Analects 17.24: 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 17.24
子貢曰、君子亦有惡乎。子曰、有惡、惡稱人之惡者、惡居下流而訕上者、惡勇而無禮者、惡果敢而窒者。曰、賜也亦有惡乎。惡徼以為知者、惡不孫以為勇者、惡訐以為直者。
Zigong said, “Does an exemplary person also hate things?” The Master said, “Yes. They hate those who proclaim others’ faults, those in low positions who slander those above them, those who are courageous but lack ritual, and those who are bold and decisive but closed to understanding.” Then he asked, “Ci, do you also hate things?” “I hate those who take prying for wisdom, insolence for courage, and exposing others’ faults for uprightness.”
Commentary
ethics Hatred and its claimed reasons The question admits that an exemplary person may hate. The Master’s list targets destructive speech, slander from below, courage without ritual, and decisiveness closed to understanding. Zigong’s reply tests three claims to virtue against the behavior behind them: prying as wisdom, insolence as courage, and exposure of others as uprightness. Uprightness here remains the good being counterfeited.
Basis: textual-inference
Confidence: high
translation Ci and the turn in the exchange The Chinese supplies 曰 before “Ci, do you also hate things?” but does not name a speaker there or before the last list. The English follows Legge in making this the Master’s question to Zigong and the list Zigong’s reply. 徼 is difficult: Legge’s prying reading is followed here; a reading concerned with taking or appropriating what belongs to others would emphasize a different false claim to wisdom.
Basis: translation-comparison
Confidence: medium