Analects 17.15: 陽貨 (Yang Huo)
Confucius and his disciples · Classical Chinese original · new English translation and commentary by Text Atlas
Overview
Book 17 puts learning under pressure: Confucius faces invitations to serve amid rebellion, and students question his choices. A sequence on six qualities shows how even humaneness, trustworthiness, and courage can go wrong without learning. Poetry, music, and ritual recur as practices that shape feeling and conduct; polished speech and respectable appearances repeatedly come under suspicion. The mourning debate asks whether ritual’s duration answers to gratitude and grief as well as to public continuity. The closing sayings rank rightness above courage, make room for moral hatred, generalize harshly about women and petty people, and treat a person’s reputation at forty as settled.
Analects 17.15
子曰、鄙夫、可與事君也與哉。其未得之也、患得之、既得之、患失之。苟患失之、無所不至矣。
The Master said, “Can you serve a ruler alongside a base person? Before getting what they want, they worry about getting it. Once they have it, they worry about losing it. When they fear losing it, there is nothing they will not do.”
Commentary
politics Service governed by fear of loss The object of 得, getting, is left implicit. Service to a ruler makes office or its benefits a likely object, but “what they want” preserves the wider wording. Anxiety continues after acquisition and removes every limit on what the person might do to keep it. The opening question asks what working alongside such a person would mean.
Basis: textual-inference
Confidence: medium