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

0:07 Mark: Hey, this is the Partially Examined Life Episode 314, Part 2, talking about Mencius or Mengzi. Except we just said Mencius throughout and our guest Krishnan and called him Mencius. So I guess we're calling him Mencius. The Mengzi is the current preferred, culturally respectable way to refer to him.

0:26 Dylan: Yeah, Mencius is the Latinized version of his name and then Mengzu or Mengzi is the master Meng.

0:35 Mark: I did learn watching an actual Chinese professor talking about some of these. The reason between the Z and the zoo is because it's just Z. Mengzi, M, E, N, G, Z. Full stop. So you got to put some vowel there. I think a schwa would make the most sense as opposed to Mengzi.

0:55 Dylan: Ah, thank you for the clarification.

0:57 Mark: I don't know if we really put this guy in perspective. I think it was sort of implicit in part one. We had our Confucius episode. People should definitely go back and listen to that. Or Kongfuzi as nobody in America calls him, I think. But maybe, maybe I'm wrong here. Maybe this seems to be changed all the time. We had to do like the Daodejing, the philosophical translation, the Ames, so somebody would explain because it's very aphoristic, it's very fragmented. But the great thing about Chuang Tzu as a follow up to the Dao Te Ching to Lao Tzu and Mengzi as a follow up to Confucius is that Zhuangzi and Mengzi actually.

Right. In a way you can understand. And I don't feel like we had to consult several different translations. I mean, there are certain terms, like the Xin meaning mind, but it also means heart. So it's the heart mind. Like, it's nice that we kind of already dealt with that in the Dao Te Ching, but I didn't feel like there was things that were just so bizarre in what I was reading in Mencius here that I need to see other translations. So we looked at, I want to say the Ivanhoe, but he actually just wrote the intro.

1:58 Dylan: It's the Irene Bloom.

1:59 Mark: Yes. It said in the intro that she had had health problems or something.

2:02 Wes: The one that Krishnan was using. Which one was that one again? Because I think that sounded better. This one is a little bit difficult to read. And the one Krishnan was using sounded much more smooth.

2:13 Dylan: It was much more informative about relationships. And in here, it's like reading a Russian novel where you have diminutives and they imply relationships like between father and

2:24 Wes: son and the parts with all the names of people. Marx just like, skip it after I'd already struggled through it.

2:32 Mark: But he says he has the Hinton, so maybe he's reading the Hinton and the Bryan Van Norden. So I actually got on Audible, the audiobook, with Van Norden, reading his translation, which includes traditional commentaries, he says, which is mostly this guy Zhu Xi, who's very influenced by Buddhism several centuries later. But he was like an important person who, just like Mencius, gave us the version of Confucius that everybody understands. Zhu Xi apparently did that to Mencius. I didn't find the commentary that enlightening as an audio reading experience.

After having just done the Brothers Karamazov, it was not ideal because of this name soup. Is it better to follow Yang and Wu or Ji and Un? Like no, and just weird, like quotes within quotes. There's a lot of things that make it not ideal for a listening experience. But on the other hand, I got to just get through the whole book to sort of see for myself, like, okay, which are the parts that are making my eyes glaze over and which the parts that are really making me want to pause and think about something.

3:35 Dylan: We should get two A6. We've mentioned sprouts, but we should.

3:38 Mark: Yeah, start with that. That was, like, what I thought, because we said we're going to 2, 4, and 6, but the beginning of 2 is like the worst of what we read in terms of just name Soup. But yeah, 2A6 was great.

3:51 Dylan: Why don't we just read a chunk of it? None of these are long so all human beings have a mind that cannot bear to see the sufferings of others. Ancient kings had such a commiserating mind and accordingly, a commiserating government having a commiserating mind and affecting a commiserating government governing the world was like turning something around on the palm of the hand. Here is why I say that all human beings have a mind that commiserates with others. Now, if anyone were suddenly to see a child about to fall into a well, his mind would be filled with alarm, distress, pity, and compassion.

That he would react accordingly is not because he would hope to use the opportunity to ingratiate himself with a child's parents, not because he would seek commendation from neighbors and friends, not because he would hate the adverse reputation that could come from not reacting accordingly. From this it may be seen that one who lacks a mind that feels pity and compassion would not be human. One who lacks a mind that feels shame and aversion would not be human. One who lacks a mind that feels modesty and compliance would not be human. And one who lacks a mind that knows right and wrong would not be human.

The mind's feeling of pity and compassion is the sprout of humanness. Ren the mind's feeling of shame and aversion is the sprout of rightness. Yi the mind's feeling of modesty and compliance is the sprout of propriety. Li and the mind's sense of right and wrong is the sprout of wisdom. Human beings have these four sprouts, just as they have four limbs.

5:18 Mark: I had started the whole thing off with the question, what is human nature? And apparently Confucius didn't necessarily think this. But Mengzi is known. His most important doctrine is that people are fundamentally good. Because we have these sprouts, we have the potential. So there's you end up doing sort of a theodicy like, well, aren't there people who are completely heartless? Well, but we all would have this reaction to the person falling in the well, we might not all like jump up and help the person, but we'd all at least have that feeling of sympathy. So that's the Humean starting point that you were talking about.

5:51 Wes: Unless we're sociopaths. But to the extent we have a conscience. Right. I think there's something really important here which reminds me of the concept of acceptance in Hart in our philosophy of law episode. In this case, he's saying this natural compassionate distress at seeing someone in pain or in misfortune. But it's not just because you fear consequences, Right? It's something that runs much deeper than that. We're talking here about ultimately the way conscience is structured. If we were to use a positivist, something analogous to the positivist construction, it's because we fear the pain, we fear the sting of conscience.

But in this case we actually accept the norms. It's not like someone holding a gun to her head and saying, you know, well, I don't want to feel guilty about this, so I'm going to do the right thing. It is the right thing. It's a norm that I actually accept. I see the norm as legitimate. I'm out on a bit of a stretch here because this is really more focused on the compassion. But anyway, I think these two things are linked. This, the moral imperative here is not just some kind of externality. Whether it's fear of consequences from others, their disapproval, or whether it's just fear of my own disapproval.

It even runs deeper than that, this

7:04 Dylan: word commiserating that's used. And I don't have any judgment whether or not it's exactly the right word for the translation, but it does bring across the idea that it's in your. A kind of recognition and a likeness and compassion that's happening. You're feeling the pain of, in this case, of the child at the well. You're also feeling the pull of needing to help them. Right? So it's not just that you're fearing for a compassion. This is, oh, I can imagine what that feels like, that you have the pull to do something about it, to rectify it. Even if you don't do it, you

7:42 Wes: might be a completely vicious person, you know, completely lacking of any virtue. In other words, you haven't cultivated these sprouts at all. So you might not do anything and you might even have lots of Cynical ideas about morality. And you might tell yourself that you don't care that much, but there is ultimately this core emotional response and it can be grown and it can be extended. Like the example of the ox, you know, the king with the. Who feels pity for the ox that's about to be sacrificed because it's visible and in his face. And then the question is, how do you make that more abstract?

Right, because you might ignore the suffering of your own people just because you don't see it. We're very visceral in that sense. And so to cultivate that particular tendency in ourselves means we have to extend and expand it in a particular way. So just the feeling is not enough, but it's a start.

8:33 Mark: So this is technically a fallacy. I feel like we should bring up the names of fallacies when they come up. But the no true Scotsman fallacy. No Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge. Hey, but my uncle Angus is a Scotsman and he puts sugar on his porridge. Yes, but no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge. It is a way of defending your generalization by equivocating about making the subject of the first generalization less strong. If you're going to say it is human nature that we will all react to a child falling in a well this way. And you say, well, what about psychopaths? Well, psychopaths are not actually human or something. I mean, that's what he literally says.

9:13 Wes: This is the weird thing about a nature though, right? Because some things are not true to type. You can say human beings are bipedal, but pointing to someone with a leg cut off, that kind of counter example doesn't refute that. Right. So you can't say, well, human beings are bipedal means all human beings have two legs. That's not true. But all things being equal, they would. So there's a natural tendency there. So maybe it's the case that you can find people who are completely sociopathic without any conscience. But the argument is that whatever is sprouts of that that they had as a child was quashed. It would have grown. Its growth is as natural as water going downwards. But someone put a dam up, someone perverted it, distorted it.

9:51 Dylan: We have different criteria for wanting to maintain that a sociopath is a human being. I would submit that you get into a slightly different argument. Maybe. Maybe your point actually wes about it, no matter how damned up it would be, you wouldn't deny that they had that aspect to them.

10:09 Wes: Yeah, you could say there is a disposition There that's completely unexpressed. Right. In the same way that someone lacking legs, there's. It's part of the genetic blueprint, it's part of the normal development, all that stuff. So that's all things being equal clause or cateris paribus. If you're talking about triangles, triangles are just true to type. And you know that anything you assert about the essence of a triangle is gonna hold. But a lot of things about that we want to talk about the essence or nature of don't work that way. So we'll find counter examples to their nature.

10:39 Dylan: Apples aren't true to type. If you have a sweet apple and you take its seeds and grow it, it won't necessarily grow an apple tree that grows sweet apples.

10:47 Mark: What is the generalization that you would be making that would then? I'm not sure.

10:51 Dylan: Well, I'm just giving a biological example of this true to type business. But I think what Wes is talking about is while giving the example that triangles are true to type, all triangles have certain things that are always true about them. Whereas if we start talking about something that's true, things that are true about all human beings, it doesn't mean that they will manifest all of those things in the same way all the time. Whereas a triangle will always have. Every triangle will have 180 degrees worth of angles in it, no matter what.

11:23 Mark: So what would we say about. Everybody has the potential to be very evil. So you could have sprouts of that. I'm thinking about in. In those later Star wars movies where the guy is killing Han Solo, his dad, spoiler and says thank you. I was able to, you know, that this was one of the things he had to overcome. He had to get rid of the filial piety in order to like truly actualize his, you know. So it seems like Mencius is going to want to rule that out. That that's not in human nature. It's not that human nature could go any which way and has multiple avenues of potential legitimate growth. There's only one.

11:59 Wes: One theory would be, well, we have these two internal tendencies, one towards good and one towards evil. And then we could cultivate one or the other. The other model, the Mencius model, is that there is only one internal propensity in us and that's towards goodness. But it can be thwarted. Something like that.

12:18 Dylan: Corruption is not going to be a fundamental tendency, but it is a possibility that could happen. Right.

12:26 Wes: So 6A4 and 6A5 get into this external versus internal thing.

12:31 Mark: It's a weird section because I feel like Mencius position against this guy Gaozi is just that your distinction between internal and external doesn't make any sense. So let's go ahead and lay it out and maybe we'll have our own version of what this means.

12:45 Wes: Should we just give a lead up in the previous sections to this in 6A2. Human nature does not distinguish between good and not good any more than water distinguishes between east and west, according to Gaozi, the opponent. So I gave two different theories for this, but there's a third which is just that, there's no internal propensity towards either. Right?

13:06 Dylan: But Mencius's reply, right, it doesn't distinguish between east and west, but it does not fail to distinguish between up and down. The goodness of human nature is like the downward course of water. There's no human being lacking in the tendency to do good, just as there is no water lacking in the tendency to flow downward.

13:23 Wes: Now by striking water and splashing it, you may cause it to go over your head. And by damming and channeling it, you can force it to flow uphill. But is this the nature of water? It is the force that makes this happen. While people can be made to do what is not good, what happens to their nature is like this. You know, we see these types of arguments today in terms of. So we might see certain tendencies like sexism or misogyny, let's say, as part of biology. And, you know, or let's just take aggression, right? You might say, well, human beings inherently have aggression and culture is there to channel that in constructive ways and to limit that, right?

And then we get repression, both at an individual psychological level and we think of morality that way we have to repress the instinctuals, some of the, some of the bad instincts. But the other more Rousseauian idea is that, well, we're by nature good. And then culture, civilization corrupts us. So civilization can either enhance that good nature or it can actually corrupt us.

14:25 Seth: It feels like a Mencius is more Rousseau than the alternative. There was a passage in connection with this concept of sprouting. He's talking about the way children behave. A child who's nourished appropriately and tended to is not going to be. And I'm talking about like when they're very, very young, is not going to be aggressive, they're going to be, I don't want to use the word compassionate, but the instinctive response in the parent child relationship is care and tending and attentiveness and so on. And so, you know, if you tie it to this notion of the familial model being the root.

Then there's the familial bond, there's a developmental bond. And if you cultivate that appropriately, you should expect to see respect, compassion, and so forth. And if you thwart it, then you expect to see disrespect. But I think that's where the normative piece about the way this is structured comes from.

15:23 Wes: Gaozi in 6A4 he's going to say something like what I just said about human instincts, right? So appetites for food and sex are human nature. Humaneness is internal rather than external. Rightness is external rather than internal. So this gets a little bit subtle. So we think of an opposition between rightness and appetite. For instance, then we have Gaozi saying something like, we have these unruly appetites and we need to use reason and society, civilization to combat them. And you know, so we get rightness out of that. And Mencius disagrees.

15:58 Mark: Just to clarify, though, humaneness, Gaozi is saying, is internal. It's not just the unruly appetites, it's all the appetites, including compassion. And that actually seems correct to me. I agree with Mencius that if you see something terrible happen in front of you, see a person falling in a well, you have this alarm. We have this compassion built into us, unless we're professional assassins that have rooted this out in some sort of systematic way. But the rightness of, you know, the culturally relative stuff, I would say so how much respect exactly you have for your parents.

I think one of the reasons that I wanted to read that whole oh, nothing else is going to be any good for you. You could have all the love of everybody around you and you could have honors. But if you don't have the approval of your parents, it's going to be empty. I don't think that's universal at all. I think it's very culturally specific. There's something related to, you know, of course, upbringing is important and you know, we, we kind of touched on this. But the specific attitudes that in Asian countries they have to their parents is simply different than we have in the West.

And so it seems like that's a good reason for saying that is external rather than internal in its origin. Of course, once you've internalized it, it's internal.

17:09 Wes: Gaozi said, here's my younger brother, I love him. This is part of the whole humaneness being internal. There's the younger brother of a man from Qin him I do not love. The feeling derives from me and therefore I describe it as internal. I treat an elder from Chu as old, just as I treat our own elders as old, so treats them with respect. The feeling derives from their age, and therefore I call external. So in other words, I am behaving towards certain people with propriety and respect because of their particular role and society. And that's something that's learned. It's not based on any internal feeling in me because they're not my father, they're not my elder. Right. It's not part of my familial feeling, but my feelings for my family are internal. And so. Yeah. How does Mencius respond to that?

17:54 Mark: With a metaphor. Mencius said our fondness for the roast meat provided by a man of Qin is no different than our fondness for the roast meat provided by one of our own people. Since this is also the case with the material thing, would you say that our fondness for roast meat is external as well? That's pretty weird. That's just like. Well, of course it's internal because it's your reaction to the meat. I don't feel like that's A good response.

18:17 Wes: 6 A 5 is a more extended response, but it mainly involves these other characters. So why do you say that rightness is internal. You're enacting our respect, and therefore it is internal. And then there's this example of, you know, who would you respect more? Your older brother or a villager? Well, it depends on their role. I'm not going to be able to. Can someone explain this in a coherent way? Are you at 6A 4, 6A 5? Now, so suppose they were a villager who was one year older than your older brother. Whom would you respect? I would respect my older brother. So I see there's respect ideas being in line with rightness. Right? Not with humaneness.

18:55 Mark: But this person is saying that rightness is internal.

18:59 Wes: Right. For whom would you pour wine first when serving at a feast? I would pour it first for the villager. You respect the one, but you treat the other as older. So in the end, rightness is an external and not internal, which is to say the person you're putting at the head of the table depends on their particular role in some social circumstance. Right. It's customary. And then there may be conflicts and you have to decide. So you pour wine or certain types of respect are due to different social roles or something.

19:28 Mark: What's being pulled apart here, according to the opponent of Mencius, is that you respect your elder brother, which is actually lines up with humaneness in the previous section, and the response is that that's different than. Even though you respect him more than an older guy who you don't know as well, you would still serve the older guy first because that's the custom. So clearly respect, like humaneness, is actually internal of this sort, whereas just obeying the custom, like, well, the custom is externally imposed.

19:56 Seth: Well, he asked Mencius and what he essentially says is he draws an analogy to 6A4 talking about the respect for old. He's basically saying that the proper expression of respect is situational and therefore it's external.

20:13 Wes: Isn't he saying, I thought the Mencius

20:14 Mark: response is that everything is internal.

20:16 Wes: Yeah. So respect is after all determined by externals and is not. Well, Gigi hurt him say this. And then. So respect, after all is determined by externals and not internally motivated.

20:26 Mark: And again, the final response from the mentioned point of view is a metaphor. In the winter we drink hot water, while in the summer we drink cold water. Does this mean that drinking and eating too are externally determined?

20:38 Wes: So in other words, yes, it's situational, but that doesn't mean we're just tabula rasas in which the situational imprints itself. It hooks into our natural feelings and in something that's internal. And this actually, I think is a strong argument. I think this is something people get wrong when they talk a lot about social construction as if there's nothing. As if it's completely a blank canvas and you could construct anything there that you want. And the idea here is that there's a human nature and whatever these externalities, they have to link into that in some way to have any causal effect.

21:12 Dylan: In the case with the water, human beings need water, they drink water even if they drink warm water in the summer and cold water in the winter.

21:20 Seth: Well, what I think also what I was trying to say was that the proper application is externally determined. But what you're saying is that the motivation or the feeling or the sensation itself is internal.

21:31 Wes: Yeah. For it to be motivational, there's got to be something internal.

21:34 Dylan: It's like the sentiments, that's the mechanism. And whether or not that mechanism is necessarily working right or wrong, is a slightly different question. I mean, it's also to me aligns with the potentials that you have. Right. It's the things that are available in working in the. In a human being. You know, consequence of his claim that human beings are inherently good, that needs to be cultivated. And also that cases of human beings being bad or not acting good is typically a lack of cultivation of that Ability. Similarly, the best rulers will cultivate benevolent action with respect to their people.

They're ruling and be concerned with their flourishing because that is tying into the way in which human beings are. I think that he would go so far as to say that, and that in the cases where things are going badly, people are suffering, the state is failing to thrive, all those things are related to him. And that all comes down to you are going against. Now, this is a kind of Western way to put it. You're going against your human nature and the nature of human beings by those activities in your political arena and where you're trying to force people to act certain ways, you're using violence in order to suppress them or to make them do things.

All of those are against their inherent human nature. And in the way in which human societies work best, they aren't in the way in which they work. And when you go against that way, then things don't work.

23:10 Wes: Well, there's a good statement of this in 6 a 6 actually much clearer statement than the things we've been looking at.

23:16 Seth: Right.

23:17 Wes: Because this notion of internality is directly connected to the idea of our natural goodness. So on page 124, Mencius said, one's natural tendencies enable one to do good. This is what I mean by human nature being good. When one does what is not good, it is not the fault of one's native capacities. The mind of pity and commiseration is possessed by all human beings. The mind of shame and dislike is possessed by all human beings. Right. So pity, humaneness, respectfulness and reverence. Shame and dislike. Yeah, these all are connected to the virtues.

So the mind of respectfulness and reverence is possessed by all human beings. And the mind that knows right and wrong is possessed by all humanity, human beings. The mind of pity and commiseration is humaneness. The mind of shame and dislike is rightness. The mind of respectfulness and reverence is propriety. And the mind that knows right and wrong is wisdom. Humaneness, rightness, propriety, and wisdom are not infused in us from without. That's the really important part. We definitely possess them. It is just that we do not think about it. That is all.

Therefore, it is said, seek and you will get it. Let go and you will lose it. That some differ from others by as much as twice or five times or an incalculable order of magnitude is because there are those who are unable to fully develop their capacities, which is what Dylan was just talking about. So you, you thwart this innate tendency. It's not that there's just all these evil impulses that haven't been conquered.

24:39 Mark: Some of this I was wondering, like, was he aware of the Taoists? Because there's no explicit reference to the Taoists. But the Taoists, you know, do talk a lot about nature and sort of what human nature and doing and that's their critique of Confucianism seemingly is that Confucianism is this foreign thing. It's external is these social standards that are trying to mold you into something that you're really not. I know one of the people he actually does talk about, he talks about the Moists which. The Confucian critique of moism is exactly that thing, you know, if you say impartial care.

Impartial care, well, that's something that the Confucian thinks is unnatural. See, it talks about. Oh that. You know, you think there are two routes to human nature. One is human nature and the other one is the moist doctrine. Like you're going to be torn apart, you're going to lack integrity. If you try to like spray this doctrine all over yourself to mold yourself, you know that. That has this improper view of human nature as if it were water that would flow in any given direction and not just mostly downwards. The other person that is referred to as Yang Zhu who in the Van Norden intro he talked about.

I don't know if we have texts of him, but anyway he had this view of ethical egoism that what human nature is, contra Confucius is pursuing your own self interest. Is there a particular Platonic somebody who responds to Plato in one of the dialogues who this lines up exactly with?

26:03 Wes: Say it again. What it's lining up with every human nature is selfish.

26:06 Dylan: Well, I mean there's someone like Thrasymachus, right in Plato's Republic that says that justice is the will, the stronger. It's aligned with what you just described.

26:15 Mark: I don't know enough of Yang Zhu's full philosophy to say is that just human nature but human nature is bad and needs to be controlled like Hobbes or is actually the Thrasymachus like yeah, and if justice follows human nature, if the way of heaven follows human nature, then that gives you a whole justice is the stronger. Maybe even a Schopenhauerian. What nature ultimately is is self seeking, chaotic, you know, some kind of weird stuff like that. In any case, Mencius is trying to cut right between those that it's not that we're fully selfish and it's not that we are fully malleable, it's that we have this differential care, as we talked about in the first half here, that it is natural for us to feel affection for our family, and then we expand that circle of concern.

26:57 Wes: You were saying it sounds Taoist, and I had that impression at 2A2 where he's talking about chi. He's talking about it politically at first, but when the will goes forward, the qi follows it. When the will is unified, it moves the chi, whereas if the chi is unified, it moves the will. And then the qi is consummately great and consummately strong. If one nourishes it with uprightness, it does not injure it. It will fill the space between heaven and earth. The chi is the companion of rightness and the way, which is Dao. Right. In the absence of which, it starves.

It is born from an accumulation of rightness rather than appropriated through an isolated display. If one's actions cause the mind to be disquieted, it starves. I therefore said that Gaozi did not understand rightness because he regarded it as external. Maybe this differs from Taoism in the sense that there's the emphasis on cultivation, which might be through ritual and propriety. Right. Where the Taoists would want to say, actually, you just got to let go, man, be non coercive. Then it'll express itself. Right. But for the Confucians and for Mencius, it seems like.

Well, actually, to get the Qi flowing, you're going to be doing these cultural, social, ritual things to get it in order.

28:12 Dylan: Well, I think that's right. They're both making an interpretation of the way. There's an agreement that a the way or nature is the thing that needs to be paid attention to. But there are different interpretations of what it means to pay attention to it. And there's definitely the strong thread of cultivation. Otherwise you can get out of alignment with the way. And that, I guess, contrasts with the Taoists. The Taoist, at least in the Dao Te Ching, it does feel a lot more, for lack of a better term, sort of Buddhist. You need to remove obstacles, remove things away, akin to a kind of emptiness or emptying of the things that get in the way of following the way, as opposed to positively cultivating one's potential to follow the way.

29:03 Mark: So I found it's in the intro to the Van Norden translation. I remember talking about chi since we threw this out here. Chi is not a concept that's talked much about in this book, and I didn't think it was in the Daodejing either, but it's a good way of highlighting how different their conceptual scheme is from what we're working with. It's been rendered in various ways, including ether, material force and psychophysical stuff. But there's really no adequate translation for Mengzi and his contemporaries. Chi, spelled qi, is a kind of fluid found in the atmosphere and in the human body, closely connected to the kind and intensity of one's emotional reactions.

Chi is physically embodied emotion. Here's an example. If you're with a group of people in someone's living room, someone tries to make an offhand joke, but it ends up sounding like a cutting personal criticism of another guest. It suddenly seems as if the atmosphere in the room has literally changed. Feels like there's something palpably heavy in the air, making further conversation awkward. This something is a kind of negative qi, which is both an expression and reinforcement of the feelings of those present. So pretty much vibes.

30:03 Wes: There is in the. In the Dao Te Ching talk of the qi. You know, if you look at our philosophical translation, there's a ton of mentions in the commentary in the introduction, it's not as prevalent in the actual text. So in chapter 10, in caring about your more spiritual and more physical aspects and embracing their oneness, are you able to keep them from separating? In concentrating your chi and making it pliant, are you able to become the newborn babe? In scrubbing and cleansing your profound mirror, are you able to rid it of all imperfections? So it does sound like this idea of making your qi pliant and becoming like a newborn babe sounds very different than cultivating it through, say, ritual, for instance, or through one's propriety and one's social relations and so on.

30:48 Mark: We can probably put a pin in that. I think there are Buddhist texts and things that talk about chi like crazy.

30:54 Wes: Chapter 42, not to belabor the Taoist thing, but chapter 42, it comes up in the context of yin and yang. So everything carries yin on his shoulders and yang in its arms. It blends these vital energies, chi together and makes them harmonious.

31:08 Mark: So I wonder if that contributes to this. Talk of human beings is relational. That, of course, makes sense in an Aristotelian context of man is fundamentally a social animal. And so this is something, you know, within the Western tradition that we've long raged against, that if you're looking at Hegel's master slave thing, if you're looking. There are all these ways in which interpersonality is fundamental, that we are not just isolated blobs of selfish humanity, that with these uncontrollable urges that need to be tamped in that the whole reason ethics works is because we have built in connections to other people, compassion for other people.

But I wonder if interpreting that psychologically, that saying, yes, we all have compassion built in. And in fact, our neuroscience Patricia Churchland episode was all about this. Like how, yes, it's Mencius's theory of human nature has been confirmed, that we can measure it with brain science.

32:02 Wes: Did she mention Mencius?

32:04 Mark: No, no.

32:05 Wes: Okay.

32:05 Mark: But she does mention Hume, but that seems to leave out this. Not that. No, you could actually, just like we were debating within the dao de jing, can you give a metaphysical. Does it all have to be psychological or. It can be metaphysical. And once you bring in chi as this idea that there are sort of literal stuff flowing between us, you bring in a whole new dimension to the ways in which we could be not isolated, we could be interpersonal. That is just very foreign to, you know, a scientifically minded Western person.

32:34 Dylan: Well, it depends on how much I mean. And yes, if you stand on it being physical as opposed to being analogical, you're right. It's like weighing your soul.

32:43 Seth: 21 grams.

32:45 Wes: You know, part of the idea is that just there'd be no way to socialize people into ethical feelings if they weren't already innately there.

32:54 Dylan: Right?

32:54 Wes: So you could threaten people. This comes up in the text as well. And again, I'm reminded of Hart. But you could say, all right, you're going to behave, Are you going to get punished? And you could build out orderly human behavior on that model. And as a ruler, right, you could try to oppress and punish people to make them do what you want to do. And Mencius says that that inevitably is going to fail and you need to be benevolent and you need to give the people what they need so that then you know, and it's not just about having enough to eat for its own sake, but it's also, you know, you need that so that they can cultivate themselves morally.

But anyway, you couldn't induce some sort of ethical nature in people by fear of punishment. It has to be there. That ethical nature has to be there already. And the capacity to see norms as legitimate, right, as opposed to just imposed by force, has to be there. I have to be able to say, I'm not hurting another person just because it's illegal or even because my conscience is going to sting me. But it's a legitimate norm. It's not right to do that. I think that's a very profound insight to say that you can't get away from the internality of that.

You can say, yes, I have to punish my children a lot. And all kinds of social stuff has to happen before you breed, to use the Nietzsche term, right before you breed an animal who can make a promise before you get that out of people. But you have to have the right clay to work with.

34:14 Mark: The next one is 6A7. In the years of abundance, most of the young people have the wherewithal to be good, while in years of adversity, most of them become violent. This is not a matter of difference in the native capacity sent down by heaven, but rather what overwhelms their mind. So in the Mozi discussion that came up, how do you make people bad will deprive them? That's a great way to do it.

34:36 Wes: And then he talks about tastes being ultimately.

34:38 Mark: That is weird. That's a weird section.

34:40 Wes: So I was thinking in this section about the Hume, Humean concept of taste. So I mean, the conclusion is, therefore I say, mouths find savor in the same flavors. Ears find satisfaction in the same sounds. Eyes find pleasure in the same beauty. Which is not to say that people don't have different tastes in the small T sense, that they can't have different musical interests and so on. But at bottom, right, you could give a theory of aesthetics that talks about something universal and that appeals to human nature. Right. Taste with a capital T in the. In the human sense.

35:11 Mark: I thought it was small T, T,

35:13 Wes: but all right, I'm trying to save the appearances here, but go for it.

35:16 Mark: When it comes to sounds, everyone in the world takes music Master Kuang as the standard because the ears of everyone are similar. That seems such a provincial pre reflective take on tastes.

35:27 Wes: Yeah, I thought by the end of it, you know, you could kind of save this. You could give this. Maybe it's a bit of a stretch, but a charitable reading in which you'd say, okay, I think, you know, a fundamental aesthetics is the issue here.

35:38 Seth: The last sentence kind of puts the lie to that, you know, thus order and rightness please our minds in the same way that meat pleases our mouths.

35:45 Wes: All right, a little bit oversimplified, but

35:48 Mark: I like the idea that there is something order and rightness, comparing it to our aesthetics discussion, that there are certain things like symmetry, you know, that are just inherently appealing. And maybe when you get into the details, you could have all the really name droppy sections in here. I felt like, I was like, do you think that the Hulk could beat Spider Man? It's just we're not familiar with These names that they're throwing around. But there's a lot of debate about, like, who is actually the most virtuous. Here's these three sages, and they're each good in some way.

And Confucius was the magic medley of the three. If you remember this section, Mengzi wants to ultimately say all these things could be sorted out. There actually is a right answer as to who is the most virtuous. But I think we could accept that, no, there are things that are innate, but then there are going to be. Because wisdom, because judgment is so important here. There are going to be differences, opinion within these different types of virtue or gradations.

36:47 Wes: You were alluding to, I think, the internal sense theorists that we had, right? There's a reason why the metaphor, taste and aesthetics came along a little bit later. That word from the German tradition. But the word taste was all the rage. And it. And it really rested on the idea of internal sense theory in the sense that it's not just something rational, it really is something visceral, which is very similar to what Mencius is saying at the end of this section, right. If it's like meat pleasing our mouths, which is to say it's not like we have something on our face, right? A physical sense, sensory apparatus that gets at the aesthetic. But nevertheless, it works a lot like that.

37:23 Dylan: It works like that for all human beings in a very similar way, just like every human being is, by the structure of their tasting faculties. Even if they're vegetarian, they would find something about the umami of roast meat attractive.

37:38 Mark: You say, I'm a vegetarian. I'm disgusted by meat. Well, you've been warped. Everyone in the world finds this. Well, you're off of your own world. You've been war.

37:47 Dylan: What I'm saying is that you are resisting, and maybe rightly so, a kind of natural tendency in yourself. I'm just saying, I mean, just like human beings, water flows downhill. Roast meat smells good, even if you don't want to eat it.

38:03 Wes: You know, man is good and so is roast beef.

38:06 Seth: I certainly think I agree with that. But, Mark, going back to your previous point about the sages, there's a reference in. I think it's the Stanford. Whoever wrote the Stanford article mentions that, you know, he's talking about the three sages who had cultivated different virtues. I don't want to say they cultivated different virtues, but their excellence was in three different virtues. And as you said, Confucius somehow brought them together in the sense that he was timely in that he knew how to apply any of those virtues in exactly the right situation, I think is the implication.

And the commentary in the Stanford says that's why that's the highest of virtues and why he was the most virtuous of men or whatever. But the implication is that if any of those sages had switched places, they would not have carried their individual excellence with them. They would have been excellent in the same way as the other sage in that same situation. In other words, they would have cultivated.

38:58 Mark: I do want to just reinforce what Seth just said. Just that that is a really important point, that the sage. There is a right answer. All the sages would act the same. There's a particularity in the ethics. Right. It's situational, but it's not relativist at all.

39:12 Seth: That's a really good way of putting it.

39:14 Wes: 5B1, we're talking about Bo Yi, Yi Yin and Liuxia Hui. So on page 111 it kind of the wrap up. I'll just start with the wrap up because it'll make the rest clear. But Mencia said Boyi was the sage who was pure. Yi Yin was the sage who was responsible. Liuxia Hui was the sage who was accommodating. Confucius was the sage who was timely. Timely in the sense he could adjust himself circumstantially to be one or other, have one of or other of those virtues, depending on whether they were needed in that moment. So with Confucius, there was the perfect ensemble.

And if you back up, you get more explication of the particular virtues of those different sages. Yi Yin, in times of good government, he came forward. In circumstances of disorder, he also came forward. Whereas Boyi, when conditions were orderly, he would advance. When conditions were disorderly, he would retire. You actually have these sages doing conflicting things.

40:19 Seth: The metaphor that's carried through the end of the paragraph, and there's some explication of it in the footnote, is musical. So it's referring to musical harmony. So maybe the individual stages are like rhythm, harmony and beat. And Confucius is the one who brings them all together into a full song or something like that. That's the implication.

40:42 Wes: Are the different tones of a chord harmonizing in a chord?

40:46 Seth: Yeah, but then there's a mixed metaphor at the end, which I actually quite liked, but it doesn't accord with the musical one, which is it's like shooting an arrow from a distance of 100 paces. That you reach the target is a matter of strength. That you hit the mark is not a matter of strength. He's talking about the difference between wisdom and sageliness.

41:09 Wes: Wisdom is like skill and sageliness is like strength.

41:12 Seth: This goes back to what I was saying previously. It's the implication that the possession of wisdom is one thing. The proper application of wisdom in the right context is another thing. That sageliness, which again, internal versus external, it's situational, I think situation, that's just the perfect way to capture.

41:33 Mark: So it's the different virtues that you might think, oh, everything boils down to love or something. Maybe that's the proper way to interpret Mozi is that it's all just impartial care, universal love, however you want to. But there are distinct virtues for Mencius. And it brings me to the mind of when we talked about Aristotle. We spent like a whole session on the distinct intellectual virtues. And I don't remember the list, but like it was when I initially see these things, like, well, this one is rightness, but this one is wisdom. And this one, I'm just like.

It sounds like you're making lists just because you like to make lists. But I really do think they put a lot in here and this is one of the place where they get pulled apart. So Bo Yi would not allow his eyes to look at a bad sight or his ears to listen to a bad sound. I remember Zhuangzi criticizing the Confucian that they're too particular, right? They can't just be happy, whatever goes on. It's a virtue in Confucius to frown when something is something you should frown about, whereas some of these other ones are. This one was accommodating, this one was, you know, trying to serve and all.

So these are just things that somehow have to be balanced. They sound like Righteous indignation, I always feel like is a very unchristian thing. Why don't you stop being so judgy and focus on how Jesus said to love everybody. But you know, that kind of Christian thinks that no, there are independent. It's not just love, it's also righteous indignation, which is right in here. This, this whole rightness, its sprout is the feeling of being pissed off by something exactly like that's actually a sprout of wisdom, not just love.

43:08 Seth: Dislike indignation when directed at the appropriate object.

43:13 Wes: The thymotic part of the soul.

43:15 Dylan: Yeah.

43:16 Mark: All right, well, there is certainly a lot more in here to talk about, so I'm glad we're having another discussion on it. If you would like to chime in with some thoughts, tell us other things we should read. I do think since this is the last, the one coming up will be the last one before the live show. I don't want to jump back into Chinese philosophy after the live show. I think we should give this a good long rest. But I'm willing to come back eventually and, you know, jump forward in the centuries or finish off the Warring States period. Connect this to Buddhism, finally bring in some some Chan, Zen, etc. But this is enough. Feel free to reach out to us pl partially examinedlife.com or through our our Facebook or Twitter or the contact form at our website to let us know what you'd like us to read next.

44:02 Wes: I think the Brothers Karamazov.

44:04 Mark: Yes.

44:05 Wes: April 15, New York City, partialexamlife.com Live for tickets.

44:11 Krishnan: Cool.

44:12 Mark: Thanks, everybody.

44:13 Krishnan: Good night.

44:14 Dylan: Good night.

44:14 Seth: Good night.

44:15 Wes: Good night.