Chapter 18

Chapter eighteen is four lines, and each one converts a recognised good into evidence of a loss.

When the great way is abandoned, benevolence and rightness appear. When cleverness comes forward, great pretence follows. When the six kinship relations fall out of harmony, filial devotion and parental care appear. When the state falls into disorder, loyal ministers appear.

The two virtues named first are the central pair of the Confucian vocabulary, and filial devotion is the foundation of the whole ethical system built on it. The chapter does not say they are bad, and it does not say they are false. It says they become visible, and become subjects of discussion, precisely when the condition they describe has stopped being ordinary.

The observation is uncomfortably good. Loyal ministers are conspicuous in disordered states, because in a functioning one nobody has occasion to notice who is loyal. Filial devotion is praised in families where it is in doubt. A virtue that has acquired a name and a literature is a virtue that has become an achievement, and things become achievements when they stop being normal.

What the chapter refuses is the remedy of promoting the named virtue harder, which is chapter three's argument in another form. Naming and exalting the good produces its absence as a category, and the more the naming is done, the more there is to name.

Chapters eighteen and nineteen are a pair, and reading them together shows the limits of what the book is prepared to offer.

Eighteen is diagnostic. It identifies the appearance of named virtues as a symptom and traces it to a loss. Nineteen is prescriptive and says to cut off sagehood, discard knowing, cut off benevolence, discard rightness, cut off cleverness and discard profit.

Between them they make one argument twice, and it is a genuinely radical one: the entire apparatus of moral instruction is a response to a problem that the apparatus perpetuates. The counterpart argument was being made at the same period by the Confucian schools in the opposite direction, that cultivation is what repairs a fallen situation, and the disagreement is one of the defining fault lines of Warring States thought.

What chapter eighteen does not do is say what to put in place of what it has criticised, and chapter nineteen's answers, hold to plainness, embrace the uncut block, reduce what is private and make cravings few, are dispositions rather than institutions.

That gap is the standing objection to this book as political philosophy, and it has been made by sympathetic readers as well as hostile ones. A text that identifies a real pathology in moral and legal machinery, and offers in its place a recommendation to want less, has said something true and something unimplementable, and the two are hard to separate.