SOURCE: Yearley, Lee H. “An Existentialist Reading of Book 4 of the Analects.” In Confucius and the Analects: New Essays, edited by Bryan W. Van Norden, pp. 237-74. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

[In the following essay, Yearley advocates applying to the Analects the same modern scholarship methods that are used in studying the New Testament.]

I. INTRODUCTION

Among the more haunting of the many haunting passages in the Analects is the one that begins “The more I strain my gaze towards it, the higher it soars. The deeper I bore down into it, the harder it becomes. I see it in front; but suddenly it is behind” (Waley 9:10). The comment describes, it could be said, not only the Confucian Way but also the figure or, better, figures of Confucius that appear in the text, as well as the text itself, or at least significant parts of it.

A sober, scholarly way to put this is that we face in the Analects a classically indeterminate text, a text that can support either no single interpretation or a number of coherent ones. Solid historical reasons explain why the text manifests itself that way: it is, like the New Testament, a text that was composed by different hands with various agendas over the course of many years. (This is a comparsion to which we shall return.) Acknowledging this fact might tempt us to give up the hope of treating the Analects, and the figure of Confucius, as a source of guidance and challenge. Nevertheless, I still find the Analects to be a text I am drawn to, even fascinated by, as more than an important historical relic. (And this remains true even though I sometimes despair of meeting the challenge of teaching well or writing about this text in an illuminating way.) It is a text that suggests the presence of a seemingly powerful but surely elusive message. I know from the reactions that the Analects provokes among my students that I am not alone in this sense.

Moreover, I harbor the suspicion that the most significant reasons for both the sense of importance and the feeling of elusiveness the text provokes are that the crucial subjects of the Analects are the figure of Confucius and the topic of virtue. Neither virtues nor significant people, when well treated, lend themselves to clear, much less static pictures. Real virtues, that is, display themselves differently depending on the situation in which they manifest themselves. (The courageous person's courage may lead her either to flee or to stand firm, a difference that arises from the interaction of her character, thought, and the situation.) And virtuous persons share the quality of being unpredictable—a quality more ordinary people are notable for lacking. Furthermore (to make a comment for which I have only an empirical, not a philosophical, defense) the greater the person the more likely that our simple notions of the coherence of personality are inapplicable. The significant actions of such people, to put it one way, cannot be predicted before the fact, but they always seem both in character and appropriate after the fact. This situation helps explain, I believe, my continuing failures to capture the figure of Confucius, a failure illustrated by the following anecdote: Each year (for a very long time) I set myself the task, in a class on Confucianism, of giving a lecture on the figure of Confucius in the Analects. Each year I found it so inadequate that it was swiftly deposited in the waste basket.

One can of course decide, out of some combination of pain and humility, to surrender such grand ambitions and turn to the treatment of single passages or apparently closely related sets of passages. In some cases (such as the understanding of Confucius' “one thread” [in 4:15] and thus the interaction of zhōng and shù) this approach has led to significant philosophical and philological progress.¹ In other cases, we find evocative presentations that also have theoretical content. An example is the statement that “only when the year grows cold do we see that the pine and cypress are the last to fade” (Waley 9:27).² The notion so elegantly put here is one we also see in the Aristotelian tradition: virtues often appear clearly only in situations of stress.

Other strategies are, of course, possible, including ones that take the Analects as a whole and then examine either all of it or at least general themes in it. Proponents of this strategy usually justify their approach by noting that the book was traditionally read as a unified text—and they often add to this justification from traditional use the commendable idea that, like interpreters in the past, they aim to make the whole work relevant to their own age. In talented hands, this approach unquestionably produces significant results. Nevertheless, this approach is often connected with the rise (which we see in studies of both East Asian and Western texts) of what can be called a “new fundamentalism.” That approach, sometimes for sophisticated reasons, simply takes texts as they are and then interprets their message with little regard for issues about their composition, and even at times cultural context.

Despite the fact that all the approaches noted (as well as others) have integrity, I want here to do something quite different. My hope is to combine two sorts of approaches to classic texts that are often viewed (implicitly or explicitly) as in opposition. (These two approaches may be found in the study of the classic texts of many different traditions, including Christianity, Confucianism, and Buddhism, to name just three examples.) On the one hand, there are scholars who attempt to arrive at a scholarly, historically accurate representation of the meaning (or meanings) of the text in particular historical contexts. On the other hand, there are those who attempt to engage a text as a still viable teaching, one with relevance for how we should live our lives today. Those in the former camp sometimes accuse those in the latter of reading the text in a naive and anachronistic way. Those in the latter camp accuse those in the former of approaching the texts with a sort of secular objectivity that robs the letter of life, and is animated only by the desire to “debunk” and “unmask,” rather than to respect and venerate, the tradition. Both accusations are sometimes just.

Although these two approaches are now typically seen as in opposition, I think it is possible, and indeed necessary, to combine the two. If we are to live honestly, we must be able to read our classic texts in ways that do justice to them as products of real human history, with all its problems and foibles. On the other hand, if in our search for more accurate scholarship about the historical Confucius (or Jesus, or Buddha), we fail to ethically engage the challenge posed by that particular character for our own contemporary self-understanding, we have lost something very precious, and very important to being a human. My sense that it is both possible and necessary to combine two approaches arises from my understanding of what is probably the most sophisticated of all those critical traditions that have roots in the West's nineteenth century: the modern tradition of scholarship about the New Testament. Let me now try to show why I think that tradition is relevant to the study of the Analects.³

II. INTERPRETATIVE STRATEGIES: THE NEW TESTAMENT AND THE ANALECTS

I believe the application of this tradition of scholarship to the study of the Analects should prove to be useful given that the New Testament and the Analects manifest some remarkable structural similarities. Both texts present different views of a figure and his message whom many people took to be of immense importance, but whom no one seems to have been able to capture without remainder, or at least to capture to the satisfaction of other people who also were deeply moved by the figure. Moreover, both texts also bear the marks of different groups, in different times and cultural contexts, that attempted not only to render the figure in a way that they found satisfactory but also in a way that (in many cases at least) would cement their claims to authority. Questions about who wrote what, when, and for what purposes are, then, crucial in both cases, even if many answers to them are bound always to be unconvincing to some seasoned observers. Finally, both texts are ones that not only have oriented people's lives, but that at least some modern interpreters also believe should continue to orient people's live, despite the various difficulties they may present.⁴

A situation like this, almost inevitably it seems, leads many modern people to attempt to find the “real” person behind the various perspectives on that person. Those attempts can be remarkably clumsy, especially if they rest on the idea that we can have something like uninterpreted facts about the significant features of a human being. Other more sophisticated attempts, however, draw on historical, philological, and textual evidence to make judgments about what are the earliest sayings and descriptions of the figure. The results of even the most sophisticated approaches ought not, of course, lead us to think that we have captured the figure's essence, or even, necessarily, have a more accurate understanding. To use a Western example that has Chinese analogues: neither Paul nor Dante knew Jesus as he lived, and yet surely in the first case and arguably in the second, they knew Jesus in a real sense, and perhaps knew him far better than a sophisticated contemporary scholar who has good reasons for believing that she has uncovered the earliest set of sayings or actions by Jesus.⁵

The nontrivial reason this situation is true rests, I believe, on the notion that at least some figures invite or demand a response from us; that is, “knowing” them involves such a response. That notion, as we will see, rests on a subtle, and controversial, view of who humans are and how they perceive and think, one that is usually associated with the early Heidegger, and surely appears in Kierkegaard, where Heidegger probably found it. The New Testament scholar who most skillfully utilized the idea, a person closely associated with the early Heidegger in what was at minimum a reciprocal relationship, is Rudolf Bultmann, and I shall often employ features of his approach. I shall call it an “existentialist” approach for the purposes of easy identification (and examine certain features of it later in this paper), but I hope that the label is not too misleading, given the number of ideas that often gather under that term. I am not, needless to say, claiming that Confucius was an “existentialist” but rather that we can productively use an existentialist approach to interpret the Analects.⁶

I am, then, treating the Analects as if it is a sacred text about a founder. (If such religious language makes one squeamish, I could replace “sacred text” with “classic” and “founder” with “central dramatic persona,” but those replacements lose much of significance.) My examination will consider both how that text can be treated historically and read existentially. That is, I will take account of both the probable time and context of the text, but also argue that we today encounter it (or can encounter it) in a way that makes a difference to our present understanding and life.

The approach can be called experimental, but only if “experiment” is used in a nontechnical sense. That is, I make no claim that the experiment is simply replicable and could produce communal agreement from those able to judge. (I further address certain methodological concerns my approach may raise later in this paper.) It is, then, an experiment in the sense of an inquiry that is worth pursuing and may be of help to others, but it must also inevitably have a tentative quality.

III. THE RATIONALE FOR MY FOCUS ON BOOK 4 OF THE ANALECTS

I shall focus my attention on book 4 of the Analects for several reasons, apart from the judgment that it contains valuable ideas. Four is surely an early book and many now think it has good claim to being the earliest book. In fact, a fascinating if controversial argument (to which we will return) has been made that it not only is the earliest book but even contains the most unvarnished report about, or picture of, Confucius.⁷ Moreover, the book has, I believe, a structure that is far from evident but that, once seen, enables us to make better sense not only of the individual, seemingly disparate, passages but also of the book's overall message. Finally, the book also has the advantage of being short, and can therefore be treated with some thoroughness. More important, that brevity means my reader can grasp the book with some ease and therefore understand more easily, and check, what I am doing.

The most significant problem, given my project, with a focus on book 4 is that it apparently lacks those religious or “mythic” elements that appear so prominently elsewhere in the Analects. In book 3 (which I think is probably another early book⁸), for example, we have a set of reflections on ritual and sacrifice that involves complex ideas about the need when sacrificing to behave as though the spirit is present (for example, 3:12), as well as several astonishing comments attributed to Confucius. One is his statement (3:11) that an understanding of the dì sacrifices would allow him to deal with everything (or alternatively govern everything) as easily as one puts one's fingers in one's palm (or alternatively have them in one's palm). A second is that offenses against Heaven leave one with nowhere to turn in one's prayers, or perhaps even with no means of expiation (3:13). The mythic quality of such sayings is all too evident, but I will argue that we find statements in book 4 whose religious content is quite as pronounced, if less evident, and whose mythic frame is almost as noteworthy, even if they appear in a considerably more subtle form. Let us, then, turn to book 4 beginning with the argument that it is the earliest book and contains the most accurate picture of the historical Confucius.

I draw this argument from one aspect of the work of E. Bruce Brooks and A. Taeko Brooks, and the results of their work that are especially relevant to us are, in brief, as follows. Book 4 is the earliest unit in the Analects, put together (they think likely) in 479 b.c.e., the year of Confucius' death. Section 15 (the “one thread” zhōng/shù section) and section 26 (a statement by Z˘iyóu that is the book's last section) are seen, for solid reasons, as interpolations from a considerably later time and perspective.⁹ The rest of the book, the Brookses believe, consists of sayings on separable topics. They think, moreover, that 1-17 (minus 15) represent one consistent older group and 18-25 another. This judgment is one that I find less secure.

Some of the Brookses' reasons for regarding chapters 18-25 as from a later historical stratum are philological. I am not qualified to evaluate these arguments, but I do know that some qualified people think they are not decisive. If the linguistic arguments are not definitive, we must judge whether 18-25 belong together with 1-14 and 16-17 at least in part on the grounds of their content. In other words, do the concepts, themes, and teachings of 18-25 “fit with” the earlier chapters? One aspect of the present paper, then, contributes to this debate, for I offer an explanation of how 18-25 fit in with the earlier chapters.

The Brookses makes a number of other fascinating and important comments, which I will not engage directly here, about both the contents of the book and its relationships to other sections of the Analects. Our agreements and disagreements on the former subject will, I think, be clear to those who compare our accounts, and I will not address at any length the latter subject. Most important here, I accept for the purposes of this inquiry the version of the Brookses' argument that would say the following: We have in book 4 a set of writings that, in Bruce Brooks's phrase, “is unique in the work for the relative shortness of its sayings, its near-absence of proper names or other contextual detail, and a certain austere antiquity of language.” Moreover, these sayings differ from at least much else in the Analects in ways that make it plausible to see much of the remainder as containing, at minimum, different views. Bruce Brooks himself is willing to say, given this, that we can “then assume that LY 4 [Lún Yu Book, 4] are real transcribed Confucian sayings, and that all the rest is addenda. That is, LY 4 alone directly represents the historical Confucius …” (italics in original). (He puts this even more precisely at another place saying that at least the first 17 [minus section 15] of the 26 sections contain, in his words “the only authentic record of the historical Confucius.”)¹⁰ I would be more tentative, for reasons noted earlier, and just say that we see at many places in the Analects later developments of ideas about who Confucius was and what he taught. They are the understandable products not only of debates in Warring States China but also of those processes that almost always surround the attempt to understand an extremely significant figure and persuade others of one's own understanding of that person's significance.

Starting from the more minimal of the Brookses' plausible historical surmises, I will then interpret Book Four aiming to uncover the picture of Confucius and his teaching that we find in it. One feature of my interpretative procedure will be to show the productivity of the kind of existentialist approach Bultmann uses. A second, closely related one, will be to focus on what I take to be features of the text that are religious both in subject matter and in what they demand from the reader. A third will be to show how the often apparently discrete, or even contradictory, sections of the book can be said to fit together, or be juxtaposed to each other in a way that allows them to illuminate each other. The dangers, perhaps especially with the last, of preparing a Procrustean bed are evident. The reader must decide whether any light is shed, and whether that light, crudely put, comes from the text or the ingenuity, or speculative fancy, of the interpreter.

IV. A TRANSLATION OF BOOK 4

For the convenience of readers, a translation follows of the text of book 4 (minus the phrase “The Master said,” which comes at the beginning of every chapter in this book except 26). The translation basically follows D. C. Lau's, probably the most widely used translation, but some modifications have been made and the two interpolations are excised but noted. I have included section headings to indicate the major thematic divisions for which I shall argue below.¹¹

ON VIRTUE (RéN)

1. Of neighborhoods virtue is the most beautiful. If one does not choose to dwell in virtue, how could one be wise?
2. One who is not virtuous cannot remain long in straitened circumstances, nor can he remain long in easy circumstances.

3. The virtuous are attracted to virtue because they feel at home in it. The wise are attracted to virtue because they find it profitable.

4. It is only the virtuous who are capable of loving or hating others.
5. If one fixes one's intention on virtue, one will be free from evil.
6. Wealth and high station are what people desire, but if I could not do so while following the Way (dào) I would not remain in them. Poverty and low station are what people dislike, but if I could not do so while following the Way, I would not try to escape from them.

7. If nobles (jūnzi) forsake virtue, how can they make names for themselves? Nobles never desert virtue, not even for as long as it takes to eat a meal. If they hurry and stumble, one may be sure that it is in virtue that they do so.

8. I have never met anyone who finds virtue attractive or a man who finds the absence of virtue repulsive. A man who finds virtue attractive cannot be surpassed. A man who finds the absence of virtue repulsive can, perhaps, be counted as virtuous, for he would not allow what is not virtuous to contaminate his person.

9. Is there a man who, for the space of a single day, is able to devote all his strength to virtue? I have not come across a man whose strength proves insufficient for the task. There must be such cases of insufficient strength, only I have not come across them.

10. In their errors people are true to their type. Observe the errors and you will know their virtue.

HOW THE VIRTUOUS PERSON DIFFERS FROM OTHERS

1. If one hears about the Way in the morning, one may die in the evening.
2. There is no point in seeking the views of Nobles (shì) who, though they fix their intention upon the Way, are ashamed of poor food and poor clothes.
3. In their dealings with the world nobles are not invariably for or against anything. They are on the side of right (yì).
4. While nobles take to heart moral force (dé), petty people take to heart land. While nobles take to heart sanctions, petty people take to heart favors.

THE VIRTUOUS PERSON AND GOVERNING

1. If one is guided by profit in one's actions, one will incur much resentment.
2. If one is able to govern a state by observing the rites and showing deference, what difficulties will one have? If one is unable to govern a state by observing the rites and showing deference, what good are the rites to one?
3. Do not worry because you have no official position. Worry about the manner in which you get a position. Do not worry because no one appreciates your abilities. Seek to be worthy of appreciation.
4. [Interpolation.]
5. The noble understands what is right (yì). The petty person understands what is profitable.
6. When you meet people better than yourself, turn your thoughts to becoming their equal. When you meet people who are not as good as you are, look within and examine your own self.

THE VIRTUOUS PERSON AND FILIAL PIETY

1. In serving your father and mother you ought to dissuade them from doing wrong in the gentlest way. If you see your advice being ignored, you should not become disobedient but remain reverent (jìng). You should not become resentful even if in so doing you wear yourself out.
2. While your parents are alive, you should not go too far afield in your travels. If you do, your whereabouts should always be known.
3. If, for three years, one makes no changes to one's father's ways, one can be said to be filial (xiào).
4. One should not be ignorant of the age of one's father and mother. It is a matter, on the one hand, for rejoicing and, on the other, for anxiety.

THE VIRTUOUS PERSON IN RELATION TO WORDS AND ACTIONS

1. In antiquity people were loath to speak. This was because they counted it as shameful if their person failed to keep up with their words.
2. It is rare for one to miss the mark through strictness (yuē).
3. The noble desires to be halting in speech but quick in action.

CONCLUSION

1. Moral force (dé) never stands alone. It is bound to have neighbors.
2. [Interpolation.]

V. THE STRUCTURE OF BOOK 4 AND WHAT IT TELLS US

I will begin my analysis by discussing the book's overall structure, but before doing so let me say something about why I have translated rén as “virtue” (or related forms like “virtuous” or “virtuousness”). The oft-discussed issue of how best to render this character in the Analects is a paper in itself, but the subject's importance in book 4 and in my analysis demands some comment. The quality noted as rén, at least as discussed in book 4, is a general one that is instantiated, or specified, in different ways in different contexts. Always rendering rén as benevolence (as, for example, Lau does) is therefore problematic, because it leads us to think that one instantiation is the whole. The difference we see between the general concept and its specific instantiations, that is, resembles the common distinction we make between “virtue” and “virtues.” (This means, for example, that we could justify Legge's seemingly odd translation of rén as “virtuous manners,” in the book's first passage, given that the context is the life of community.)¹²

Other possible general terms such as “goodness” (Waley) or “humaneness” (even if seen, as Dawson does, as full human flourishing and not a specific attitude) are, I believe, less helpful than “virtue.” Utilizing “good” or “humaneness” involves understanding the complicated philosophical issues that enable one to recognize, and employ, the related but different references of those two terms. In contrast to our often muddled use of these two terms, especially of the term “good,” we have both a long tradition and at least some common usage that enables us to work more accurately and easily with the supple relationships between the concepts of virtue and virtues. (Moreover, “good” and “humaneness” are, in fact, virtual synonyms for “virtue” from say a Thomistic perspective.) The choice of virtue seems, then, to be a good one. And this remains true even if other more technical difficulties are present (including two uses in book 4 of a character [dé], which is normally translated as “virtue”) and if some modern Western notions of virtue ill fit its use in early Chinese thought.¹³

Let me now turn to an examination of book 4's overall structure, sketching out in some detail my view of the contents of and relationships among what I believe are the book's separate sections. This presentation is dense at places, but it can provide both an overview of the whole book and a content for our later discussion of specific points.

Any notion that the book has sections and a structure may seem odd to some people to whom it appears to contain little more than a set of disconnected ideas and aphorisms. (Honestly admitting, incidentally, just how bewildering—that is foreign or alien—we initially find texts like this to be is, I think, extremely important.) But the book manifests, I believe, a distinctive logic as well as a subtle and challenging perspective, if one that becomes apparent only when we examine it closely. Telegraphically put, the book starts with seven sections on virtue's attributes, and then has nine sections on how perfected people manifest virtue in specific situations. It then ends with two sections that test the previous treatments, four passages on filial piety and three on the relationship between words and deeds, and concludes with a single passage that intensifies the opening passage.¹⁴

The first seven sections all clearly deal with virtue (rén) (only the seventh being a possible exception depending on how, see Lau [p. 234, n. 1], rén is read). These sections enumerate qualities virtue has, the various ways it can be manifested, and how and why people do and do not possess it. The claims made, as we will discuss, are often striking: for example, if you lack this quality you are unable to dwell well either in adversity or in pleasurable circumstances, and only if you have it can you truly either like or dislike people. The most fundamental kind of human activities depend, then, on the possession of virtue.

Sections 8-17 (excising 15) can be seen as one whole but I will, if tentatively, divide it into two related sections with the last five sharpening, and therefore also narrowing, the focus of the first four. That is, sections 8-11 can be said to provide glosses on the previous seven sections because the subject is not just the character of virtue, but how perfected people manifest virtue in several specific situations and differ, either clearly or implicitly, from those who do not. (Section 8 provides, as we will examine in our last section, an especially important gloss on the first seven sections.)

The crucial, general notion in these sections is that a perfected person has a distinctive equanimity born of virtue. In each of the successive sections, that is, the perfected person is depicted as being correctly related to one of the following: the Way (dào, in 8 and 9), the right (yì, in 10), and moral force (dé, in 11). (The presence of such terms as dào, yì, and dé is remarkable, showing the centrality of these concepts even in the earliest surviving dicta of Confucius.) Each of those separate “objects” is connected to the others, but each also has distinctive differences; the way and the right, for instance, relate closely yet differ substantially. Moreover, each commendable state is also described as contrasting with a state with which the virtuous person feels no concern. That is, in each of these successive sections the virtuous person is depicted as being unconcerned with one of the following: death (in 8), bad food and clothes (in 9), dominant conventional opinions (in 10), and special favors or leniency (in 11). It is, I think, striking that these last four states are ones that most ordinary people either fear or pursue. Indeed, taken together, as we will see, they describe much of what motivates such people.

Sections 12-17 (excising 15) specify these states in terms of their social implications, or even more precisely in terms of the activity of helping or hoping to govern. This is most obviously true in the case of 13 and 14, but I submit that it is also true of 12, 16, and 17. Chapters 12 and 16 emphasize the importance of not focussing on profit (lì) in one's actions. Although neither passage might seem at first, to our late-twentieth-century sensibilities, to be about governing, Confucius' audience might have seen such connections. Taking part in government was, for ambitious young men in Confucius' era and long after, one way to make a profit (see Mengzi 6A10; Analects 8:12). In addition, I do not think it is too far-fetched to suggest that (even long before the official rise of the Mohist school) the issue of whether governing should aim at profit (perhaps the profit of society as a whole) was beginning to be discussed (compare Analects 13:9; Mengzi 1A1).

What about 4:17? In general, Confucius advocates rule by virtue. This makes his political philosophy “meritocratic,” and people in any meritocratic system must make evaluative comparisons (however just or unjust they may be) among the members of the meritocracy. That situation presents the constant danger of generating destructive emotions such as jealousy, envy, snobbery, and resentment. The saying in 4:17 can be understood as Confucius' advice about how a virtuous person can channel the emotions generated by comparisons of quality within a political environment in a less invidious and more productive direction.

Sections 12-14 and 16-17 discuss, then, how those who are virtuous or pursue virtue relate to the holding of position, deal either with those people who pursue profit or those people who are superior in worth to them, and understand the commitment involved in attempting to run a society by means of ritual and the deferential attitudes it induces and relies on. The treatment resembles that in the previous sections, but the context is now more specifically the set of issues involved in any active life in a polity, issues such as the character of “public policy,” the pursuit of office, and the great variety of people one will necessarily encounter while governing.

Sections 18-21 clearly concern issues about filial piety. These sections may initially seem not to fit at all or to fit only as an even more specific example of how virtue must operate in a particular social situation. I think, however, the topic appears here because it presents an apparent test case of great importance for what has been treated previously. In 18, for instance, we have ideas that seem to query sharply the notion presented in 17 that a person either, with good people attempts to emulate them, or with bad people examines herself. With one's parents, however, a different response is called for: a response characterized by gentle remonstrance or respectful attention. Similarly, the son's need to make no changes in his father's way for three years, the subject of 20, seems to war with the notion in 10 that one is not invariably for or against anything. The actions filial piety demands, then, seem to present important cases in which the virtuous attitudes previously described are qualified or called in question. (Features of it, moreover, also exemplify the notion of ritual's significance and perplexities, the subject of 13.) The question of why these sections appear in the book and what of significance they tell us, including why they must be demythologized, will be returned to in section eleven of this paper, but let us turn to the next segment, 22-24.

These passages, which again may seem not to fit into the book, present yet another “test case,” this one centering on how the virtuous person deals with the general relationship of words and actions. This is clearly the topic in the case of 22 and 24, but 23 requires special comment. Admittedly, if we examine the use of the key term in 23, yuē (which I follow Waley in rendering as “strictness”; Lau originally had “the essentials”; Legge gives “The cautious seldom err” for the whole line), we see that it is not typically limited to care in one's use of language. (See, for example, Waley 6:25: “A gentleman who is widely versed in letters and at the same time knows how to submit his learning to the restraints [yuē] of ritual is not likely, I think, to go far wrong.”)¹⁵ However, the placement of 23 between two quotations about language suggests some connection with this topic, and we can certainly see how one manifestation of the virtue of “strictness” (or “caution”) would be in one's use of language.¹⁶

The subject of 22-24, presented in an austerely brief fashion, is a very important one especially if we presume three things. First, words involve both what one says to one's self and what one says to others. (Self-deception is as involved as are verbal accounts that range from moderate embellishment to outright hypocrisy; each involves a misleading that can be more and less intentional.) Second, this subject covers the uses and misuses of rhetoric, rhetoric in public and private arenas being seen as, at the same time, both necessary and dangerous. Third, the movements of shame (22) (and perhaps by implication other emotions) are a crucial indication for the virtuous of whether or not an action is appropriate, and language, and by extension intellectual analysis, must recognize that.

Finally, we end (having excised 26) with a statement that rounds off the whole book: The notion that virtue (dé) as moral force never stands alone but always has neighbors both echoes and deepens the opening comment about the wisdom of living in a virtuous neighborhood. Virtuous people do not just seek a virtuous neighborhood, they create one. Indeed, we can now understand why that is true because of the topics treated in the rest of the book; for instance, the examination of what both virtue and ritual are and of the luminous qualities, such as equanimity, that virtuous people possess. This last section, however, also contains (if implicitly) a challenging message for readers: if one does not have neighbors, people drawn to one, then one is not virtuous. The book, that is, ends with yet another way to examine whether one actually possesses virtue.

Book 4 is, then, a whole in which passages group into separable sections and illuminate each other. Moreover, it presents a set of fascinating and important subjects. Let us now turn to a few especially significant ones, beginning with the general treatment of the figure of Confucius and his message, focusing on how what is missing illuminates what is present.

VI. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WHAT IS MISSING IN BOOK 4

The absence of certain features in the treatment in book 4 is striking, given other parts of or motifs in the Analects and many normal understandings of it. Reasoning from absences to conclusions about, say, the “historical Confucius” is (for the reasons noted) a most tricky enterprise. But recognizing that absences can also manifest presences is important. In fact, the absence of one quality does not just make clearer the presence of other qualities, it can also enable us to see the whole in a different way.

Book 4 contains, for example, no references to ancient sages or classics, and just one reference to the past: the cryptic reference to the models people of old provide about the relationship of words and deeds. The notion is absent, then, that a key part of Confucius is that he transmits and does not create (7:1), or that he reanimates the past as a teacher (2:11). Closely related to this is the absence of any notion of a formal set of educational practices, a “curriculum” in the widest sense, that ought to be followed. (None of the “five classics” [wcu jīng], which later became central to Confucian education, are even mentioned.) Perhaps even more important, this also means we see nothing about how Confucius models his own ideas on the people and society of a past time. Absent, then, is the notion that both his authority and the substance of much of what he says arise from what happened in the past, whether because of (in a debate later Confucians will have) the genius of the sages or the presence of an experiment that worked.¹⁷ Related to all of these absences is the lack of statements that contain one familiar kind of religious reference, a reference (however explicitly noted) to the sacred: that is, to a religio-cultural system in the past that was sacred; or to the notion of sacred texts or figures one must turn to; or the notion of personalized sacred forces, like Heaven, that operate or did operate in the world.¹⁸

Different from, if related to, these absences is the absence of statements about the exalted stature of the figure Confucius. We lack statements, that is, that portray him as an instrument Heaven will use to wake the world, or as a person of whom there has never been greater, or as one who in old age was attuned to Heaven (tiān, for example, 9:5, 19:25, 2:4) The simplest explanation of these absences is that most statements in the book are attributed to Confucius; they are not statements by others about him. Nevertheless, the statements attributed to Confucius, on my reading, share the characteristic of presenting someone who reports about the qualities of the virtuous person but who does not directly claim he always manifests them. A prominent instance is section 8's treatment of hearing about the Way and then dying content. An extremely influential tradition of interpretation presumed that Confucius had, of course, heard the Way, but the statement need not lead to that conclusion. (Soothill can even say “To the unprejudiced the Sage would be ennobled and not degraded by interpreting” the statement with a conditional “if.”)¹⁹ Perhaps even more striking than that instance are two other sections. The complex picture of the relationship between the love of virtue, strength or motivation toward it, and actualization of it in section 6 appears to include Confucius in its comments about imperfections. Second, the statement in section 7, whatever its notable ambiguities, seems to imply that in all human states vices and virtues are mixed.

None of these sections, or others like them, need imply that those who saw Confucius might differ from Confucius' own judgments about himself, although too large a discrepancy does seem odd. Nor should we deny that these statements can have a rhetorical, teaching function—Jesus, for instance, is reported as saying that those without sin should cast the first stone but he does not then throw a stone. Nevertheless, the distinction between descriptions of a state of perfected virtue and statements that Confucius actually possessed that state remains significant.

One last kind of absence is worth noting: the absence of certain kinds of generalizations. Statements attributed to Confucius describe general attributes of the virtuous and the vicious, or the gentleman and the small man, but they contain no comments about humanity as a whole. (There is one implied exception: humans are those sorts of beings who operate in different ways depending on whether or not they have those qualities called virtues.) What we see, that is, is an attitude toward generalization that has two characteristics. One is a lack of interest in, perhaps a reasoned antagonism to, general theoretical statements of the sort: “all human beings are X.” The other is an interest in, and a desire to make, general statements of the sort: “people of this kind are or manifest X.” This does not mean more general statements cannot be developed from the spare resources given—and the tradition surely has done so. Nor does it mean some kinds of general statements are not made or implied, the most significant being, perhaps, the statement about hearing the Way. (Even it, however, rests on the capacity to be able to hear about the Way and there is no necessary implication that everyone either has that capacity or the ability to use it.) The book manifests, then, an agnosticism about many theoretical issues that combines with a willingness to make clear, even dramatic and controversial, statements about some characteristics of the virtuous life and its contraries.

These absences tell us much of importance, I think, but I want to turn now to those statements that fill out our grasp of both the figure of Confucius and the message. Before doing so, however, I should say more about the Bultmannian methodology I shall employ in interpreting what Confucius does say. Then I shall try to clarify my approach by contrasting it with some other important methodologies, and by answering some objections that my methodology is likely to provoke.

VII. THE BASIC FEATURES, FOR OUR PURPOSES, OF AN EXISTENTIALIST APPROACH

Bultmann employs what I will call an “existentialist” approach for the purposes of easy identification, recognizing that the label can be misleading given the often very questionable ideas that can be gathered under it. One very problematic kind of existentialism (associated with Sartre and one reading of Heidegger), for example, focuses on ungrounded choice and attacks almost all notions of character or virtue. Its philosophic inadequacies are, to my mind, evident, and any application of it to the Analects would, I believe, distort the text.²⁰ Bultmann, and a more accurate reading of at least the early Heidegger, represent another kind of existentialism.

That kind has close connections, I think, with Aquinas, if not with the Thomistic tradition. (Heidegger, it is worth remembering, not only made an intensive study of Aquinas as a student but also tended to exempt him from many of his criticisms of the Western tradition.) Indeed, some of the existentialist ideas most important to us resemble closely Aquinas's ideas, although obviously there is not equivalence and the differences in many areas are very significant. A crucial resemblance for us, for example, is between an existentialist understanding of the conditions and importance of choice, and a Thomistic understanding of intention and the significance of dispositions and rational freedom. These resemblances explain why, at some points, I will utilize certain ideas from Aquinas to help explain the results of an existentialist reading of the Analects. Let us turn now, however, to those features of Bultmann's existentialist position that are most significant for our purposes.

Bultmann is probably most famous for his claim that one must demythologize the New Testament, a claim that, as we will see, is considerably more subtle than it might appear to be. Simply put, however, to demythologize is to assume, first, that religious materials contain meanings that can be separated from their original mythic form and, second, that such a separation clarifies either the material's real meaning or the material's only possible contemporary meaning. To demythologize the story of Jesus walking on water, for example, is to claim that water is a mythic representation of chaos and that the story therefore manifests how Jesus overcame the constantly threatening forces of chaos. Similarly, to demythologize Jesus's resurrection is to re-describe it as a story which affirms that the values and power embodied in his life continue to live among people or at least continue to have a claim on them. Such demythologizing assumes that modern people do not, in fact cannot, believe a person either could literally walk on water or arise from the dead, but that those stories contain viable ideas that can be uncovered when we penetrate their mythic form. Such a penetration is necessary because myths objectify the reality of which they speak; they make it a part of the world, make it fall within the subject-object correlation, and therefore make a qualitative distinction a quantitative one.

Put more abstractly, the project of demythologizing manifests the need for a contemporary interpreter to deal constantly with two demands that initially may appear to be incompatible or even only to generate conflict: what I will call the demands of being both credible and appropriate. To meet the demand of being credible is to formulate ideas from a sacred text in a way that meets the conditions of plausibility found in an experience informed by modern scientific explanation, historical consciousness, and ideas about the rights of all humans. To meet the demands of appropriateness is to formulate those ideas in a way that shows fidelity to, is appropriate to, their meaning as judged by the most basic norms found in the most fundamental forms of the tradition the text manifests. The two demands stand in a dialectical relationship with each other, but, roughly put, credibility rests on theoretical considerations and appropriateness on historical, textual considerations.²¹

Underlying this whole approach is the notion that the encounter with at least some texts and events must involve a specific type of thinking, an existentiell not an existential understanding, to use the relevant technical terms. An existential understanding is a worked out understanding of the ontological structures of existence. An existentiell understanding, in contrast, is the type of thinking that is inseparable from one's most immediate understanding of one's self as a person. It is an act of thinking connected with an act of being, an individual's understanding of his or her own way to be what he or she is. A classic example of the difference, which will be important to us later, is the distinction between seeing death as a part of the ontological structure of human life and facing death as a part of your own grasp of who you are.

The thinking involved in an existentiell understanding need not be rational in the strictest sense, but it will often resemble closely the kind of thinking involved in the interpretation of a situation or in the explanation to one's self or another of why one did something: for instance, acted generously or thought a quality, generosity, was valuable. Another, crucial feature of our existentiell understandings or interpretations is that they are neither completely pre-established nor firm. We have, that is, the capacity to throw significant parts of our life into a new relief, to shift our perspective, to change the framework or horizon within which we interpret things. Moreover, part of our responsibility as humans, if we are to actualize the capacities we have, is to reflect upon our interpretations and to appropriate those we think most adequate. Crucial, then, is a kind of self-reflexiveness whereby we evaluate how and why we interpret as we do and then choose to be formed by some interpretations. Much stands in the way of such reinterpretations, perhaps most notably the hold on us of conventional thinking and the fear of facing what will occur if we question, much less surrender, such thinking. Nevertheless, the possibility is always present because of our capacity to reinterpret the way in which events, notably the “fact” of death, ingress on our settled interpretations. We must, then, recognize the role our interpretations play in our life and also decide about appropriating an interpretation (that is, claiming a life as our life) if we are to flourish.²²

This kind of approach to understanding or interpretation produces what can be called an intensified version (one that has deep ethical and religious ramifications) of the operations of the hermeneutical circle. The hermeneutical circle, in its most basic form, refers to the way in which readers initially understand a text in terms of their own world but then have their world changed by the text, a process that continues on in a circle of changing understandings for as long as the work remains a challenging object. Any work (in fact almost any situation) can be part of such a hermeneutical circle. Clearly, however, some genres invite or even demand engagement in a way that others do not. Moreover, either the subject matter of some genres or the approach to them can be such that the issues involved in religion and ethics are paramount. In my view, book 4 (and much of the whole Analects) exemplifies such a text.²³ Below, I shall examine that book using features of an existentialist approach. First, however, I want to clarify further what my approach is, and what it is not, by contrasting it with features of two other noteworthy recent interpretations.

VIII. GENERAL METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES THAT ARISE FROM CONTRASTS WITH TWO OTHER INTERPRETERS

One aspect of my approach to the Analects that may seem quite wrongheaded is my insistence (which I will develop at even greater length in section 9) that Confucius values a kind of reflexive choice that is formed by dispositions and an interpretative perspective. In particular, this feature of my approach will seem mistaken, for very different reasons, from the perspective of both Herbert Fingarette's Confucius—the Secular as Sacred and David Hall and Roger Ames' Thinking Through Confucius. Their interpretations respond to genuine and important aspects of the Analects, but I offer here an alternative way to interpret some features of the Analects that motivate each of their readings.²⁴

Fingarette, I think, would say that I have overestimated, or simply exaggerated, the extent and importance of choice in the Analects. He has argued that the proper metaphor for understanding Confucius is “a way without a crossroads.” In contrast with a number of modern Western views (most notably for our purposes Sartean existentialism) there is no radical choice among alternative ways of life in Confucius' vision.

Fingarette does, I think, grasp a genuinely important aspect of Confucius' world view—an aspect that is alien to many contemporary understandings. I believe, however, that it is important to see that a kind of choice does play a crucial role for Confucius. Even though a context for choice is presupposed and, more important, even though there is no “crossroads,” in the sense of alternative, equally worthwhile paths, one must nevertheless make a genuine existentiell choice or commitment to follow the Confucian Way. This is evident even in the very first passage of book 4, in which Confucius remarks, “If one does not choose (zé) to dwell in virtue, how could one be wise?” Similarly, Confucius tells us that we must “Fix our intention upon (zhì yú) virtue” (4:4), and “Fix our attention upon the Way” (4:9). For Confucius, then, we must make a reflexive commitment to the Way if we are to genuinely follow it.

In contrast to Fingarette, Hall and Ames would object that I have underestimated, or failed to fully appreciate, the extent and significance of choice in Confucius. Confucius, they note, seems to have a flexibility and an unpredictability in his responses that suggest a lack of interest in fixed, unchanging rules. As I suggested earlier, I think this is an accurate and significant feature of the figure of Confucius (one we see for example in 4:10). Nevertheless, I also think it important to recognize that, even within book 4, we see certain “fixities” of action that a virtuous person must acknowledge, however flexible and creative she may be: a virtuous person will not be guided by considerations of profit, for example, and she will not become resentful when correcting her parents.

The combination of flexibility and stability that, to my mind, characterizes the Confucian understanding of a virtuous person manifests a larger interpretative (and normative) issue. Hall and Ames tend at times to draw a sharp—and it sometimes appears exhaustive—contrast between thinkers who believe in an objective order grounded in transcendent principles (like Plato) and those who believe in “freely creating” values and order (like the contemporary pragmatist Richard Rorty). I think, however, there is a third option, one exemplified by a virtue ethics of the kind found in the Aristotelian (or more specifically Thomistic) tradition. Advocates of this kind of virtue ethics recognize that creativity and flexibility are required in order to successfully navigate a complex and changeable world. They also hold, however, that there are “right” and “wrong” ways to behave in particular, determinate contexts. I suggest, then, that for all of their genuine and important differences, Confucians and Aristotelians are similar in that they each fit within one, roughly similar, kind of virtue ethics.

My comparison of Confucianism and Aristotelianism (and even more, perhaps, my use of existentialist ideas) can raise the more general objection that I am distorting both Confucianism and the Analects by reading Western ideas into them. Allow me to make two brief comments about this very significant objection. First, we must, of course, always read a text in the light of some concepts, and these must, in some sense, be our concepts. We need not read a text in terms of concepts that we actually share, but we can only read a text in terms of concepts that are accessible to us from our perspective. (That fact is, one might say, the import here of the idea of being “credible” that we discussed earlier.)

One may still object, however, that we cannot successfully apply concepts from our own tradition to these texts. Rather, we must interpret the texts in terms of new sets of concepts that we learn from the texts; we must, as it were, acquire a second conceptual language. At its most sophisticated, this objection grows from the recognition, born of serious study, of the diversity of concepts and beliefs among traditions, and of the way in which that diversity informs the character of even what seem to be even the most basic human experiences such as the desires for food or sex. This diversity is genuine, and it often has not been adequately acknowledged. Nevertheless, I submit that human experience has enough in common for there to be nontrivial similarities in certain experiences, concepts and claims, especially (and most important here) on topics such as the virtues.²⁵

This is not a claim that can be justified a priori. (But neither, it is important to recognize, can it be disproven a priori.) It can only be substantiated on the basis of detailed, extensive comparisons of alternative traditions. Many scholars, including myself, have begun to undertake that comparison. This chapter is, in part, a contribution to that debate, by seeing whether, and to what extent, certain Western vocabularies give us insight into at least book 4 of the Analects. My approach certainly may be mistaken. If it is mistaken, it can only be because my conceptual framework does not, for some reason, do justice to the text of the Analects in a way that an alternative framework does.

Having presented at least an initial account of the methodological issues, let us now return to the text of book 4. I will start my analysis by examining issues that appear in two brief passages, 3 and 4, and then turn to several larger ideas, found elsewhere in book 4, that respond to the issues those brief passages raise. I end with comments about the role both of filial piety and of facing death in the whole book. There are, or course, many other fascinating issues in book 4: for example, the portrait of the motivation toward virtue and the description of attitudes about virtue in 6, and the relationship of virtues and vices in 7. Dealing with the questions I have chosen to examine, however, allows us to treat much that is central in the book. Moreover, it allows us to illustrate an approach that reflects key features of the one Bultmann uses.

IX. THE EXEMPLARY TREATMENT OF VIRTUE IN TWO BRIEF PASSAGES AND THE CENTRAL ISSUE IT PRESENTS

Sections 3 and 4 are to my mind closely related passages that surely are very brief (the content is carried in seventeen characters, including grammatical ones) and may appear to be relatively insignificant. I think, however, they are very illuminating; they show us how much can come from close attention to the text and enable us to begin to probe a central issue in the book. In section three, Confucius says it is only the virtuous person who is able to, or capable of, liking or disliking other people. In section four he says that if people set their heart on virtue, they will be free from, or without, evil.²⁶

These two passages are open to various kinds of glosses. One could, for example, focus on how the passages point to the idea that a “purified” dislike, or even anger, characterizes a virtuous person. (Note, for example, Confucius' outrage at the unethical actions of a former disciple: “He is no disciple of mine. You, my young friends, may attack him openly to the beating of drums.”)²⁷ This idea seems close to notions in the Thomistic tradition about how anger can, even must, serve justice by giving to it the motivation it may lack. I want here, however, to concentrate on a larger and more illuminating issue, one that leads us into some crucial questions about the perspective seen in book 4.

Section 3 parallels the notion in the preceding section (to which we will return) that virtuousness alone allows one to be satisfied, to dwell for a long time, in the apparently opposed states of pleasure and adversity. The claim in section 3, however, is an even more dramatic one about what virtue allows. Liking and disliking, or love and hate, are two of the most fundamental states or movements that characterize humans. (Indeed, if disinterest is added, these three could even be called the most fundamental states.) Love and hate, then, surely appear to be constantly present in human life, but the claim here is that what appears to be love and hate are either not them at all or are just semblances of them. That is, the claim is that only virtue allows one to manifest love and hate in their full or real state.

Interpreted through an existentialist interpretative framework, the point is that what appears as liking and disliking in most people is nothing more than the reflex-like reactions of conventional understanding. (That state is one the later tradition, and one section of the Analects, will label the world of the village honest man [xiāng yuán] [17:11; compare the more elaborate discussion in Mengzi 7B37] and existentialists will call the world of Das Man.) These reactions do not arise from any fully appropriated understanding. Rather they arise from, are the epiphenomena of, those conventional attitudes possessed unreflectively by all people insofar as they are part of a society. Moreover, their origin in unappropriated conventional understanding means they finally are of little worth. Even actions and attitudes that appear to be good, such as my inclinations to like justice or a just person and to dislike their contraries, can be of little or no value if they neither express my reflexively appropriated character nor manifest a view of the world that has been fully accepted.²⁸

The point here can be put in a more neutral (or at least more traditional) way; that is, we can say that “intentions” are all important, as are those qualities of character from which genuine intentions arise. Seen from this perspective, the next passage, 4, generalizes the message seen in 3. It moves beyond, that is, the specifics of liking and disliking, to claim in the most general terms that if one's heart is set on virtue, one will be without evil. This dramatic claim echoes, despite the difference in the virtues noted, what we also see in 10: the idea that the perfected person is not invariably for or against anything (or alternatively has no antagonisms or enmities, or favoritisms or affections) but is always on the side of the “right” (yì). These passages taken together seem to reflect a world that, in the West, is associated with Abelard or those thinkers who took as their “motto” Augustine's famous notion that one should love and do what one will. They could even be said to reflect the world of that problematic kind of existentialism, associated with Sartre, that I noted earlier.

Nevertheless, other passages in the book present us with classes of action that seem always to show one's lack of virtue, whether they be, say, caring about bad clothes and bad food, 9, or being unfilial, 18-21, or not having acts follow words, 22, 24. The idea that some classes of action are vicious has, of course, its own Western analogs, whether in Aquinas's developments of Abelard and Augustine's ideas, or in those existentialists, like Bultmann, who believe for both ethical and intellectual reasons that choice must presuppose fixed supports like character. The issue or perhaps better conundrum is one, then, that reverberates through many traditions, whether they be Confucian, Christian, or existentialist.

Let us, however, place the issue squarely in the context of book 4. The question there is whether the position seen in the book is that only intentions are crucial (and perhaps also a most minimal class of actions such as the gratuitous injury of the innocent), or whether the position is that intentions are crucial but that the virtuous person always fulfills the demands presented by some significant classes of actions. If the latter is true (the most likely position to my mind, as we will see), what is significant is not the mere setting of an intention, to use the formulation in 4, but also the character of the intention that is set. Seen this way, on the one hand, the book emphasizes the need to appropriate, to choose, certain attitudes and actions in the belief that they direct one toward virtue. But, on the other hand, it also accepts the notion that virtuous humans have qualities (and probably relationships), whatever their origins, that entail some acts and attitudes that will never be chosen and others that will always be chosen.

The ramifications of this issue, much less a clear-cut answer of it, are surely not fully treated in book 4, nor arguably in the whole of the Analects. One might, however, argue book 4's “incompleteness” or “ambiguity” is commendable, given the significance and the complexity of the problem, as well as the tendency of people to focus too exclusively on either “intention” or “conventionally sanctioned action.” That is, we could say the pursuit of resolutions in an area like this is far less important than the recognition that one faces what I would call “irresolvable but revelatory and productive” tensions. These tensions arise from two different but related ideas that stand as the irreducible givens on which reflection works. Both sides of the tension must be upheld and therefore any resolution that even diminishes either side must be rejected. Indeed, a final resolution need not even always be sought because seeing both sides is revelatory and productive. Keeping the tension's irresolvability in mind can enable people to better understand reflection's character and clarify their relationship to ethical and religious realities.²⁹

That situation does not mean, however, that the issue cannot be approached. In fact, I think we find a set of oblique responses to it in Book Four and examining them leads us into some of the book's central claims. Examples which we will treat include the idea of expressive virtue, the rationale for the apparent indeterminacy of virtuous action, the significance of filial piety, and the understanding of death. Let us then turn to those topics.

X. CENTRAL CLAIMS IN BOOK 4 THAT REFLECT THE ISSUES SEEN IN THESE PASSAGES: EXPRESSIVE VIRTUES AND THE INDETERMINACY OF VIRTUOUS ACTION

One quality that virtuous actions must have in book 4's account of them is to be “expressive.” This quality, which arises from correct intention, is probably manifested most clearly in section 2 (to which we will return), and represents, I believe, one of the most crucial notions in the book. To explain what I mean by “expressiveness,” however, let me begin by explicating the relevant conceptual framework, one which is drawn from Thomistic virtue theory but has clear analogs in existentialism.

Virtuous behavior, it is argued, has not only acquisitive but also expressive motives. People choose a virtuous action not only because it contributes to goods they want to acquire but also because it expresses their conception of the good. The essential feature of the idea of expressive virtue, then, is the response it contains to one basic question: Why might, or even should, people pursue an activity if they have severe doubts that it will have the kind of effects in the world that they hope it will? The answer is that the best kind of life simply demands such activity. This does not mean such choices are made recklessly, indeed they must be well considered if they are to be fully expressive. Nevertheless, the crucial motivating force is not the good benefits received or given but the good expressed.

Put in the terminology of existentialism, a person appropriates or chooses a way of life (and, thus, a set of personal qualities) that, for her or him, defines the good life and thereby constitutes flourishing. The outline of that way of life might appear to stay stable over time. But the need to reaffirm it, to appropriate it as one's own, remains a continuing demand, and often one whose form changes as circumstances change. That reaffirmation, moreover, will always rest on the good that is expressed, not on the benefits that will or could be produced. Central, then, to the appropriate motivation of truly virtuous action is the desire to manifest or express a valued state. In fact, it is the desire to express this state that makes merely prudential pursuers of virtue doubt the sanity of (to appeal to a Platonic picture) those and lovers of virtue who aim to express a virtue. This mad love and its apparent imprudence is the critical defining mark of expressive virtues, and we see striking resemblances to it in certain formulations in the Analects.³⁰

The distinction between acquisitive and expressive virtues is not, however, explicitly employed in book 4 or even in the early Confucian tradition. Indeed, the formulations of Confucian thinkers usually reflect the language of acquisitive virtue; they write in terms of the goods that virtues can produce; they defend them in terms of their beneficial effects on both the world and the agent. (Interestingly enough, such acquisitive formulations are less evident in book 4—or at least are more obviously in tension with other formulations.) Nevertheless, Confucians also speak of how a person can choose an action or way of life because it expresses that person's conception of what is good, and these formulations not only are central to book 4 but also generate one of the most cogent defenses of the ideas found there.

The passage in book 4 that most clearly manifests this distinction is section 2. The placement is propitious because if we bring together sections 1 and 2 we have an opening passage that announces the most challenging general themes in the book: virtue's expressive character and relationships to the general community and the different kinds of people who live in it.

The key notion in section 2 is the idea that the virtuous rest content with virtue, or rest in it, or are at home with it. That situation is juxtaposed with the wise who seek virtue because they derive advantage from it, believe it pays to do so, or find it to their advantage. That is, the wise seek virtue for acquisitive reasons. Their attitude finds its justification in the comment that starts the passage: the notion that people cannot well, or for long, endure either adversity or ease without virtues. Believing that to be true, a wise person would of course seek virtue, but the guiding rationale (even if it might justifiably start a person's pursuit of virtue) differs most significantly from the rationale of someone who finds contentment in virtue. The latter embrace fully the state virtue represents, have no purpose beyond possessing it, and therefore want also to express it.³¹

This passage puts, then, with particular succinctness, clarity, and even poignancy, an idea versions of which appear throughout the book: expressive virtue differs fundamentally from acquisitive virtue and that distinction helps us understand the characteristics of different kinds of people. The lowest levels of people (small people or lesser people) will have virtually no understanding of expressive virtue and will only pursue profit (16), or what is conventionally believed to be beneficial, even if they recognize that this pursuit will generate resentment (12). Higher levels of people, categorized as the wise, will pursue virtue, but because they recognize it is to their advantage to do so (2, and perhaps 14). What distinguishes the virtuous, however, is that they seek virtue as an end in itself, a goal that needs no further justification (2, 5, 14, 16). Moreover, they understand that, in fact, virtue may not produce some benefits, such as position and good food (9, 14), but that finally those benefits do not provide them with fully adequate goals and may even need to be surrendered.³²

The idea that the truly virtuous dwell in virtue and express it also helps to explain the apparent indeterminacy of the perfected person's actions, the idea noted earlier that a kind of unpredictability defines virtuous people's actions. There are two different, if closely related, ways to understand that unpredictability, and grasping each is important if we are to understand the portrait of the truly virtuous and, implicitly, of Confucius himself. The first concerns a defining characteristic of the virtues or more accurately of the dispositions that underlie them, and a distinction among kinds of dispositions that appears in Thomistic virtue theory but has clear analogs in existentialism is helpful. In that theory virtues are basically dispositions, but only a few, such as the disposition to be punctual, will always manifest themselves in just one kind of action: e.g., arriving on time. Most characteristically human dispositions, such as the disposition to be courageous, will manifest themselves in often substantially different ways depending on the circumstances in which they are exercised and the peculiar mix of dispositions within the agent: that is, the courageous person can stand firm or can flee.

The concern in book 4 is with this second kind of disposition, even if the text lacks the theoretical framework that allows one to pinpoint it abstractly. (It is worth emphasizing again that when we consider the understanding of virtues in book 4 we are dealing with dispositions, not specific, discrete acts or states.) With this second kind of disposition, specific actions are much less important than is the presence of the needed disposition, and the actions produced may not even seem, especially to the untutored eye, to manifest the disposition's basic character. The character of these dispositions differs greatly, then, from the invariant reactions seen in the first kind of dispositions because subtle kinds of thinking inform their activation. To use existentialist terminology, the activity of these dispositions, is guided by interpretations that are reflexively appropriated. The continuing openness and necessary indeterminacy of those interpretations along with the complexity of the activity of appropriation produces, inevitably, a kind of unpredictability.³³

These features, when seen from another perspective, also inform the second reason for the unpredictability of the virtuous. Virtuous people do not pursue the obvious goals, do not follow the predictable lines of action, that other people do. The difference from “small people” is most striking. That is, the virtuous do not pursue what seems to be profitable, such as a good position and its accoutrements, to a conventional mind. Put in the existentialist terminology we used in treating the subject of ordinary people's lives and dislikes, small people simply reflect the conventional understanding of the general society.

Even the wise will, however, find odd some actions of the virtuous. This occurs especially at those places where the expression of virtue and the advantageousness of virtue come into conflict, and the clearest examples are situations where virtuous behavior seems likely to bring great harm or even death. Myriad less dramatic circumstances also occur, however, as when a teacher forgoes time with her students because of narrowly defined demands of professional achievement. This distinction between the wise and the virtuous is extremely important, and it may be part of what underlies book 4's statements about words and deeds (in 22, 24, and perhaps 23). That is, the wise, unlike the virtuous, can fail to do what they say they will do for two reasons. They either lack full understanding of the demands of expressing virtue or find they cannot express it, that is reflexively appropriate it, when serious adverse consequences might result.

This second explanation for the unpredictability of the virtuous has implications that are far more dramatic than those that follow from the first. It can open up, for example, a gap between ordinary understanding, even the refined kind of ordinary understanding the wise possess, and the understanding and actions of the truly virtuous. Nevertheless, as a Thomistic or existentialist perspective makes clear, this does not necessarily mean that the virtuous must act in ways that differ radically from ordinary people. Rather it means they approach what they do and who they are from a perspective that differs from what is found in ordinary people. (Aquinas and Bultmann, for example, often focus on Paul's statement that one must be “in but not of” the world to underline that point.) This situation helps to explain, I believe, the apparently discordant presence of the passages on filial piety in book 4.

XI. THE ISSUE OF FILIAL PIETY IN BOOK 4: THE ROLE OF ORIGINS

The passages on filial piety appear to present what I called earlier a “test case.” That is, sections 18-21 apparently test what has been presented previously because the actions and attitudes they require differ from those earlier passages have commended. For example, one is not (as in 17) to emulate good people and with bad people examine oneself, but only to remonstrate gently with one's parents (18), and one surely seems called on to manifest some invariable responses (20 versus 10). (Indeed, the claim in 20 that filiality demands leaving unchanged one's father's way for three years recalls the strictures of 1:11, a text that became authoritative for those later people who propounded a stringent, even oppressive view of filial piety.) The situation we see here is a concrete instance of a much more general issue: it reflects in microcosm the question we discussed earlier about the relationship of the claim that intention is the basic value and the claim that some classes of activity are always virtuous or vicious. The rationale provided for filial piety, then, has implications that extend considerably beyond the limited case it presents, and to that rationale we may now turn.³⁴

Before doing so, however, we need to consider an alternative explanation for the presence of these texts. One might argue that filial piety was so deeply ingrained a cultural practice in Confucius' China that no thinker could imagine it needed to be rationalized, or even see it as a phenomenon susceptible to deliberative activity.³⁵ (Its apparently discordant presence in book 4 could even then be taken as further evidence that it was seen as a “natural fact.”) If approached this way, filial piety exemplifies what can be called the fallacy of false fixity, the idea that crucial features of the self and its relationships are part of the nature of things. Such false fixities can be seen, in retrospect, to be social myths that protected particular ways of life, but to the participants in a culture they represent fixed features that cannot be other than they are and therefore they set the limits on human deliberation. No sensible people attempts, that is, to deliberate about them; one thinks in terms of them, one does not think about them. Such an explanation for the presence of these texts is, I believe, a possible one, but I think another explanation is more productive. It focuses on filial piety as not only describing a very special class of action, but also as a notion that demands demythologizing.³⁶

Filial piety concerns the service in action and attitude owed to parents. It presents, I believe, a unique case of human activity, one that must involve ritual practice and always have mythic overtones. The rationale for filial actions is, then, far from exhausted by simple notions of ethical obligation; indeed it can even be corrupted by them. Let me explain, recognizing that my explanation moves considerably beyond what is clearly evident in book 4 (or even in the Analects) and also involves us in the project of demythologizing. Such an interpretative move is needed, however, if we are to provide an adequate, alternative explanation of why these passages appear here. Even more important, that explanation leads us to certain of the most basic religious motifs in the book: the focus here on the topic of “origins” and the focus in the next section, when we treat death, on the topic of “terminations” or endings.

Both motifs deal with the reactions human beings have when they inhabit liminal states, when they face “thresholds,” that will engender significant changes in their situation. Such changes are of two kinds. Either people move from one to another state, from being, say, a child who is cared for by a parent to being a child who must care for a parent. Or people respond to events that radically differ from and challenge their ordinary routine, events such as the death of a family member. The most important of these transitional states usually concern origins or terminations. They manifest, that is, what makes possible or ends human life. They force people to encounter the sustaining and destroying boundaries of life.

At the core of the unique case of filial piety, then, is the notion that human life has various origins or sources. Probably the clearest of these sources is parents who both are a biological origin and represent that basic unit, the family, which provides the social organism that generates human beings. Parents provide, then, the fundamental sources and relationships upon which people build and from which they move. (Thus, Mencius would describe one's love for one's parents as the “one root” [yī běn] of human ethics, and criticize those who sought to supplement this root in a way that he felt undermined its fundamental importance.)³⁷ People respond strongly to such an origin because they recognize that with it unpayable debts have been incurred. In most relationships, that is, people receive and give in a fashion that allows for repayment; equity can be restored. In these relationships, however, people receive so much that there is no way for them to repay what has been given. When debts exist that cannot be repaid, the only appropriate response is gratitude, reverence, and a set of related reactions.

The recognition of such a debt also, however, unleashes other psychological forces because it illuminates our fundamental dependence, and thus our frailty. We must, if we are to flourish, find ways properly to express the emotions that result from this grasping of our frailty, because failures to do so make us fall prey to one or another human deformation. They lead us, that is, to fall under the dark shadow cast by the crippling attitudes of masochistic religion or the uncontrolled reactions of primordial movements.³⁸

The practices that constitute filial piety are designed to protect us from these deformations. Those practices, unsurprisingly, have significant ritual forms, and they in turn draw on mythic bases. (A classic mythic defense of the ritualistic three-year mourning period appears, for example, in 17:19.) Filial piety, then, enables people to deal well with a situation constituted by both the presence of unpayable debts and the recognition of human frailty and dependence.

Moreover, the proper attitudes and actions toward parents that constitute filial piety underlie any kind of virtuous activity. They provide people, that is, with both the protective structures and the frameworks (both ritualistic and mythic) that make other kinds of virtuous activity possible. They also provide us with a locale where expressive virtues can operate, where the expression of states like reverence (jìng) is central enough that it makes no sense to speak only of the operation of acquisitive virtues.

We can, of course, question the truthfulness of the many claims contained in the set of ideas that make so important our relationship with the origin that is our parents. Most important here, however, is another issue. Those ideas, after being demythologized, do provide a rationale for why people must follow the activities prescribed by filial piety, and that in turn explains why these sections appear in book 4. That rationale rests on the significance of origins; let us now turn to its opposite, endings or terminations, a topic that appears in the treatment of death in section 8.

XII. THE ISSUE OF FACING DEATH IN BOOK 4: THE ROLE OF ENDINGS

Section 8 comes immediately after the seven opening sections on virtue. This position lends, I think, a special weight to the passage; it might even be said to provide the necessary bridge between those opening sections and the topics the remainder of the book covers. The section is brief and spare, by even the high standards book 4 sets (nine characters, including grammatical ones), and any interpretation must grapple with the lack of any scholarly consensus on the question of whether a sophisticated person in Confucius' time would or would not assume that biological death also meant the end either of consciousness or of life in any meaningful sense. Nevertheless, the general sense seems relatively clear: To hear about the dào in the morning leads one to be able to face death in the evening with an attitude that can be described in related but different ways: contentment, or acceptance, or a lack of regret, or a not minding of it, or a knowing that it is all right to die, or perhaps more problematic, a knowing that you have not lived in vain.³⁹

With a hesitancy born of the subject's weight, our ignorance, and the line's terseness and placement, I would suggest the following understanding of how it fits into and illuminates the general picture that book 4 presents. My interpretation, which admittedly is speculative, draws on how the idea of death functions in existentialism. I will begin by examining that complicated topic, only mentioning here that there are, again, clear links with a Thomistic perspective.

Existentialists make, as noted earlier, a fundamental distinction between seeing death as a part of the ontological structure of human life and facing death as a part of your own grasp of who you are. Most important to us is their focus on the latter. That is, they argue that truly facing death involves coming to terms with the apparently broken, often fragmentary character of human life and with the fundamental human need to achieve “recognition” (Anerkennung)—to be seen by others as having integrity. Facing death, then, ingresses on how we understand both our projects—our achievements and aspirations—and those recognitions that give our life meaning. This ingression occurs differently depending on whether we face death in its narrowest sense or in its more extended senses. The narrowest sense is the apparent end of the actual physical presence of my self and of the selves that I love most, those people whose recognition I most treasure. The extended sense is the apparent end of those ideas and practices that give meaning to my life. The two senses differ, but both arise from a single source: those experiences in which we directly face the frailty of all we treasure, of all that gives significance to our lives and generates recognition in it.⁴⁰

Such a direct facing of frailty is, for existentialists, especially significant because people's “horizons,” their general perspective, determine specific interpretations and thus also form most attitudes and actions. People's perceptions of the salient characteristics of events and people's reactions to them, that is, control people's attitudes and actions, and the former (the perceptions and reactions) are controlled by the framework within which people place those events. A horizon, then, is the general framework that controls the character of perceptions of and reactions to specific events.

Most important here, existentialists also claim that people's normal horizon does not highlight, or often even include, the notion of death. People understand, of course, that they and others will die. (It is relevant, given our earlier treatment of filial piety, that such an understanding is often triggered by another's death, especially if the deceased is a parent, a protective barrier between oneself and one's own mortality.) But they see death only as part of the ontological structure of human life and that understanding has not been grasped in a way that would change their horizon. They have not an existentiell but only an existential understanding. They have not, in that apparently odd existentialist locution, “chosen to die.”

When and if people do truly face death, changes in their horizon are produced, and those changes will, in turn, affect how they see and react to a multitude of specific occurrences. Indeed, the effect will often be especially pronounced when less is at stake—and therefore little conscious reflection occurs—than when more is at stake. The change in horizon can be debilitating, even destructive, or it can be freeing and constructive; it can produce a distorted life or a more flourishing one.

The destructive reactions will all be variations of an unalloyed fear of annihilation or of its surrogate, separation from what we love and honor. What formerly was overlooked, seen as neutral, or thought to be easily surmountable can become, for example, a troubling, even terrifying event. Even more important here, we can begin to doubt the significance of those projects and recognitions that bring meaning to our life. The fear of destruction can, then, generate responses that range from retreat into a self-enclosed world to the submission to external forces that are seen as producing meaning, whether they be those provided by the conventional world of understanding and aspiration or those found in other, far more dangerous kinds of authoritative systems. In each of these responses, we surrender much of what seems valuable in order to preserve an enduring presence. Therefore, each of them also corrupts what is necessary to pursue and actualize virtue.

A change in horizon can also, however, produce an understanding that enables us to live in a new more actualized way; to live, in that often misused existentialist phrase, “a more authentic life.” We can, that is, see the frailty of our projects, understand the contingency of what brings recognition, and yet still pursue them because of what they do contain. We can overcome, then, fears of annihilation or its surrogates, fears that generate responses in which we surrender much that is good in order to preserve an illusory but appealing enduring presence. We fully embrace, to use our earlier terminology, the demand to see true virtue as expressive. Moreover, we realize that only such an understanding can provide the proper motivation for virtuous action. Indeed, to face death truly is to see that any form of acquisitive virtue may fail to bring temporary satisfaction and surely will bring no ultimate satisfaction.

This kind of existentialist perspective allows us, I think, to grasp what is at stake in section 8 of book 4 and to see why that passage can serve as a bridge between the opening section's treatments of virtue and the contents of the remainder of the book. The passage itself has features that make it more like a myth than a propositional statement. It has, for example, the narrative form so characteristic of myths: an event at one time, in the morning, leads to a resolution at another time, in the evening. Moreover, the process occurs in a circumstance, a classically mythic “timeless time,” that is both removed from ordinary processes and yet also fundamentally relevant to them. Finally, the narrative concerns someone who is an “every person,” or better, an “any person,” a paradigmatic figure whose specific characteristics are far less significant than is the figure's general import.

I am, in fact, tempted to say that the passage presents a demythologized account of a much more elaborate myth, an account that I in turn will demythologize yet again. Whatever the truth in that idea, the passage clearly says that hearing about the dào (which I take to be grasping its significance) allows us both to face death and to be content about it. The dào, then, is something that, at minimum, relates positively to that idea of virtue the first seven sections have described and the remainder of the book will turn over in different contexts. (Only if the dào were hostile to, or negatively related to the virtuous life would such a validation be missing.) Hearing the dào and facing death, that is, generate the kind of confidence that enables virtuous people both to see clearly the frailty of what they are about, those practices that generate recognition, and yet also to continue to embrace the significance they do have. Virtuous people can, with this understanding, live fully from expressive, not acquisitive, virtue. They can be fully engaged “in” the world and yet not be “of it” because they grasp the world's contingent, and thus problematic character, and yet also grasp the significance both of virtue and of the pursuit of virtue.⁴¹

This kind of understanding of death and the dào, then, undergirds the virtuous person's character and aspirations. It validates the necessarily contingent but still completely satisfying character of the virtuous life. Moreover, understanding that character both allows virtuous people to possess in full measure the qualities they have and gives them the ethical force that means, as the book's end has it, they will neither be alone nor without beneficial influence. The treatment of the relationship between hearing the dào and being content with death, then, concludes in most fitting fashion the initial treatment of virtue and points ahead to the full treatment of the subject that book 4 provides. Or at least that seems to be the result of working through my proposal to present an existentialist reading of what may be the earliest book in the Analects.

Notes

1. For examples of approaches that focus on particular passages, see the essays by P. J. Ivanhoe, “Whose Confucius? Which Analects? (on 5:13), Bryan W. Van Norden, “Unweaving the ‘One Thread’ of Analects 4:15,” and Bruce Brooks and Taeko Brooks, “Word Philology and Text Philology in Analects 9:1,” all in this volume.

2. Literary style in evocative sections like this one is, I believe, important because we are not just dealing with the shadowgraphs of ideas; see Yearley, 1999, pp. 145-49. This is one reason, among others, why Waley's translation is always worth consulting. On this passage for example, Lau's rendition is: “Only when the cold season comes is the point brought home that the pine and the cypress are the last to lose their leaves.”

   The importance of style helps explain, incidentally, why consulting Ezra Pound's version can be worthwhile, despite the fact that its connection with the Chinese is so slight in many cases that it cannot be taken seriously. In other cases, however, we see the hand of both one of the century's great poets, and one of its most thoughtful and reflective translators of, say, Italian texts. An example is 4:12: Dawson's translation is solid and clear, “If one acts with a view to profit, there will be much resentment.” But here is Pound's: “Always on the make: many complaints.” In discussing matters like this I do not, I should stress, speak with the particular kind of authority that comes from having real expertise in classical Chinese.

3. See Yearley, 1999, pp. 127-33, 149-53, for a lengthy treatment of certain facets of this notion.

4. For an excellent treatment of the current scholarly situation in regard to historical treatments of the figure of Jesus, see Sanders; for a fine analysis of the development of modern biblical criticism see Harvey; for a fascinating work that queries the whole idea of a historical understanding of the Bible, see Frei.

   In these footnotes I will, as in the preceding paragraph, refer to a few significant works on subjects outside Chinese thought to give guidance to those people who might wish to evaluate the possible usefulness of those works to the treatment of topics within Chinese thought. I will also (if with trepidation) refer extensively to my own work because it contains analyses that may be helpful to readers who either want to evaluate my more telegraphic comments or to see which scholars I rely on. I make, however, few references to other works that deal with the Analects, and therefore do not attempt really to enter the often heated debates that surround the interpretation of the book.

5. A second comparison may also illustrate my point. Compare two twentieth-century translations of Dante's Inferno: one by the poet Robert Pinsky, the other by Charles Singleton. Singleton is without question the finer Dante scholar, but one can at places get a better sense for what Dante is about from Pinsky's translation. That poetry is being translated in Dante's case, to my mind, makes the comparison more, not less, relevant.

6. Questions about the exact sources of Heidegger's work and the character of his relationship with Bultmann are, it needs to be said, much debated, as is the question of how the early and the late Heidegger differ.

   Let me also note that the account given here also uses neo-Aristotelian, or more accurately Thomistic, ideas. As we will see, (see, e.g., sections VII, IX, and X, as well as notes 20, 22, and 40) I believe some of those ideas also “parallel” crucial aspects of the kind of existentialist approach I will use despite the noteworthy differences between the two approaches. The most sophisticated theoretical attempt to relate these two traditions appears in the work of Karl Rahner, a Roman Catholic theologian who was deeply influenced by Heidegger; see Rahner and see Yearley, 1970.

7. See Brooks, especially pp. 31-40, and Brooks and Brooks, pp. 13-18, 114-15, 149, 202-3, and 208-9. The Brookess' work concerns, it needs to be said, far more than just book 4 or even the Analects. I make no attempt here to query the exact philological or historical grounds on which the Brookses base their argument, having neither the inclination nor, in almost all cases, the expertise to do so. Nevertheless, until shown otherwise, I think the general direction of those philological and historical arguments is sound, whatever problems may arise with the details of the account.

8. The Brookses disagree, suggesting that book 3 is later even than book 10. The issues involved in our differences are too complex to examine here, but let me note that I think their dating is based in part on an assumption I do not share about the incompatibility of a focus on ritual with some aspects of the earlier Analects. (For more on how ritual and, say, self-cultivation might be reconciled, see Kwong-loi Shun, “Ren and Li in the Analects,” in this volume.) The issue of whether statements about ritual can, or should be, demythologized is also relevant.

9. See, again, Van Norden, in this volume, on 4:15.

10. The first two quotes are from Brooks, p. 31, the last from p. 34.

11. The editor's aid was very substantial in considering modifications to Lau, but he is not, of course, responsible for my interpretations. Let me emphasize that this translation is for the reader's convenience and almost no attempt is made here to consider the range of questions that a more definitive translation would have to consider. (A few of those issues are treated at more length elsewhere in this chapter, for examples see notes 26 and 39.) For that reason specific issues and possible alternative are not noted; e.g., at the end of the third sentence in 4.5, also possible is “how can they live up to the name [of ‘noble’]?”

12. A brief note on what I mean by virtue, given how significant the idea is here and in what follows. (For more detailed discussions of the idea of virtue, see Yearley, 1990a, especially pp. 6-17, 53-58; Nivison, “‘Virtue’ in Bone and Bronze,” in Nivison, 1996, pp. 17-30; also note Yearley 1990b, and 1994a and b.) A virtue is a disposition to act, desire, and feel that involves the exercise of judgment. The judgments may not be clearly present to my consciousness, much less the result of sustained reflection. At minimum, I must be able to explain (at some point, in some fashion) to myself or another person why I did something; e.g. why I was generous. This requirement may seem too “intellectualistic,” but the sort of account or explanation that I have in mind need not be highly theoretical. For example: “Why did you loan your friend Susan ＄20?” “She is a graduate student with kids on a tight budget, and although she's generally prudent with money, some unexpected expenses made her a little short this week, so. …” “But then why did you refuse to loan ＄20 to your friend Bill?” “Bill is a compulsive gambler who has fallen off the wagon, so. …” That virtuous individuals were expected (at least soon after Confucius) to give explanations for their (or other virtuous people's) actions is clear from texts like Analects 11:20 and most of book 5 of the Mencius.

    Virtuous activity also involves choosing virtue for itself. I possess not the virtue of generosity, but a semblance—or even counterfeit—if I act because of some ulterior motive such as helping specific people so they will think well of me. Finally, virtuous activity involves choosing specific virtues in light of some justifiable life plan. I believe, for instance, the best kind of human life involves generosity, not selfishness. I have, that is, a general view, and good reasons for it, that lead me to think that kind of life is better than one that lacks generosity.

13. The character dé “virtue” is used in 4:11 and 4:25, but arguably in these cases something like Waley's moral force is appropriate. (As Waley correctly notes dé often corresponds closely to the Latin virtus; 33; and see Yearley, 1990a, pp. 53-57, and David S. Nivison, “‘Virtue’ in Bone and Bronze,” in Nivison, 1996, pp. 17-30, on this whole subject.) A very different kind of difficulty is that the word “virtue” for many today either has very narrow connotations or generates understandable suspicions because it often seems to function as the rhetorical adjunct to one or another dubious political agenda. A sophisticated understanding of the concept does not, however, have such references. (Moreover, there is no reason not to pair “vice” with “virtue” [given a sophisticated understanding of vice] save for the resonances the word has for some people.) On the issue of the different but related meanings of the good see the two pieces by Hampshire; on the question of the relationship of the concepts of virtue and virtues and related issues see Yearley 1990a, pp. 11-17, 40-44, 182-87.

14. There is general agreement that sections 1-7 of book 4 deal with rén (but see Lau, p. 228 and p. 234, n. 1, on 4:7), and that 18-21 deal with filial piety (xiao). Beyond that, however, there is disagreement, even among those who think that book 4 has significant internal structure. Lau remarks (p. 228) that “IV.8 and IV.9 deal with the Way, IV.10 to IV.17 deal with the gentleman and the small man … while the last few chapters [22-26] seem to deal with the way the gentleman should conduct himself.”

    Brooks and Brooks (p. 209) think the book is divided into discussions of “The Cardinal Virtue [Rén],” 1-7; “The Public Context: [Dào],” 8-10; “The Gentleman and His Opposite,” 11-13; “Preparation for Office,” 14-17 (minus the interpolated 15); “Filial Duty,” 18-21; “Keeping One's Word,” 22-24; and a “Chapter Envoi,” 25 (with 26 an interpolation). The Brookses' division is driven, in part, by their hypothesis that sayings in the Analects are frequently grouped in pairs, often with a third “capping” quotation that follows the pair (p. 207). I worry that this sometimes leads them to force the sense of a section to fit the pairing schema.

15. On the other hand, yuē later (in the Warring States Period) came to have the sense of “oral agreement” or even “contract.” (See Lewis, 1990, pp. 67-80.) I wonder whether this later usage suggests a meaning liminally available in even the earlier uses of the term.

16. The Brookses remark of 4:23 that it “contrasts the loose modern practice with the ancient scruple of 4:22” (Brooks and Brooks, p. 115).

17. On debates among later Confucians, see Ivanhoe, 1993.

18. The absence of references to Heaven is striking, and could lead to the supposition, supported by othe evidence, that the notion of Heaven is intimately connected with the idea of a past perfected society; on a related topic see Yearley, 1985.

19. Soothill, p. 226; also note Legge's treatment of the differences between Mencius and Confucius on the issue of “humility,” discussed in Yearley, 1990a, pp. 85-86. Many modern translations either add the “If” (Dawson) or make the statement more general and impersonal (e.g. Waley, Lau, and interestingly enough, Soothill's actual translation). This passage will be treated at length in our last section.

20. Charles Taylor has been a profound and, I think, decisive critic of this kind of existentialism. See, for example, Taylor, 1991. For critiques of efforts to apply existentialist concepts to other figures from Chinese philosophy, see David S. Nivison, “Moral Decision in Wang Yangming: The Problem of Chinese ‘Existentialism,’” in Nivison, 1996, pp. 233-47, and Philip J. Ivanhoe, “‘Existentialism’ in the School of Wang Yangming,” in Ivanhoe, 1996, pp. 250-64.

21. For an excellent treatment of what is involved in the notions of the credible and appropriate see Ogden, 1982, pp, 4-6, 89-105. Yearley, 1995, 1999, and forthcoming treats in a Chinese context issues about “developing” ideas to make them credible. It is worth emphasizing that development might so change the original ideas that a disinterested observer could well wonder what role the traditional ideas played. The ideas might seem to be only a device to jog the interpreters's reflections or, worse, to give them an authority they otherwise would not have.

22. Numerous theoretical questions swirl around this account, of course, but I will just note that Bultmann's use of these ideas does not, I think, suffer from the obvious problems found in almost any reading of the early Heidegger's account, much less in the position of Sartre: e.g., questions about the absolute primacy of choice, the vacuity of the idea of authenticity, the apparent lack of any ethical content, and the absence of even a minimal account of many seemingly evident human qualities. (Rahner, to my mind, presents the most sophisticated theological attempt to treat these problems, but unlike Bultmann he was not a New Testament scholar and his work usually seems forbiding to those untrained in the traditions on which he draws.) The account of “thinking”—and thus of the notions of interpretation, choice, appropriation, and dispositions—are especially important to us, and to those who find existentialist terminology uncongenial or worse, I recommend Hampshire's 1989 account of thinking: he often makes similar points in a very different vocabulary.

    For representative works, for our purposes, by Bultmann, see the works cited; note especially, 1960, pp. 58-91, 147-57, 183-225 and 1984, 1-43, 95-130. An accessible and reliable treatment of Bultmann is found in Perrin. For more complex treatments that also contain criticisms see Ogden, 1991, and Jones.

23. For treatment of this subject see Yearley, 1999, pp. 135-37, 145-46. This approach resembles features of that process of self-cultivation that Neo-Confucians called a “strenuous spiritual effort,” a gōngfu, or sustained effort of both self-understanding and self-cultivation that focuses on examining one's reactions to concrete events. It also resembles the method used for over a millennium in Christianity, in which a four-fold method of interpretation operates, with the tropological mode being most prominent.

24. For a further treatment of Fingarette, 1972, and Hall and Ames, 1984, see Stephen Wilson's contribution to this volume.

25. The use of any Western categories, much less modern ones, in the interpretation of early Chinese texts presents, of course, more complex issues than I can adequately treat here. Issues about the categories of “the individual” and “choice” are perhaps most difficult, but one could query many others, including the concept of “dispositions.” On this topic see Yearley, 1990a, pp. 4-7, 110-11, 175-82, 196-99; Nussbaum, 1988 and 1993; and Yearley 1993a.

26. My paraphrase follows both Dawson and Lau, but Waley combines the two passages into one, seeing the first notion as an adage and the second as a commentary on it. He then translates “evil” as “will dislike no one.” (The actual character for “to dislike” and “evil” are the same: …, read wù in the former sense and è in the latter.) The reading is, I believe, a possible one, and if we think disliking no one and being free from evil are not roughly equivalent, conclusions follow that seem to contrast with much else in the book. (They do, that is, unless the reference is to a special kind of general judgment that differs from all judgments about specific failings; e.g., the kind of charitable love of people that, for Aquinas, can combine with severe judgments about an individual.) I have with these passages, and elsewhere, changed “man” and related forms to gender neutral terms; often that change, in book 4 at least, is easy to accomplish but in this case a price is paid.

27. Lau 11:17. This is from a “later” book, but it illustrates, I am suggesting, a conception of righteous anger present in book 4. Incidentally, Chad Hansen has suggested that 4:3 is “jarring”—“as if Confucius' highest virtue is one that generates hatred.” (Hansen, 1993, p. 58.) I would propose that an examination of kinds of anger, such as that found in Aquinas, can both illuminate the passage and illustrate how the comparative study of Chinese and Thomistic ethics opens up productive interpretive possibilities.

28. The idea of semblances and counterfeits of virtue in Mencius addresses this issue, but the most thorough response in early Confucian thought is Xunzi's. Not only does he clearly rank people's achievements, but he also argues that practices like ritual can affect people even if they do understand them. The cogency of especially this last claim is, of course, questionable. On Mencius treatment see Yearley, 1990a, pp. 67-72; on Xunzi see Yearley, 1980 and 1996a.

29. On the general idea that much religious thought deals with “irresolvable but revealing and productive tensions,” see Yearley, 1975b, but also note 1975a; 1994a, p. 713; and forthcoming. The issue examined here remains, I think, one of the crucial questions in the Confucian tradition even if, unsurprisingly, much of the tradition will emphasize “good” actions over good intentions in a way that at least book 4 does not. Put more dramatically, we can too easily forget the antinomian side of the Confucian tradition, and it is beneficial to remember that it may be present in one of the tradition's earliest texts.

30. See, for example, 11:24 and 17:11. For a more extensive treatment of this distinction see Yearley, 1990a, pp. 20-23; that analysis draws on Irwin's treatment and also uses Williams's analysis of the difference between first person statements and third person descriptions when virtue is the subject. If this distinction is seen as simply descriptive then any expressive motivation is acceptable. The category, that is, is simply formal and therefore also amoral, a feature that is prominent in some existentialist analogs to the idea. (On this issue, see the analysis in Scott of Heidegger.) In traditional Western accounts, however, evaluative elements are always prominent; for examples see Yearley, 1990a, pp. 129-43; 154-68. A muted version of this distinction always, of course, informs ethical action because we never know for sure that our actions will generate the results we desire. Nevertheless, the uncertainty is much greater in paradigmatic cases of expressive virtues because the final outcome is very uncertain and a full knowledge of that uncertainty informs a person's motivation.

31. Waley presents the initial notion in section 2 as a couplet, presumably a traditional saying that will be commented on; if that is true the differentiation between the virtuous and the wise would make even more sense.

    The subject of the relationship between the acquisitive virtuousness of the wise and the expressive virtuousness of perfected people is an important topic in early Confucian thought. Treatments range from Xunzi's examination of why the unvirtuous might pursue virtue to Mencius' combination of acquisitive and expressive language in his attempt both to criticize and to “use” Mohist ideas of profit or utility (lì). (Zhū Xī, interestingly enough, draws on Mencius' paradigmatic treatment of expressive virtue in 6A10 in his comments on 4:16, and 6A10 draws on 4:10.) The different renditions noted in the text are from, in order, Dawson, Waley, Legge, and Lau.

32. My treatment here raises complex issues about the relationship between wisdom (zhì) and “virtue” (rén) that I can only gesture toward here. In particular, my analysis seems to significantly subordinate wisdom to rén. How does this fit in, for example, both with the apparent commendation of wisdom in 4:1, and with the fact that in the later Confucian tradition (e.g., Mencius), wisdom became a cardinal virtue? The general theoretical issue involved here is the problem of the unity or connectedness of virtues, and it is a complex and vexing one. (See Yearley, 1998.) In this context, I believe it most likely that Confucius sees wisdom as a subordinate “part” of full virtue. As a part, it is present in the fully virtuous individual, but in the absence of other parts its value is limited.

33. For a more detailed account of four different kinds of dispositions and their use when examining early Confucian thought, see Yearley, 1990a, 106-11. I now think that account does not, however, adequately address all the significant issues an existentialist perspective presents. The unpredictability of Confucius' actions, incidentally, is one of the hallmarks of some portraits of him in the Analects, the most famous probably being 11:20.

34. These sections also are important because features of filial piety fit within the idea of ritual and therefore can cast light on the rather mysterious treatment of ritual in 4:13, with its focus on the yielding or deferential attitude that underlies ritual. This emphasis raises the interesting possibility (which I first encountered when prodded by the editor of this volume in another context) that yielding is an unnamed virtue that corresponds to the activities needed in a specific but variegated sphere of existence; see Yearley, 1993a, and note 1990a, p. 37.

35. The fact that filial piety was frequently violated in Confucius' China (as evidenced by texts like the Zuo zhuan) is no argument that it was not seen as a fixity. The occurrence of some kinds of violation can even provide us with evidence that a fixity is present.

36. On the idea of “false fixities” see Yearley, 1995, p. 13, which draws on the development of this notion in Hampshire's 1989 analysis (In support of this reading it is worth remembering that even one of the more radical parts of the Zhuangzi exempts filial piety from criticism; see Yearley, 1996c.)

37. See Mencius 3A5, and David S. Nivison, “Two Roots or One?” in Nivison, 1996, pp. 133-48.

38. For an analysis of a later Confucian's, Xunzi's, treatment of the notion of origins and the primordial, see Yearley, 1996a, pp. 10-15. One cannot, of course, assume that the two treatments are equivalent, or even that one is an appropriate development of the other. The subject of filial piety is infrequently treated in the Analects, most references coming in book 2, and that makes even more significant its appearance in a book as brief and early as 4.

39. Each of the seven translators I note has surrendered to the need, not just the temptation, to read something into kě yi. Allowing for changes in grammatical form, “contentment” is Soothill and Waley, “with acceptance” is Ivanhoe, 1993, “without regret” is Legge, “a not minding of it” is from the Brookses, “a knowing that it is all right” is Dawson, and “a knowing that you have not lived in vain” is Lau. Specifying this final state involves serious theoretical issues; e.g., does “knowing that it is all right to die” necessarily, in and of itself, involve contentment or even acceptance. (The general subject of treatments in the Analects of one's own possible death or the death of others is examined in Ivanhoe, forthcoming.)

40. For an excellent example of a treatment of this subject that combines existentialist and Thomistic ideas see Rahner, and note Yearley, 1970. (Despite its many conceptual problems, Becker also represents an extraordinary attempt to develop an existential perspective on the facing of death.) For a brief treatment of some of the many complexities in the Hegelian idea of “recognition” see Yearley, 1995, especially page 14; for the operation of those horizons, which include facing death, Yearley, 1990a, pp. 132-34; for the relationship of the idea of the primordial to death, see Yearley, 1996a, particularly pages 14-15 and Yearley, 1985; for the relationship of death and notions of expressive or heroic virtue, see Yearley, 1996b, 1998, and forthcoming.

41. The exact meaning of the “dào” in this passage must, I believe, remain fundamentally mysterious given the lack of context and the fact that it surely cannot mean, given the rest of book 4, the Way of the Ancients as it can be reconstructed. Dào may not even mean the ideal course of a political organization. In the Analects, it often does refer to the ideal course of conduct for an individual, and only once (5:13) is conjoined with Heaven. (See Philip J. Ivanhoe's “Whose Confucius? Which Analects?” in this volume, for more on 5:13.) The most I think one can say here is that the dào has a positive rather than negative or neutral relationship with the ideas of virtue that book 4 discusses.

Citations of the Analects in this essay follow the sectioning in the Harvard-Yenching concordance, unless otherwise noted. Complete citations for translations referenced in this essay may be found on p. 29, or in the Annotated Bibliography at the end of this volume [Van Norden, B. W., ed. Confucius and the Analects: New Essays, New York: Oxford Universtiy Press, 2002].

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