Love and Hate

The Passages

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4.3

4.4

The first of these passages says the human-hearted are capable of hating. The second says anyone who has merely set their will on human-heartedness has no 惡 at all. Read the shared character the same way in both, and the two passages contradict each other — which is why two thousand years of commentary have argued about how to read it.

Philosophical Discussion

The two passages

4.3 is about those who possess 仁. 4.4 is about those who merely aim at it. Both turn on the same character, 惡 — which is where the trouble starts.

Why "capable" carries 4.3

The passage does not deny that people without 仁 love and hate — obviously they do. The claim rests on 能, capable: loving and hating the right people for the right reasons is a capacity, and only the human-hearted have it. Without it, likes and dislikes carry prejudice. They attach to whatever the person happens to remind you of, or to what you stand to gain or lose by them, rather than to anything the person has actually done — and the judgment that follows is about you, not them.

What 4.4 asks for

A far lower bar: not possessing 仁, only having set your will on it. "Bad intentions" is deliberately broad — "evil" is too loaded, "spite" too narrow; what is ruled out is mean-spiritedness of any kind.

Which makes it a claim about intent rather than outcome, and that distinction does real work. The episode opens on a case of it: during the Great Plague of London in 1665, Lord Mayor Sir John Lawrence concluded that the disease was being carried by animals and ordered the city's stray dogs and cats destroyed. Those strays were the only thing hunting the rats whose fleas were actually spreading it, so the cull almost certainly made the outbreak worse. He was not negligent — he acted while others denied there was a crisis — and he was not malicious, since nobody then knew what rats and fleas had to do with plague. By 4.4 he is hard to condemn, however badly it ended.

仁 in brief

The Analects' cardinal virtue, and often rendered with something as general as "virtue" or "benevolence" — which loses the thing that makes it specific. 仁 is never a private quality. It exists only between people.

The disciple 有子 sets out where it comes from, calling devotion to parents and elder siblings the root of 仁 — 孝弟也者，其為仁之本與. The claim is developmental rather than sentimental. The household is where you first practise reading another person's position and acting on it, and that capacity is what later extends outward: what you learn with a parent becomes how you meet a teacher or an employer, what you learn with a sibling becomes how you meet a colleague or a neighbour. So 仁 is not warm feeling. It is the trained ability to understand where someone else stands and to treat them accordingly — which is why 4.3 makes it the precondition for judging anyone well. See passage 1.2.

That makes 4.4 a test you can apply to yourself. Find 剛毅木訥 — resolve, grit, plainness, restraint in speech — in your own conduct and you are getting closer; find jealousy and pettiness and you are not. That is also the logic of the passage covered in Episode 8, 13.27.

The problem: one character, two readings

The translations render 惡 as "hating" in 4.3 and "bad intentions" in 4.4 — read wù in the first, è in the second. Read it the same way in both and the contradiction is immediate: only the human-hearted are capable of hating people, followed by set your will on human-heartedness and you will have no hate.

The simplest answer is Robert Eno's, in the notes to his The Analects of Confucius: An Online Teaching Translation (Indiana University, 2015), which he made freely available:

These two passages seem contradictory, suggesting the Analects' complex editorial process.

What complicates the shrug is that Book 4 is widely held to be the oldest and most carefully composed stratum, so whoever set these two lines side by side was not confused by the pair.

Camp 1 — hating and bad intentions

Keeps both readings: wù in 4.3, è in 4.4. 孔安國 settled on it in the second century BCE; 朱熹 made it canon in the twelfth.

Their picture is a ladder. Setting your will on 仁 is the bottom rung, and that alone clears you of ill intent (4.4); the capacity to love and hate correctly belongs much higher, to those who have arrived (4.3). No contradiction — two marks on one scale.

Camp 2 — pure hatred

Reads wù throughout, surfaces only in the eleventh century with 蘇轍, and cites no supporting work — it expects the text to speak for itself.

To a point it does. 惡 means hate about twice as often as anything else — 24 of its 39 appearances — and it plainly means hate in 4.3 and in the neighbouring passage 4.6.

The trouble is that letting the text speak for itself is exactly what produces the contradiction. The best account of how the two coexist is 王闓運's, in his commentary on the Analects:

The human-hearted love people. Even those they reject, discard, banish, or exile, they wish to see reform themselves, and they take measures for their safety. It is not only the fully human-hearted who are free of hatred: anyone who merely sets his heart on human-heartedness has nothing he personally hates.

A tough-love reading: any degree of 仁 means loving people, so even a rejection comes from concern rather than animus — and what 4.4 rules out is the personal kind of hatred.

What the catalogue of hatred supplies

If 4.3 permits some hatred, the Analects shows elsewhere what kind. 子貢 asks whether the exemplary person also hates, and gets a list: 惡稱人之惡者, those who broadcast others' faults; those who slander superiors from below; the bold without propriety; the daring but obstinate.

Every entry is a way of acting; not one is a kind of person. So the permitted hatred is a moral objection to conduct paired with a wish to see it corrected, and it never falls on a whole class of people. One caveat: that is not 王闓運's argument. He asserts the conclusion, and the case holds up only because someone went looking for the evidence — he himself never cites passage 17.24.

Context and Connections

The oldest surviving use of 4.4

Centuries before either camp, the 4.4 line appears in the 春秋繁露 (The Luxuriant Dew of the Spring and Autumn Annals), a Han work credited to the jurist 董仲舒 — already read as Camp 1 reads it. The 繁露 mines the 春秋 for hidden moral judgments by a technique called 微言大義, "small words with big meanings," treating word choices as verdicts: a killing recorded as 弒 is regicide rather than mere 殺, a campaign called 伐 is legitimate where 侵 marks an unauthorized incursion. Silence is a verdict too — which is the point of the case below.

Two attributions worth flagging. Both names in that sentence are traditional ascriptions that modern scholarship does not accept. The 春秋繁露 is almost certainly not a work by 董仲舒: it is a composite, assembled from material of varying date and outlook, and its chapters disagree with one another in ways a single author would not — the title itself is not attested until well after his death. Nor is the 春秋 the work of Confucius. The tradition that he compiled or edited it is old and was doctrinally important, since it underwrites reading the chronicle for concealed moral verdicts at all, but it has no evidential support; the Annals reads as what it is, the court chronicle of Lu.

Neither point damages the story below. What matters here is that Han readers believed both attributions, and that belief is what licensed the interpretive method — and it is a Han reader, whoever he was, who quotes 4.4 and reads its 惡 as è.

graph TD
    SONG["宋 State of Song"]
    XUAN["宋宣公 Duke Xuan
r. 747–729 BCE"]
    MU["宋穆公 Duke Mu
Xuan's younger brother
r. 728–720 BCE"]
    YY["與夷 Yuyi — Xuan's son
宋殤公 Duke Shang
r. 719–711 BCE"]
    FENG["公子馮 Prince Feng — Mu's son
宋莊公 Duke Zhuang
r. 710–692 BCE"]
    ZHENG["鄭 State of Zheng"]
    SONG -. "ruled by" .-> XUAN
    XUAN -. "father of" .-> YY
    XUAN -- "passes over his own son;
throne to his brother" --> MU
    MU -. "father of" .-> FENG
    MU -- "on his deathbed,
returns the throne to" --> YY
    MU -- "exiles his own son to" --> ZHENG
    ZHENG -- "shelters Feng;
war after war with Song" --> YY
    YY -- "murdered 710 BCE; a Song minister
brings Feng home to the throne" --> FENG

The verdict

Two charges are available against the brothers: violating the order of succession, or the graver one of colluding to shut 與夷 out — manslaughter versus murder, where intent is the whole question. 穆公 gave the throne back at the price of exiling his own son, which is not what a co-conspirator does. The Han legal tradition had a slogan for the reasoning: 論心定罪, "assess the heart to determine the crime."

So their aspiration to 仁 shields them from the charge of ill intent, and their rule-breaking bars them from praise. Unable to condemn or endorse, the Annals says nothing about them at all — and the 繁露 reads that silence as the verdict, closing the case by quoting our passage, 苟志於仁無惡.

Who's who

• 孔安國 — Han scholar; settled on the two-reading interpretation in the 2nd century BCE
• 董仲舒 — c. 179–104 BCE, the Han jurist-scholar traditionally credited with the 春秋繁露, though the text is now taken to be a composite by several hands
• 朱熹 — the 12th-century synthesizer who made the two-reading interpretation canon
• 蘇轍 — 11th-century Vice Grand Councilor, younger brother of the poet 蘇東坡; opens Camp 2
• 王闓運 — late-Qing scholar in the orbit of 曾國藩 and 袁世凱; the tough-love reading
• Robert Eno — Indiana University sinologist; his The Analects of Confucius: An Online Teaching Translation (2015) is freely available, and its notes give the editorial-history reading

Related passages

• 17.24 — the fullest treatment of hatred in the Analects; every item a behavior, none a type of person
• 4.6 — 我未見好仁者, the neighbor where 惡 unambiguously means hate
• 1.2 — 有子 deriving 仁 from devotion to parents and siblings
• 13.27 — 剛毅木訥近仁 (Episode 8)

Language Notes

4.3 — 唯仁者，能好人，能惡人

Only — human-hearted — ones, can — love — people, can — hate — people.

• 唯 — only; the 唯 of modern 唯一. Some editions print 惟, which commentators call identical here.
• 者 — a nominalizer, classical and modern: "the one who." 仁者 is "the human-hearted" — or "people who possess human-heartedness," which works until dogs or aliens with 仁 turn up.
• 能 — not mere possibility but capacity, as in modern Mandarin. The hinge of the passage.
• 好 / 惡 — a verb pair, not adjectives: to love and to hate. How charged they sound is the translator's call — affection and hostility, like and dislike, love and loathe.

4.4 — 苟志於仁矣，無惡也

Just — set — the will — on — human-heartedness, it is — lacking — badness.

• 苟 — a soft conditional. It needs an "if" in English, but the sense is a future state that would not be hard to reach: "would you just give it a chance?"
• 志 — the 志 of modern 志願者 (volunteer) and 同志 (comrade, one who shares your aspirations). Wholehearted investment, not coercion.
• 於 — to, on, at, with; the English is decided by the verb in front of it. Here, "on."
• 矣 — marks a completed change. The change is becoming willing, so the will is now set.
• 無 — without, to lack. Rendered "have no," since "lacking" sounds too regretful for something you would not want anyway.
• 惡 — hate or badness, as above. Intent enters the English by way of 志 and 仁: a will fully set on human-heartedness has crowded other intentions out.
• 也 — the marker of a statement, so usually unrendered; in the gloss above, the copula "it is."