Analects 17.2: 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 17.2
子曰、性相近也、習相遠也。
The Master said, “By nature people are close to one another; through practice they grow far apart.”
Commentary
ethics Practice produces distance 性 names the nature people begin with; 習 names what they repeatedly practice and grow used to. The two 相 clauses make the contrast relational: people begin close and grow apart. “Close” leaves room for initial differences, while the saying gives acquired habits considerable power.
Basis: textual-inference
Confidence: high