Ep. 314: Mengzi (Mencius) on Moral Psychology (Part Two)
The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast
Mark Linsenmayer
4.6 • 2.3K Ratings
🗓️ 10 April 2023
⏱️ 46 minutes
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Summary
Continuing on the teachings of Mengzi from ca. 350 BCE, without our guest.
We go into textual quotes, covering the "sprouts" of virtue, whether human nature is good or simply malleable, whether tastes are universal, and more.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Last call, the partially examined life live on Dust Tafziki's Brothers Karamazov comes this Saturday, |
| 0:05.2 | April 15th. You can see us if you're in New York City or you can watch it from the comfort of your |
| 0:09.3 | own home either during the live show or within a week afterward. Go to partially examinelife.com |
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| 0:33.2 | Hey, this is the partially examined life episode 314-2 talking about |
| 0:38.4 | Mensis or Mung Tzu, except we just said Mensis throughout and our guest, |
| 0:43.6 | Christian, called the Mensis. So I guess we're called a Mensis. The Mung Tzu is the current preferred |
| 0:49.6 | culturally respectable way to refer to it. The Mensis is the Latinized version of his name and then |
| 0:56.8 | Mung Tzu or Meng Tzu is the master Meng. I did learn watching an actual Chinese professor |
| 1:04.8 | talking about some of these days. The reason between the Z and the Zoo is because it's just ZZZ. Mung Tzu |
| 1:11.6 | M-E-N-G-Z full stop. So you got to put some vowel there. I think a schwa would make the most sense |
| 1:18.8 | as opposed to M-Z. Thank you for the clarification. I don't know if we really put this guy in |
| 1:24.7 | perspective. I think it was sort of implicit in part one. We had our Confucius episode. People |
| 1:29.3 | should definitely go back and listen to that or Kong Fu Tzu as nobody in America calls it, |
| 1:34.5 | I think. But maybe I'm wrong here. It seems to be changed all the time. We had to do like the |
| 1:39.5 | out of Jing the philosophical translation, the aims. So somebody would explain because it's very |
| 1:44.6 | aphoristic. It's very fragmented. But the great thing about Tuan Tzu as a follow up to the |
| 1:49.9 | Dowd-A-Jing, T'Lou Tzu, and Mung Tzu as a follow up to Confucius is that Shuan Tzu and Mung Tzu |
| 1:55.8 | actually write it a way you can understand. And I don't feel like we had to consult several different |
| 2:00.8 | translations. I mean, there are certain terms like the Shin meaning mind, but it also means heart. |
| 2:05.9 | So it's the heart mind. Like it's nice that we kind of already dealt with that in the Dowd-A-Jing, |
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