Analects 17.23: 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 17.23
子路曰、君子尚勇乎。子曰、君子義以為上、君子有勇而無義、為亂、小人有勇而無義、為盜。
Zilu said, “Does an exemplary person prize courage?” The Master said, “An exemplary person puts rightness first. A person of high rank with courage but no rightness stirs up rebellion; an ordinary person with courage but no rightness becomes a robber.”
Commentary
politics Courage needs rightness The answer first uses 君子 as the exemplary person who ranks 義, rightness, above courage. Its next contrast is read socially: courage without rightness produces rebellion in someone of rank and robbery in an ordinary person. The difference in action supports that shift of sense. It also makes courage’s effect depend on the person’s position as well as their moral direction. 亂 is the same word rendered “disorder” in the warning about courage without learning in 17.8; “rebellion” gives it a political force here.
Basis: textual-inference
Confidence: medium