“The Master rejected four things: assumption, insistence, obstinacy and self-centredness.” The sentence appears in the Zi Han chapter of the Analects and is a summary offered by Confucius’s followers. The four terms are not isolated prohibitions. They describe a judgement tightening in stages: an untested supposition becomes certainty, certainty resists revision, and the self becomes the final measure. Read today, the line need not mean having no position. Its more restrained demand is that a position may be clear while still allowing facts, circumstances and other people’s reasons to change it.
https://ctext.org/analects/zi-han/ens
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