VOLUME III, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 2, SECTION 3
Wei Is Neutral, Good or Bad Is in the Hands
The last section saw that wei is two kinds of work done by one hand. It made ritual and culture, and it also made the only right of taking more. This section turns the word over and looks at both faces. Once that is done, the meaning of this chapter stands steady, and the position that the eleven chapters below run on has somewhere to root.
First, clear a two thousand year injustice off this word
Write the word wei today, and two things rise at once in a person’s mind. Falseness. Disguise. Neither is a good word.
But in Xunzi it does not mean that.
Look at the bones of the word again. A person, and a doing. What is done by a person is wei. What a human hand makes is called wei. It speaks of where a thing comes from, not of good or bad. What is grown in from birth is called the nature. What is made by man is called wei. That is all.
Across the whole book of Xunzi the word wei appears forty four times, and of those only three carry the sense of falseness, and the other forty one all mean what is made by man. Which is to say, a neutral word has been pressed down under later usage, pressed for more than two thousand years, pressed until a person frowns at the sight of it. The first thing this volume does is set it back where it stands.
Because if this word does not stand straight, nothing said below in this volume can be said through to the end.
The first face of wei, everything good in a person is made by it
Xunzi puts it as plainly as it can be put. Work upon the nature and raise the wrought.
To work upon is to change, to remake. The nature is that heap a person is born carrying. To raise the wrought is to stand up the made layer, the human layer.
A person is born, and hungry he cries, and seeing something good to eat he wants to grab it, and this is the nature. But later he comes to know how to wait his turn, comes to know to let the old go first, comes to know to leave the last mouthful for the child, and this is wei. This layer is learned, is made, is taught in one generation after another.
Ritual is wei. Righteousness is wei. Writing is wei. Weights and measures are wei. The rules of wedding and funeral are wei. Music is wei. The whole of culture is wei.
Think through the weight of this layer. The reason a person is no longer that male lion is wei, exactly. Curse wei away whole, and you curse the human back onto the grassland. So this volume does not curse wei.
The other face of wei, that chain was made by it too
But the same hand, the same skill.
A person can add a reason to a thing, and this skill, turned this way, grows ritual, righteousness, law, poetry, music. Turned that way, it grows I am nobly born, you are basely born, and so it is only right that I take more.
Aristotle’s natural slave argument is wei. Roman law writing the human into the column of things is wei. The thirty year mortgage contract is wei. That thing in the phone that keeps a person swiping for two hours and will not let go is wei too.
Mark this. Not one of these things is inborn. No contract grows out of the ground. No law fruits on a tree. They are all made by man, written out one stroke at a time, argued into place one layer at a time.
So wei is double edged. That line is not a figure of speech, it is the ground of this volume. The starting point of enslavement and the starting point of ritual and righteousness are the same starting point.
Laozi and Zhuangzi sounded the warning here long ago
Among the ancestors, the first to fix on this face of wei was Laozi. He says, when the great Way falls away, there is benevolence and righteousness.
The great Way falls away, and only then does benevolence and righteousness come out. This line has long been read as sour cynicism, and what Laozi is really telling is a matter of order. He is saying, if people all still shared, still ran alongside one another, who would need to hang benevolence and righteousness on his lips every day. Benevolence and righteousness are brought in to patch, and what they patch is the thing that has already torn. The moment those two words ring out, it tells you something below has already gone wrong.
Zhuangzi puts it harder. While the sages do not die, the great robbers do not stop.
That line has been cursed as an absurdity for two thousand years. But set it back on this thread of wei and it is not absurd at all. Zhuangzi means this. The whole apparatus of benevolence, righteousness, law, and rank that the sages set up was meant well. But once it is set up, it becomes a ready made mold. Whoever steals that mold can use it to argue that he himself is only right. The finer the benevolence and righteousness, the smoother it runs in the hands of the one who steals it.
These two lines tell one same thing. The finer wei is, the harder to make out.
One thesis, and both directions score a full hundred
The ancestors held a large wisdom. On one thesis, both directions can score a full hundred. Put it on the institution of enslavement, and it runs like this.
The one side. The institution of enslavement is cruel. This side takes a steady full hundred. The Shang burying the living with the dead is cruel. Roman law counting a human as a thing is cruel. A five year old going down the mine in the workshop is cruel. The set of irons at the very bottom of today’s supply chain is cruel. Every one of these concrete cruelties ought to be opposed. This volume does not touch one hair of this side.
The other side. The institution of enslavement is one stage in the evolution of wei, without right or wrong. This side takes a steady full hundred too. Every human society has the ceding relation. Slave position and master position are only positions in a structure. The one sitting in the master position is a slave as well. Doing away with slavery did not do away with the ceding relation, it only changed its name.
The one side and the other side, two hundred points.
Put together it is one line. Concrete acts of enslavement are cruel and ought to be opposed, that is the one side. But the institution of enslavement, as a whole thing that has been found guilty, needs to be restored to a structural stage in the evolution of wei, that is the other side. The one side handles events. The other side handles structure. They do not fight, because they are not in the same field of argument at all. Part these two fields, and you walk out of the dead alley of all black or all white.
So good or bad is in the hands
Wei is a tool. The same as money, the same as fire, the same as writing. A tool is neutral, and the responsibility is in the hands that work it.
The same pen can write down a law that lets people live like people, and can write down a clause that counts a person as livestock. The same logic can argue that everyone ought to have food to eat, and can argue that some people are base by birth. The pen has no fault. The logic has no fault. The hand is moving.
Then how do you read that hand. The way this volume gives is one only. Walk in close, look down into what is under him.
Stand far off, and everyone is a flat shadow, and you slap a label on him, stupid, greedy, evil, and once slapped you are done. But walk in close, look down under him, and often you find, under that shadow, a living person of blood and flesh, with his own bitterness, his own bind, his own grief he cannot speak out loud.
This is not asking you to pity anyone. Pity sets him down in the low position and hurts for him, and that is still not seeing him. Walk in close, and what you see is position. What locks him, and whom he locks, and how these two locks bite into each other.
What this section set up, and the turn to the next chapter
The three sections of this chapter are walked through, and the second meaning of the volume stands steady.
The first section, the lion takes one more bite and gives no reason. The second section, the human takes one more bite and must give a reason, and that line only right is the first brick of wei. The third section, wei is neutral. It made ritual and culture, and it made that chain. The starting point of enslavement and the starting point of civilization are the same starting point.
The line this layer sets up is this. The finer wei is, the harder to make out. The eleven chapters ahead will watch, layer by layer, how it changes its skin, from the bare irons to that piece of paper a person is still glad to sign today.
Then among the ancestors, is there one who saw the matter of the economy itself early, and saw it through. There is. He held office in the state of Qi twenty seven centuries ago, he ran the granaries of the state, and he said a line that, twenty four centuries later, someone in London said over again.
The next chapter, let Guanzi take the stage.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
Chapter 3. Guanzi, the Same Position Set Two Thousand Years Early