VOLUME III, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 2
Wei, the Layer Made by Man
Start at the edge of the grassland, with a carcass. A pride of lions has pulled down a buffalo, and the male walks up and eats first. He takes the best piece, he takes more than his share, and then the thing is over. He said nothing. He did not tell the others that his strength earned it, or that his crown deserved it, or that his part in the kill was larger. He just ate, and the fact passed and left nothing behind. That is where this chapter begins, and it begins there because the whole root of the volume is buried one inch under that carcass. To dig down to the word wei, you first have to stand in a place that has no wei in it at all. The animal world is that place.
This chapter digs to the root in three moves.
The first section watches the animals divide their food, and finds that sharing is everywhere in nature, not the rare exception. The pride all gets fed, because one lion cannot haul a whole buffalo off alone, and because the one who swallows everything today hunts alone tomorrow. The wolf brings its meal back up for the cubs and even for the packmates who stayed home. The chimpanzee that finds a loaded fruit tree calls the others over instead of eating in silence. The vampire bat feeds blood back to a starving roost mate it shares no kinship with, and remembers who helped it. None of this rests on morality, none of it rests on any institution, and all of it makes plain biological sense, by kin selection, by reciprocal altruism, by group selection. Mankind did not set out from a selfish wilderness. It set out from a floor of sharing. And then the real subject arrives. The male lion took more, and added no reason to it. Zhuangzi drew that state long ago, an age of the fullest virtue where people dwelt among the birds and beasts and ranked alongside all things, not above them. In the animal world there is strong and weak, but no noble and base, no dynasty, no inheritance. Every day’s order has to be won again with force. A fact happens, and it is over.
The second section walks up to the human and watches him do the thing the animal never does. He speaks. He says, it is only right that I take more. Set that beside the plain report I took more, and a whole judgment has been smuggled in. This is right, this should be so, next time again. Between what is and what should be runs a deep ditch, and that one line fills it in. This is why the step shakes heaven and earth. A fact cannot grow, but a principle can. A principle does not tire, does not age, and can be handed to a son. So enslavement does not begin when the irons close on some particular ankle. It begins when the line it is only right that I take more is spoken and accepted. Xunzi gave the pasted-on layer its name. Wei. Not the wei of falseness, though it has been misread that way for two thousand years. Wei is simply what a human hand makes, and it is neutral. Ritual, righteousness, writing, the codes, the whole of culture, all of it is wei. And here is the hinge of the chapter. The same hand that makes ritual can turn and argue the bare grab into a thing that is only right. Wei is double edged. Aristotle showed how sharp the edge can be, when he argued in the Politics that some men are slaves by birth, the first systematic case in the West for why enslavement was fitting. The finer wei is, the harder it is to recognize.
The third section turns the word all the way over and looks at both faces at once. One face, everything good in a person is made by wei. Work upon the nature and raise the wrought, as Xunzi says. The child who learns to wait his turn and leave the last mouthful for another is running on wei. The other face, the chain is made by wei too. Roman law, the mortgage contract, the thing in the phone that will not let a person stop, none of it is inborn, all of it written and argued into place one stroke at a time. Laozi and Zhuangzi sounded the warning early, that benevolence and righteousness get loud only after something below has already torn, and that the mold the sages cast can be stolen and used by the great robber. Then the section lays out the volume’s evenhanded method in the open. On the thesis of enslavement, both sides score a full hundred. The one side, that concrete enslavement is cruel and every instance of it ought to be opposed. The other side, that enslavement as a structure is one value neutral stage in the evolution of wei, since every society carries the ceding relation and the master is a slave as well. The one side handles events, the other handles structure, and they do not fight, because they stand in different fields.
That is the method this chapter hands you. A neutral word, and its good or bad hangs entirely on the hand that works it. So you do not read the label, you read the hand. Walk in close and look down under the person, and the flat shadow you were about to call stupid or greedy or evil turns into a living person with a bitterness and a bind and a grief he cannot say. This is not pity, because pity sets him below you and hurts for him and still does not see him. What you carry out of the chapter is the one distinction the whole volume rests on. The division of work is a fact. Noble and base is wei. Once you can tell wei from what it dresses itself as, you can watch it, over the eleven chapters to come, change its skin from the bare iron to the piece of paper a person still signs today, and is glad to sign.
SECTIONS:
SECTION 1. The Lion Takes One More Bite and Gives No Reason
SECTION 2. Man Takes One More Bite and Must Give a Reason
SECTION 3. Wei Is Neutral, Good or Bad Is in the Hands
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.