40:30 Dylan: Thanks for joining.

40:31 Wes: It was great.

40:32 Mark: That sounds like a good place to end Part one if you want to hear part two, if you're a Partially Examined Life supporter, there'll be next thing in your feed. Otherwise go to partiallyexaminedlife.com support. Why don't you sign up? Otherwise you'll hear next week. Thanks so much.

40:45 Krishnan: So long.