The Mencius (6A)

Book 6 of The Mencius was a debate between Goazi and Mencius about human nature and righteousness. As I read the debate, I found myself a little bit confused with the way Goazi was describing things and comparing human life to nature. How could it be possible to have no good or bad existing yet it appears to me that there is definitely bad occurring in real life. Gaozi states that as water has no distinction with east and west, humans will have no distinction with good and bad (6a.2) I don’t wanna say I agree more with the response Mencius had with this, but I feel like it did make a little more sense. What Mencius said here was essentially that with force things can change. In this case, with force you can move water up instead of down, just as a person is not bad but made to be that way. As I read this part of the section, I questioned how a person could be forced to be “bad”. I think I would take it more as not forced but with certain events, someone may decide to use certain actions which may be looked at as bad rather than good. Mencius is thinking that that force can drive nature, in this case the good in a person, in the opposite direction. Which I do believe in all cases to be true, especially when you think about what the word “force” means on a day to day basis.

As I continued to read through 6a.3, I genuinely didn’t understand what Gaozi’s words meant. I didn’t know what was meant by “nature means inborn”, as much as I tried to derive the meaning from both sides of the conversation. How is the nature of an ox and that of a man considered to be the same? Following that in 6.4 was the idea that “humanity is internal” and “right is external”. By this I could see that it was meant to say that what you feel towards something of your own, that you don’t feel towards the same thing of someone else’s, is considered an internal experience because it is your own feeling. The opposite would be an external experience, which could be treating all elders in the same way. This concept made sense to me until Mencius questioned what would happen if you like something of your own, just as much as the something that is someone else’s, asking if it would then be considered external. There wasn’t much of an answer here, but I do believe that it would be external. I think in some instances Gaozi’s concepts are not 100% correct as there always seems to be some backhanded comment from Mencius that leads to questioning the existence of the concept.