Virtues that Come Close
May 24th, 2009 
Analects, Chinese Philosophy, virtue ethics 
Chris
Analects 1.13 discusses the notion of virtues that “come close” to other virtues. It reads:
Master You said, “Trustworthiness comes close to rightness, in that your word can be counted upon. Reverence comes close to ritual propriety, in that it allows you to keep shame and public disgrace at a distance. Simply following these virtues, never letting them out of your sight – one cannot doubt that this is worthy of respect.
In Slingerland’s commentary on 1.13, he cites, with some approval, the interpretation of Qing Dynasty commentator Liu Baonan’s view on what it means to “come close to” in these two cases. I have some disagreements with Lin Baonan’s view, and by extension Slingerland’s, below.
The Baonan/Slingerland view here is that trustworthiness and reverence are “secondary virtues” to ritual propriety (li) and rightness (yi). As a consequence, they see the former as only “coming close” to the latter, but falling short. This being the case, they suggest that there are times when an unguided or raw possession of the former will lead to a nullification of the latter, and as such inappropriate conduct would follow. Consequently, there are times when the secondary virtues can be discarded in order to advance the latter.
Baonan uses the story of Wei Sheng to illustrate a failure of trustworthiness. Here, the story tells us that Wei Sheng had a meeting arranged with a young girl under a river bridge. At the time of the meeting, however, a terrible storm came. The girl stayed home, but Wei Sheng, refusing to compromise the keeping of his word, went and was drowned. Baonan suggests that the girl’s behavior is “yi” where Wei Sheng’s is not, and this happens because she, unlike Wei Sheng, adapts to the situation instead of being inflexibly tied to her word. Thus she is the moral “hero”, not him.
Similarly, Slingerland suggests, there are times when reverence is misguided and will lead a person to do things that are not in accord with ritual propriety. His point is, apparently, that there are times when one needs to discard reverence in order to advance ritual propriety.
—
It is easy to see Baonan’s and Slingerland’s points here. However something doesn’t seem to sit right. If they are right, there should be a parallel structure between the two cases. In the case of trustworthiness, it seems that they are suggesting that there are times when it must be abandoned in order for rightness (yi) to come to pass in a situation. One can easily think of other cases to fit this, say “upright Gong” or “straight body” from the Analects (the case of the son who tells on his sheep-stealing dad).
However, if the “abandonment” reading here makes sense, it should apply to the case of reverence as well. But it doesn’t. Although one can surely think of cases of misguided reverence, there can’t be any cases of ritual propriety without reverence — at least not by the standard Confucian line of thought about ritual. Ritual must be accompanied by reverence, or it’s not ritual propriety.
So the parallel structure of “abandonment” doesn’t seem to hold up. So I’m left to think that whatever the relationship between the secondary virtues (trustworthiness, reverence) and the primary ones (ritual propriety, rightness), it’s not such that in a given case you can have one without the other. If that’s right, then we need to rethink the suggestion that sometimes trustworthiness needs to be put to the side in order to attain rightness. Instead, it looks like one might say that just as all cases of ritual propriety contain reverence, all cases of yi contain trustworthiness.
Of course, this means a closer look at the concept of “trustworthiness” – one I haven’t supplied here. Instead, I’m more concerned here just with the relationship between the “secondary” and “primary” virtues as Slingerland/Baonan see it.
No Comments
Comments RSS
TrackBack Identifier URI
No comments yet. Be the first!
Leave a comment
