Learning Native Wisdom by Gary Holthaus

Author:Gary Holthaus
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780813141497
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky

Spirituality

The Power and Pragmatism of Language

It is about 490 B.C. Confucius has been traveling around China, teaching, hoping to find a ruler who will not only seek his advice about running the country but actually implement it. He has had little success. A practical man, a disciple—one suspects he had ties to political insiders—comes to Confucius, asking, “If the Lord of Wei wanted you to govern his country, what would you put first in importance?” The question has the feel of a test question, a hidden agenda left unspoken and lurking behind the interrogative: “Answer this right and I’ll put in a good word for you.” Confucius doesn’t need time to think; he already knows his answer: “The rectification of names,” he replies, “without a doubt.” The practical man is astonished, as would be any presidential advisor in our own country and time. “That’s crazy!” he replies. “What does rectification have to do with anything?” Confucius does not gladly suffer fools and does not coat many pills. For one whose whole life was given to political science, he is often impolitic in his speech. Truth came before schmooze. “You’re such a dolt!” he says, then continues, “Listen. If names aren’t rectified, speech doesn’t follow from reality. If speech doesn’t follow from reality, endeavors never come to fruition. If endeavors never come to fruition, then Ritual and music cannot flourish. If Ritual and music cannot flourish, punishments don’t fit the crime. If punishments don’t fit the crime, people can’t put their hands and feet anywhere without fear of losing them.”1

Without its right names, the world, as Confucius points out, is unreal, and none of the government’s policies will be realistic, and none of its endeavors will come to fruitful conclusions. In noting the importance of ritual and music, Confucius echoes indigenous peoples around the globe, for those are two necessities for balance and harmony within oneself and in the society. I take the final comment, “If punishments don’t fit the crime . . .” as a way of saying that people will have no confidence in government if the government does not call things by their right names. One might commit a small crime, not even theft, and lose a hand like a real thief caught with the goods. Without right language we have government by caprice, which may be just the way some (many? most? all?) people in power—princes of commerce and industry, members of Parliament and Congress, among others—want it. But Confucius apparently believed what the founders of our own government often said: if the government does not have the support of the people, it cannot stand. So the most critical arena for the implementation of successful, long-lasting government, in his view, lies in getting its language straight. “Naming enables the noble-minded to speak, and speech enables the noble-minded to act,” says Confucius. Part of his definition of the noble minded is that they seek to square their acts with their words. “Therefore the noble-minded are anything but careless in speech.

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