42 pages • 1 hour read
MenciusMencius
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Book VChapter Summaries & Analyses
Book V, Part A Summary
Book V, Part A offers a discussion of key human relationships, their significance, and the rules surrounding them. It begins with someone asking Mencius why a man who was to become Emperor, Shun, was said to have been found crying in the fields. Mencius uses his answer to demonstrate a point about both the importance of the relation to one’s parents and what it means to be a properly dutiful child. He says that Shun remained anxious and unhappy despite receiving beautiful women, wealth, rank, and even “the whole Empire” (100). Mencius is suggesting that the happiness of one’s parents, for a dutiful son, takes priority over all other ostensible goods. So long as Shun’s parents remained estranged from him he was sorrowful. Love for one’s parents is also more constant. Mencius describes how at different periods of our lives, and depending on what we have achieved, we may variously long for a wife, public office, and a prince to serve. However, the desire to make one’s parents happy persists throughout our lives—or at least it does if, like Shun, one is a virtuous and benevolent person.
Mencius goes on to discuss another obligation to our parents. We must tell them if we want to get married, and we must seek their approval. However, it is permissible in certain instances to marry without telling them if they will refuse the marriage. The reasoning for this is that: “A man and woman living together is the most important of human relationships” (100). Using an example from the life of Shun, Mencius says that to deny oneself such a relationship would have the effect of undermining our relations with our parents in the long run. Here again is a case of Mencius attempting to resolve an apparent conflict between two different rules and coming to a pragmatic resolution.
Lastly, in this part, an example of Shun giving favorable treatment to his brother when punishing him is used to show the importance of the sibling relation. Mencius suggests that it is fair and right to treat one’s brother with more mercy because of the value this relationship should occupy in our lives (section 3). Mencius also talks in section 4 about how the spirit of a poem is more important than its literal meaning when we are interpreting it. This point can be viewed as a metaphor for the prioritization of the spirit of a rule over its detail.
Book V, Part B Summary
Part B of Book V focuses, like Part A, on human relationships. The emphasis is on broader social relations, social etiquette, and friendship, rather than familial or marital ties. In section 3, Wan Chang, an interlocutor from Part A, asks about friendship. Mencius says that in making friends one must not choose someone because of their age, power, or status. One must choose someone “because of his virtue” (114). In this way, friendship should not be instrumental. In section 8 he also suggests that it is possible to “make friends” with great poets and writers from the past by reading and studying them. Similar to a claim made by Nietzsche in Human, All Too Human (1878), this is especially true, suggests Mencius, if one cannot find equals in one’s own time.
In section 4, Wan Chang asks about the correct attitude of mind to adopt in social discourse. Mencius responds by saying that one should adopt a “respectful attitude of mind” (115). A complex discussion follows about what this “respect” exactly entails in the context of gift-giving. For Mencius, gift-giving, and receiving, constitutes an integral aspect of social etiquette. It is also connected to social hierarchy. If your superior gets you a gift, it is disrespectful to ask whether he acquired it by moral means. Crucial here is whether the superior follows the correct etiquette in making friends and treats one in the correct way. If so, argues Mencius, even Confucius would not refuse the gift.
Pushing this principle to its limits, Mencius next discusses whether it would be permissible to accept a gift from someone you knew had acquired it through open robbery. The answer of Mencius is that social etiquette should still be followed. This is because the two actions can be separated. In other words, one could still accept the gift if the proper rites of social intercourse are followed. The true King should then separately punish the robbery, or try to reform the robbers, if they are found to have committed this crime. Mencius does emphasize, however, that what constitutes robbery can be ambiguous. Not all instances of taking what strictly does not belong to us is theft. This part also contains a discussion of the distinction between charity and gift-giving as they relate to social hierarchy (section 6), and it gives specific details of the etiquette for summoning different ranks of person (section 7).
Book V Analysis
Book V occupies an important role within the overall structure of Mencius and its account of “the way.” If Book IV tries to indicate why, from a broader perspective, we should follow the practices and rites of the former kings, Book V adds more detail to what these rules amount to. It also focuses on the rites and precepts pertaining to more localized and personal matters, especially with regards to our social and familial relationships and obligations, but also for very specific social practices. For instance, Mencius says that, on entering a new place, “The first thing Confucius did was to lay down correct rules governing sacrificial vessels, ruling out the use of food acquired from the four quarters in such vessels” (117). Thus, Mencius in general, and Book V in particular, prescribe the appropriate rites on a range of issues, ranging from sacrifices to summoning someone to the amount of time required for grieving. It even stipulates the correct wood to use when burying one’s parents.
This discussion might strike a reader in the 21st century as odd. We tend now to associate philosophy with a distinct academic and theoretical enterprise. Issues of etiquette, friendship, romantic relations, and family are usually parceled off to the domains of anthropology, social psychology, or even self-help. This has not always been the case. Both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche discussed such issues well into the 19th century. So, too, did French aphorists such as La Rochefoucauld, Montaigne, and Voltaire in previous centuries. They all regarded a certain type of advice and reflection on what Nietzsche called the “closest things” as an essential part of the philosopher’s task (Nietzsche, Friedrich. Human, All Too Human, trans. R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge University Press, 1986, p. 309).
Mencius’s comments on these issues can be viewed in a similar vein. While one may not always agree with the content of his views on such matters, they form part of a broader, more holistic conception of philosophy and its goal. That is, via the sage, philosophy’s purpose is not merely to speak to other specialists about abstract issues in metaphysics or epistemology. Its aim is to affect and improve the lives of ordinary people. This conception is in keeping with Mencius’s conception of the way and the harmony it looks to bring into all aspects of life.
There are, however, important distinctions to be drawn between Mencius and the European philosophers mentioned. While these figures attempted to outline ideal relations between men and women or between friends according to their own reason and experience, Mencius’s position is more ambiguous. On one level, he is indeed doing that, but he is also describing and affirming the specific practices and traditions of his day. Rites Mencius mentions stipulating, for example, that a “commoner should be summoned with a bent flag, a Gentleman with a flag with bells and a Counsellor with a pennon” are hardly derived from his independent evaluation of what is best (120). They seem to be simply conventions of that culture.
This focus on the conventions of the day raises a question of what status the rites have within Mencius’s broader notion of the way. Some ideas may be genuinely conducive to social cohesion, such as respect for one’s parents. Others, though, related to mourning and social etiquette, or notions that women should be subservient to men, are social fiats, or they are codifications of existing hierarchies of power. If Mencius is endorsing them just because they exist, then the reader may question whether his “way” is as radical or far reaching in certain respects as he sometimes suggests. This is a tension in Mencius and Confucian thought generally: The way is often torn between respect for tradition and the necessity of reforming it.
