Born as a master, dead as a ghost.
Still thinking about Xiang Yu, he refused to cross Jiangdong.
--Li Qingzhao
Xiang Yu's "military campaign" for Liu Bang ended in Xiang Yu's defeat.
This has a big impact on the psychology of Chinese:
Chinese remembered "success and defeat", learned to "do whatever it takes", and recognized a life without dignity.
▌ Father and son of the people of the bitter world: Xiang Yu's gentlemanly spirit
Analyze Xiang Yu's personality and psychology. He is a typical "heroic personality".
"Heroes" all have some common characteristics: they value morality, have dignity, have self-confidence, are unwilling to rely on the strong and bully the weak, are willing to protect the weak, and are frank and straightforward...
Xiang Yu was a descendant of the great general of the Chu state and represented the spirit of nobility. The true aristocratic spirit is not to show off wealth and status, but to cherish one's noble personality. The spirit of nobility is not a utilitarian attitude to life, but a belief in a noble personality.
Confucius praised "gentlemen" and despised "villains". He believed that being a gentleman was a matter of faith. Man does not do it because there is any advantage to being a gentleman, and emphasizing utilitarian purposes will only become a hypocrite.
Confucius's so-called "gentleman" originally refers to the nobility, and the original meaning of "villain" refers to the lower class. Therefore, the gentleman spirit is actually the so-called aristocratic spirit, and the heroic spirit is also a form of the aristocratic spirit.
The Qin Dynasty was politically tyrannical, and rebels from all over the country rose up against Qin. Xiang Yu was a general in the Chu army, and when the Zhao army, an ally of the Chu army, was besieged by the Qin army, the Commander of the Chu army, Song Yi, decided not to save the Zhao army, so that the Zhao Qin sandpipers and clams would fight each other and gain their own fishing.
▲The image of Song Yi in film and television dramas
Song Yi sent his son to the State of Qi as an ambassador and feasted on guests. Xiang Yu was very angry, first of all, the people were very poor now, the soldiers were eating taro to live a life, and they couldn't eat the grain, and Song Yi actually ate and drank heavily. Then he criticized Song Yi's strategy, and finally said that now that the country's security is in this move, Song Yi is not sympathetic to the soldiers and martyred, not a minister of social welfare.
Therefore, Xiang Yu killed Song Yi and led his troops to help Zhao.
From the perspective of strategy alone, Song Yi's strategy may not be bad. However, on the spiritual level, Xiang Yu was dissatisfied with Song Yi's "martyrdom without sympathy for soldiers", and Song Yi lacked benevolence.
In war, benevolence is not necessarily beneficial to victory, but Xiang Yu believes that it is indispensable. This is his principle, his insistence on benevolence and justice.
When fighting with Liu Bang for the world, Xiang Yu took pity on the people's war suffering and proposed that "those who are several years old in the world, who are several years old, are willing to challenge the King of Han to decide between male and female, and do not suffer the father and son of the people of the world." Even Liu Bang's subordinates had to admit that "Xiang Yu was benevolent and loved others".
At the Hongmen banquet, Xiang Yu was unwilling to kill the potential competitors who showed weakness in front of him and let Liu Bang go. In the eyes of posterity, this is a manifestation of Xiang Yu's stupidity. In Xiang Yu's view, if there is no sufficient moral reason, killing Liu Bang just to eliminate competitors is also something that cannot be done.
If we do whatever it takes to defeat a devil, if we finally defeat the devil and become the devil ourselves, is that a victory? In the eyes of people who really have the spirit of nobility or gentleman, this does not count.
After Xiang Yu failed, Ning killed himself but wujiang. Is it that he can't bear to continue to be "the father and son of the people of the bitter world" for the sake of his competition with Liu Bang, so he is willing to die?
▲The Hongmen Feast in the Murals of the Ancient Tombs of the Western Han Dynasty
▌ "Fei Erpolai": Xiang Yu's dignity and pride
Xiang Yu refused to cross Jiangdong, perhaps more mainly because of his dignity. Letting a hero like Xiang Yu run away like Liu Bang is something that Xiang Yu can't do, and that will hurt Xiang Yu's pride.
The strong are easy to fold, the proud people are more dangerous in front of them, and if a person can give up his dignity, it will be easier to survive. But for the mind, dying with dignity and living without dignity, perhaps the former is more valuable.
I think of a phrase called "a family has a thousand coffins, and its family is prosperous", which means that if there is a family where everyone is very brave and not afraid of death, the family may often die because of it, but the family is prosperous. For example, the Yang family in the Yang family.
In addition, Xiang Yu's way of war was the traditional "Fair play" (Fairplay), which obeyed the traditional rules of war, while Liu Bang did not abide by all the rules in war. In such a war, Liu Bang won the victory.
It reminds me of what happened when Westerners first set foot on the American continent and were at war with indians. During one battle, a white man was caught off guard, causing the Indians to rush straight to their side. Not wanting the Indians to not hack the white man to death with a knife, they only put a wooden stick lightly on the white man's head, and then turned their heads and galloped away.
Originally, in Indian customs, tapping with a stick meant, "I can kill you but not kill," and generally the person who was pointed out admitted to failure. Not wanting the white man to have no such rules of war, the white man saw the Indians do this, and the white man raised his gun and shot the Indians in the back, killing them. Xiang Yu was like this Indian.
In healthier societies, wars are inherently rule-based. Modern Westerners also have their own rules of war, including the non-use of biological weapons, chemical weapons, the inability to kill civilians, the non-mistreatment of prisoners of war, and so on. Such rules can prevent war from becoming more degenerate, and can also avoid human nature from becoming more degenerate.
From the battlefield to the modern shopping mall, what will be the consequences of the irregular "business war"?
Merchants cheat on each other, drag on their accounts, and don't pay attention to credit, so they may get some additional benefits, but over time, the whole business environment becomes extremely bad. Now, many businesses are suffering from a "credit crisis" and calling for "rules of the game" in the business world, precisely because they find that wars without rules are indeed harmful in the long run.
In Liu Bang's war, Xiang Yu was relatively obedient, but failed. This is unfortunate for the personality development of Chinese. Because Liu Bang became the object of worship of people, and Chinese learned to have no rules, began to allow himself to degenerate morally, and allowed himself not to be dignified.
A person who can temporarily give up his dignity on the road to success, after success, has a tendency to get compensation by insulting others, which is actually a manifestation of psychological pathology.
Because they give up their dignity and develop self-hatred, they vent this self-hatred on others and insult others. If the other person who is insulted also chooses to temporarily give up his dignity for the sake of future "long-term interests", this will form a vicious circle.
▌ The degenerate "zeitgeist"
Some people may ask, Xiang Yu is healthier than Liu Bang in personality, why did he fail? This is not a question I'm going to answer, but I can make a few comments:
First, we should not judge heroes as success or failure. Although he failed, he is still a hero.
●Second, from the perspective of Xiang Yu himself, although he has an excellent spirit, he also has his shortcomings, such as lack of management experience and little listening to the opinions of others. These shortcomings led him to failure, but they were not enough to hide the light of other people's humanity.
● Third, at that time, the gentleman's spirit represented by Xiang Yu had already declined, and the Zongheng family who did not talk about honesty and shame had already surpassed the Confucians who talked about honesty and shame. It can be said that Liu Bang and China's "spirit of the times" at that time are more in line with it.
But the zeitgeist is not necessarily beautiful, not necessarily a healthier culture. In my opinion, that utilitarian zeitgeist spirit is harmful to the development of human nature.
Qin Shi Huang's unification of China is the product of this spirit of the times. The re-division of Xiang Yu is a return to the old culture, and Liu Bang's victory is the rebirth of the utilitarian spirit represented by Qin Shi Huang.
Xiang Yu was dead, it didn't matter. But the spirit represented by Xiang Yu died, and the Chinese nation began to lose its courage and bloodiness. Even if China was once strong later, it was the strength of the rulers, not the strength of national humanity.
During the Spring and Autumn Period, we could see self-respecting and brave "soldiers" everywhere, and in the powerful Han and Tang Dynasties, we could see very few such "soldiers".
Now we Chinese relish the Wenzhi martial arts of the Qin Emperor Han Wu and the Tang Emperor Song Zu, which is nothing more than an "idolatry" of the emperor. This kind of worship is precisely the compensatory psychological manifestation of the lack of self-esteem and pride of the scholars themselves.
Xiang Yu died, and the best elegy for Xiang Yu was written by a woman. While the men laughed at Xiang Yu for not understanding politics, it was a woman who knew why Xiang Yu "refused to cross Jiangdong." In the chest of the weak lyricist Li Qingzhao, there was a dry cloud arrogance that many men did not have.
On the contrary, in the hearts of Chinese women, this expectation of male arrogance is endless and endless.
▲Sima Qian
▌ Xiang Yu in the "Chronicle of History": Through the changes of ancient and modern times
In addition to Li Qingzhao, there is one person in ancient Chinese history who has a very high evaluation of Xiang Yu, that is, Ma Qian of the Taishi Company.
In the "History of Xiang Yu Benji", Sima Qian commented on Xiang Yu: "In recent times, there has not been a taste of it."
Moreover, Sima Qian, as a Han courtier, placed the "enemy general" Xiang Yu in the "Benji", which was equivalent to Liu Bang's status.
●This elevation of Xiang Yu, one of them, is Sima Qian's respect and admiration for heroic figures. This is the same as Li Qingzhao's appeal of "Thinking of Xiang Yu", expressing the pride of his family and country in his heart through words;
Second, Sima Qian actually projected his own image and wind bone onto Xiang Yu. Xiang Yu always maintained the gentleman's frank style and the dignity of the nobility, adhered to morality and rules, and did not pursue victory by any means. The same is true of Sima Qian's history and his personality;
Third, Sima Qian, through Xiang Yu, sorted out the trajectory of "the king's traces". The dispute between Xiang Yu and Liu Bang is actually a game of two political paths in ancient China, and it is also a conflict between two institutional ideas: is it to restore the rule of Zhou Li's "king-noble-feudal" division? Or is it a continuation of the centralization of the "Tianzi-Bureaucrat-County" by the First Emperor?
From the entanglement and rise and fall of Xiang Yu's four years of hegemony, Sima Qian completed the interpretation of the entire historical picture from Zhou to Qin to Han. After Xiang Yu, the mainstream political thought of ancient China was fixed, and Sima Qian wrote the institutional connotation of the ancient Chinese dynasty for thousands of years with the historical changes of just four years.
"On the occasion of the heavens and the people, the changes through the ancient and modern times have become the words of one family", Sima Qian, with a broad historical vision and profound historical philosophy, truly fulfilled the responsibility and responsibility of the historians he put forward.
Wen Zhu Jianjun