溫故知新 Old wisdom, today’s insight — ONGO
Is True Knowing to Hear Much and Set the Doubtful Aside?
Is true knowing to know much, or to honestly know the line between what one knows and does not?
Hear much, set aside what is doubtful, and speak the rest with care.
Confucius's teaching to "hear much but set the doubtful aside" became the principle of honesty in Confucian epistemology. Yet later Confucians filled that honesty differently. Zhu Xi set the path of hearing widely and broadening knowledge by investigating the principle of things one by one (gewu zhizhi); Wang Yangming countered that knowledge lies not without but in the innate moral knowing of the heart, and that knowing and acting are one. One probed outward, one turned inward, yet both stood on Confucius's starting point — honestly dividing what one knows from what remains doubtful. The path of knowledge that begins in honest questioning grew side by side on both halves of the earth.
In an age where the loudest confident assertions draw notice, Confucian knowing — honestly dividing what one knows from what one does not — becomes a rarer and dearer strength.
To Zizhang, who had asked how to seek office, Confucius taught this stance of knowing and speaking: hear much, but set aside whatever is doubtful rather than asserting it, and speak with care only the rest you are sure of.
📝I, Too, Stand Before It
To Zizhang, who had asked how to seek office, Confucius taught this stance of knowing and speaking: hear much, but set aside whatever is doubtful rather than asserting it, and speak with care only the rest you are sure of. Knowing lies not in heaping up much but in honestly drawing the line between what one knows and what remains doubtful. Remarkably this stance overlaps with the place Socrates stood, half a world away, saying he knew that he did not know. Before the temptation to assert the doubtful as if known, I too grasp again this ancient honesty.
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