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anyone who has wu-wei as a spiritual goal is going to face the tension of trying not to try

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the paradox of wu-wei in the Analects

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Analects 3.3: "A man who is not Good, what has he to do with ritual? A man who is not Good, what has he to do with music?"

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ritual and music are the way you become good

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Confucius is saying: you shouldn't be doing the practice unless you are already Good

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Goodness is cultivated by means of the Confucian practices

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it can't be rote, you can't just be going through the motions

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you have to be involved with what you are doing at a certain level

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while we may offer candy to a child in order for them to play chess, to develop a higher skill and interest

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virtue seems to be something that we desire for its own sake

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Analects 3.3 says "you shouldn't be messing with ritual unless you are doing it for the right reasons"

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to become a gentleman, you need to love the Way

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you can't be a hypocrite

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Confucius is worried about

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people being glib

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say the right things but don't practice what you preach

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the village honest man

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the "village worthy"

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goes through the motions but doesn't feel it

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you can't point to anything they are doing that is wrong

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they do all the rituals property

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they know all the odes by heart

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they can play music

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and yet, they're hollow

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the petty "ru"

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motivated by salary or prestige

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Analects 7.30

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"Is Goodness really so far away? If I simply desire Goodness, I will find that it is already here."

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what it is about is motivation

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if you really want it, you've got it

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Confucius is constantly frustrated with people who don't love the way

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Analects 9.18: "I have yet to meet a man who loves Virtue as much as he loves female beauty."

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he is saying that the Way is something that someone should desire as much as sex

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Analects 5.10: "Zai Wo was sleeping during the daytime."

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"Rotten wood cannot be carved, and a wall of dung cannot be plastered. As for ai Wo, what would be the use of reprimanding him?"

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the metaphor is: his raw material is ruined

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someone who has the right material

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Yan Hui

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as they say in Canada, he is a keener

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Analects 6:3

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Duke Ai asked, "Who among your disciples might be said to love learning?"

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Confucius answered, "There was one named Yan Hui who loved learning. He never misdirected his anger, and never made the same mistake twice. Unfortunately, his allotted lifespan was short, and he has passed away. Now that he is gone, there are none who really love learning, at least I have yet to hear of one."

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Confucius is constantly shaming his students in this way.

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Yan Hui was born learning and loved it.

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but there is a tension

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What do you do if you weren't born loving it?

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How do you make someone into a Yan Hui?

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if you apply yourself, you will eventually love it

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fake it until you make it

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you'll start to feel the right things

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this applies to basic skills

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but how this transition happen when it comes to virtue

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as opposed to a craft skill

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how do you become sincere suddenly

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the lurking danger in the background is that you won't make the transition

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you become a village honest person, one of these counterfeit people

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how is acquiring virtue different from acquiring a skill

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learning to play chess

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carving and polishing a beautiful object

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there's an important disanalogy between acquiring virtue and skills

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recognized by Aristotle

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Nicomachean Ethics

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the disanalogy between crafts and virtues

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the products of a craft determine by their own character whether they have been produced well, and so it suffices that they are in the right state when they have been produced

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so a bowl is a good bowl when it is finished

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but for actions expressing virtue to be done temperately or justly, and hence well, it does not suffice that they are themselves in the right state, rather the agent must also be in the right state when he does them

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if you go to a piano recital, it's beautiful, then you find out afterwards that they were actually thinking about what they were going to have for dinner, or they were counting seats and seeing how much money they were going to make

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they produced something and that produce stands on its own merits

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there was a viral picture of a policeman putting boots on a homeless man in winter

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implicit is the idea that this is motivated by the right internal motivation

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if we found out later it was a public relations stunt, everything would change

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it would not be a compassion act anymore

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this is why it is not necessarily the case that if you are not compassionate, just by working in a soup kitchen you will compassionate, since something inside has to change, not just that your skills improve

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in the end, Confucius sees little other way for those who don't feel sincerity to be sincere but to practice sincere acts

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if you act out compassionate behavior in a ritual way, you will become compassionate

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but the danger is you will just become someone who simply acts compassionate, a kind of hypocrite