Zi Yue: "A gentleman is a righteous person, and a villain is a profit." ”
This chapter, everyone should also be very familiar with, the traditional interpretation, roughly means that Confucius said, a gentleman knows the great righteousness, and the villain understands the stakes. This itself is one of the most important propositions in the history of Chinese culture, that is, the "distinction between righteousness and profit", in fact, from ancient times to the present, almost always from the perspective of personal righteousness and interests to understand and interpret. The implication is that the gentleman who emphasizes righteousness and light profit is a gentleman, and the person who emphasizes profit and light righteousness is naturally a villain.
This is actually a very great, extremely deep misreading, that is, the complete opposition between righteousness and profit, and we can ponder the question, only the moral benevolence as we understand it now, only noble sentiments, no practical interests, at least to ensure the minimum interests, that is, all people or the vast majority of people can survive at the lowest level of security, can this way be sustained? We, as well as everyone know, in our history, such "experiments" or "situations" have appeared not once or twice, repeatedly, repeatedly, and repeatedly "experimented", and it can be said that they have never succeeded.
In itself, the righteousness and interests mentioned here are not contradictory, nor are they naturally opposed, and what they are talking about is not actually a one-level problem. Similarly, here, the adults and the gentlemen and the villains have no moral judgment in them.
We have talked about this "righteousness" many times before, and I have told you many times before, righteousness, yiye, that is, the meaning of appropriateness. However, when we interpret "faith is close to righteousness, words can be repeated", we spend a lot of time talking about this "righteousness" word, in fact, the "righteousness" here and the "righteousness" in "faith close to righteousness" are a meaning, in order to better fit the context here, we can interpret the "righteousness" here as "objective truth", that is, "essence and truth", which is no different from the meaning and meaning of "righteousness" in "faith is close to righteousness", here we are just for the convenience of interpretation, another statement.
The "metaphor" here, the simple understanding of which is "xiaoyi", "metaphor", and the meaning of "for example" in "for the sake of government and virtue" is also close, and here we can interpret it as "guidance" and "enlightenment". The "yu" here should be used more "yu", that is, the "yu" next to the square character of the traditional character, which means "to be".
So how should the "gentleman's metaphor for righteousness" here be understood? Simply put, a gentleman can be guided by objective reality, truth, and essence. If we set the object of observation or investigation as a society, this "righteousness" is actually the reality of society, and of course this refers not to appearances, but to the "truth" and "essence" after penetrating appearances, illusions, and illusions. We can continue to think deeply about what is meant by "the truth and nature of society"? Simply put, it is culture, system, and so on, but behind it, in the final analysis, it is the "pattern of interest distribution", and culture, system, and even "etiquette" are actually the embodiment of "interest distribution pattern, interest distribution model".
Then we should better understand the words of "the villain is profitable" later, which means that the villain can or is easily guided by the interests of reality.
Here, we can say a few more words, our traditional understanding, or interpretation, the result of misleading is that only those who do not talk about interests and are ashamed of talking about interests are gentlemen, and they become gentlemen who are guided by morality, in fact, in our traditional statements, this is kidnapped by morality. Similarly, when we talked about "gentlemen are not instruments", I specifically said that only by first becoming an instrument can we be qualified to talk about gentlemen and not instruments. In this context, we can also say that only by mastering interests and being able to navigate through various interests can we be able to achieve "gentlemanhood in righteousness", rather than being wrapped up in interests and falling into the whirlpool of interests, to borrow a saying that we will still use now, "first the villain and then the gentleman", which means that we can only be a good villain, qualified, and have the possibility to become a gentleman.
In life, it is certainly not possible to have no interests, of course, only talking about interests is a villain. Many people pretend to be high, full of mouth to see money as dung, in fact, there are no more than two types, one is to think that they only pursue morality, do not need to pursue interests, this is pretentious and high, and there is a mouth to see money as dung, but the heart is extremely eager, he just wants to sell fame and reputation in this way. There is nothing wrong with pursuing reasonable and legitimate interests and obtaining them by virtue of them, nor does it require any sense of guilt, let alone the fact that you cannot master interests as the basis on which you can be a gentleman. Fame and profit are actually tools that we can do more and seek welfare for more people, but if you are not proficient in the way of wealth and cannot make money reasonably and legally, then the so-called way of adults and gentlemen can only be castles in the air, and those people are useless corruption.