Love and Hate

The Passages

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4.3

4.4

4.3 says the human-hearted are capable of hating. 4.4 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

4.3 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, affection and dislike track irrelevancies — the decent man who resembles the bully from middle school, the neighbor whose dog you are allergic to. It is the reasoning behind jury selection.

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 is why the Lord Mayor of London, ordering the 1665 cull of the strays that were the only check on the plague-bearing rats, is so hard to condemn: neither negligent nor malicious, and his intentions stay what they were regardless of the outcome.

仁 in brief

The primary virtue of a book that also has 孝, 禮, 忠, and 信 to discuss — hence renderings as general as "virtue," which lose what makes it specific: 仁 is always about relationships between people. 1.2 has 有子 locate its origin in the household — 孝弟也者，其為仁之本與, devotion to parents and elder siblings is its root — and the claim is developmental: what you learn with a parent extends to a teacher, what you learn with a sibling to a colleague.

That makes 4.4 a self-test, the way 13.27 is: find 剛毅木訥 — resolve, grit, plainness, restraint in speech — in your own conduct and you are getting closer (Episode 8). Find jealousy and pettiness and you are not.

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.

Robert Eno gives the simplest answer: "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 plainly means hate in the neighbors 4.3 and 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:

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 17.24 supplies

If 4.3 permits some hatred, 17.24 shows 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 never cites 17.24 — the case holds up because someone went looking for it.

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.

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 jurist credited with the 春秋繁露
• 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 — his Analects of Confucius: A Teaching Translation is free from Indiana University

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."