Kongzi Says You Talk Too Much

This post, first in months and months (Years?  I need to go back and look at the last post), was written as a response to my friend Hannah's post which you can read on her nifty blog, right here. I read Hannah's entry about wanting to curb her speaking habits and started to comment, but after beginning to type my third paragraph I remembered that I too had a blog, one that I was paying to keep up without ever using.  Feeling like a big fat sucker, I eventually remembered the password to this thing and began typing.  Here's the original comment:

Kongzi said, "The ancients feared to speak, for fear that their actions wouldn't measure up." (4.22)

子曰： 古者言之不出，恥躬之不逮也。

Lots of folks think that Kongzi ("Confucius") was just a talky talker who liked to talk, talk talk and keep talking, spouting off arcane and obscure rules of conduct here, being tediously patriarchal there (thanks a lot, Song Dynasty) and generally pouring cold water on everybody's good time.  He has some great ideas, though, that are still applicable even in our post-modern, trying-to-be-less-PC-yet-less-bigoted-at-the-same-time society.

What he's saying in the quote above is thought to have been recorded by his students who, when they thought about it, probably found it to be an indirect rebuke of sorts.  See, Kongzi was polite - really polite - and he rarely insulted anyone unless they thought they were being so inappropriate they needed some scolding.   I think that there's a subtext here for people who need to learn how to get along with others, and that subtext is, "You talk too much, fool."

So who is this proverbial 'you'?  Me?  Sure.  You the reader?  Maybe.  I think I'm probably more guilty of talking too much than most.  During my years in music school I railed against the administration of my school to whoever would listen about the unfairness with which my professors were being treated, how the power structure boiled down to the Board of Regents (who were not musicians and sometimes not even college grads) as well as individual and group donors (somewhat more benign but ultimately too banal for my taste) and what they envisioned as the perfect system for the College of Music at my school.  I look back on this time in my life and think: what did I actually do about all of this?  The answer is mostly nothing.  Aside from showing my support during teaching evaluation time and the occasional signature on a petition I did very little to improve the environment within the CoM as a whole.  I like to think that I gave plenty of effort in my individual study, but in this case I don't feel that it applies.

My point is that, while we have every right to examine our problems critically (read: complain about them) and fill our neighbors' ears with incessant annoyances and opinions, alternatively we might try to remember that our actions - as Americans are constantly reminded by the likes of Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer - speak louder than our words.  In an age where personal blogs like this one are so prevalent and the Internet has put mediocrity at the center stage of every argument via the comment bar, I think some perspective is needed.

Think on this:  Kongzi lived 2500 years ago, in a culture where spoken and written language had already existed for centuries.  Language, today considered one of the crowning achievements of ancient Chinese culture (if not the crowning achievement), had already been evaluated and found wanting, and all for reasons that I think those of us who talk too much can realize through our own personal experience.

Honestly, this sort of insight only comes with experience and a lot of self-reflection, so you can imagine all of the talking that must have gone on in Kongzi's head before he laid the science down on his disciples so well that they wrote a whole book of his teachings (The Analects).  Rather than berate the poor old guy for saying too much, we should thank him for pointing out the fault of language without resorting to snarky catch-phrases, pirates, or Nicolas Cage.

Comments

[Hannah Pralle]

Yes! Perhaps verbalization should be viewed as a necessary but intermediate step towards something else. I'm not sure how long I've been annoyed by all my talking – longer than conscious awareness can track – but I remember sitting with a friend at Macy's who told me about this ten-day-long, silent meditation retreat he'd attended. My very first thought was, ironically, "Oh, I bet you'd get to know the other people so well." I surprised myself that time, but it really got me thinking. The part that really bugs me about the talking is this: a moment, any moment, can mean anything, everything, nothing, just depending. Every moment is unlimited potential. But the act of talking bricks up all the doorways we could have walked through, leaving one. One meaning, one interpretation. Or more, but still, it's a mass murder. Hm.

[Mama II]

One word: Hurray!
2 words: thank you
3 words: Hannah is correct.
4 words: parallel to last post!

[MF]

I agree, Hannah. Talking is only part of how we realize those moments and interact with one another. For Kongzi, speech was something that always had to be done carefully and appropriately - either that, or not done at all. There's another famous passage where he states that, if there's something to do, you should only talk about it after you've finished doing it. But, according to another passage, Kongzi believed that events whose moments have passed should not be spoken of. In all, Kongzi's injunctions regarding everyday speech read like the instruction manual for a dangerous weapon, but he had just as much to say about conduct outside of the spoken word. In fact, some argue that there was no separation of thought, speech or action in the Analects or in early Confucian thought. It was all action, and every action was to be done appropriately, a feat that could only be accomplished through lots of experience tempered by introspection. As the master put it, learning without reflection leads to confusion, while reflection without experience leads to catastrophe.