Knowing what is right and acting on it

Knowing what you leave undone

Imagine a committee member who notices that a colleague has claimed credit for another person’s work. She can explain why the credit should be corrected, and she could speak up safely, but she keeps quiet to preserve a useful friendship. “I knew what was right,” she says. “I just did not do it.”

Is knowing a duty one achievement and fulfilling it another? Or does her failure to act reveal that something was missing from the knowledge she claims?

Returning to Confucian learning

From Vedānta in South Asia we turn to China. Zhu Xi lived from 1130 to 1200, under the Southern Song, and Wang Yangming from 1472 to 1529, under the Ming. Their dispute was never face to face: Wang challenged an influential tradition that Zhu’s interpretations had shaped. [1] [2]

Lesson 13 introduced cultivation: developing the habits, feelings and judgment through which we act. Ren, humaneness, was concern expressed in relationships. Lesson 15 asked whether education nurtures moral beginnings, as Mengzi argued, or forms goodness through acquired practices, as Xunzi argued; Xunzi’s artifice meant deliberate human effort, not deception. Zhu and Wang both affirm that human nature is good. For them, too, a moral beginning is not yet a dependable character. [1] [5]

Ritual, principle and qi

The li of ritual, written 禮, names ceremonies and forms of respectful conduct. Li written 理 means principle or pattern: the intelligible order that makes something what it is and, in human conduct, indicates how it should be. The two words sound alike but are not interchangeable. A rite is a practice; asking what justifies it raises a question about principle. [4]

Zhu’s account also uses qi, the stuff of the world in its changing forms and activities, including bodily and psychological life. English renderings such as material force or vital energy are aids, not exact equivalents of modern matter or energy.

Li describes order, and qi its concrete realization. They are distinguishable aspects of the world we live in, not separate containers for mind and body. Differences in qi help explain why a nature that is originally good can become obscured, and cultivation works on how that nature finds expression. [4] [5]

Zhu Xi: learning in a life

Zhu’s preface to his commentary on the Great Learning begins with a good nature that people do not all understand or preserve equally. He pictures an ancient education that proceeded from ordinary conduct and practical arts to deeper understanding and government. His ideal still ranks learners by status and ability, and it is no evidence that universal schooling once existed. [1]

The Great Learning connects the formation of a person with order in the household and the state. Its disputed phrase ge wu concerns things or affairs. Zhu reads it as investigating their principle, while Robert Eno’s modern translation, “aligning affairs,” reflects a different interpretation. Choosing the smoother English phrase will not settle the dispute. [3]

For Zhu, investigation includes studying texts and attending to circumstances. What would respectful care require of this person, here? The details matter, because a rule remembered without attention may miss the very situation it should guide. [4]

Can knowing come first?

In a passage quoted by Bryan Van Norden, Zhu compares knowledge and action to seeing and walking. Eyes need feet to get anywhere, and feet need eyes to find their way. Knowledge comes first in sequence, but action matters more. The distinction lets understanding guide a deed while insisting that understanding needs practice to become effective. [5]

Applied to the committee case, the distinction lets us ask what the member understands and why she fails to act on it. Further study might clarify a difficult duty, but it would be an evasion if she used study merely to put off a duty that is already clear. Zhu’s preface itself criticizes scholarship reduced to memorization and polished composition. [1]

Wang Yangming on knowing and acting

In Instructions for Practical Living, the disciple Xu Ai raises an objection much like ours. Some people acknowledge their duties toward parents and older brothers and yet fail to perform them. Surely, then, knowing and acting are two separate things?

Wang replies that selfish desires have already divided what Xu describes. Acknowledging a duty in words does not show the genuine knowing Wang has in mind; his teaching aims to recover a knowing that is active in conduct. The claim concerns moral understanding. It is not a rule that every piece of information must immediately produce an action. [2]

Wang develops the point through the Great Learning’s image of a foul smell. To experience the smell as foul is already to recoil from it; the aversion is not a separate addition to the perception. Acting, here, includes a felt response and not just an outward deed. [5]

The analogy clarifies his demand but leaves a question: does being moved by a duty ensure that we fulfill it? Our committee member might feel the pull of fairness and still protect her friendship. Wang challenges a thin account of knowing, but whether his stronger account explains every failure remains open.

Why this still takes effort

Wang identifies mind with principle and appeals to liangzhi, innate moral knowing. “Mind” here includes feeling and judgment. Extending this capacity takes attention to actual affairs and resistance to selfish desire, and it gives no automatic warrant to a passing impulse; Wang also calls for reflection when a person acts recklessly. [5]

So neither account lets our committee member swap responsibility for a slogan. Zhu’s distinction invites us to examine how understanding becomes effective, while Wang asks whether an understanding left idle deserves the name. Their ideas about mind, principle and qi matter because they explain both our capacity to act well and the obstacles that moral learning must address.

Try the disagreement

After the meeting, the member offers two plans: “With Zhu Xi, I can postpone correction until I have finished studying ethics. With Wang Yangming, whatever I immediately feel must be right.” Explain what each plan misses. Then say what the two thinkers might still disagree about in her claim to know the duty.

This exercise is optional.

Read a possible response

Neither plan is backed by the thinker it invokes. Zhu’s distinction makes study and practice support each other; it does not turn more reading into permission for indefinite delay. Wang’s innate knowing is a moral capacity to exercise, not a guarantee attached to the first feeling that arrives, and her wish to preserve a friendship may be a self-serving motive. Both approaches require work in the situation. They still differ over whether her acknowledged duty counts as knowledge she failed to carry out, or whether her failure to act exposes a failure in the knowing itself. You can explain that disagreement without choosing a winner.

Carry this forward

When someone says that knowledge must change a life, ask what they count as knowledge and how the change is supposed to happen. The next lesson follows principle and qi into a Korean disagreement about emotion: can a feeling reveal moral goodness, and how does such a feeling arise? A brief Japanese example then shows another way inherited concepts can change.

Sources and limits

[1] Zhu Xi, “Preface to the Great Learning by Chapter and Phrase”, dated 1189, for Zhu’s account of learning. Columbia University’s Asia for Educators handout reproduces a selection from Sources of Chinese Tradition, compiled by Wm. Theodore de Bary and Irene Bloom, second edition, volume 1, 1999, pp. 722–725. All four handout pages were read, and images of pp. 2–4, containing the Longer Selection, were inspected. The handout does not name an individual translator. Its idealized history of education and its criticism of other traditions are Zhu’s claims, not this lesson’s historical findings.

[2] Wang Yangming, “On the Unity of Knowing and Acting”, Asia for Educators, from the same anthology, pp. 849–850, for Xu Ai’s objection and Wang’s reply. The complete supplied exchange recorded by Xu Ai under “Longer Selection,” together with the shorter excerpt and the introduction, was read. The page does not identify the individual translator. This is a short selection from Instructions for Practical Living, not the full work; the teacher’s reply was compared with the credited rendering quoted in source 5.

[3] Robert Eno, The Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean: An Online Teaching Translation, June 2016, version 1.0, for the opening of the Great Learning and a reading that departs from Zhu’s.

• Read: the title and access pages, the prefatory note on p. ii, the general introduction on pp. 1–2, the text and notes on pp. 11–12, and “Aligning affairs” in the glossary, p. 44.
• Page images inspected: printed pp. 11–12 and 44 (PDF pp. 15–16 and 48).

Eno’s section I.A–B is the Great Learning opening, not Zhu’s commentary. His prefatory note explains that he departs from Zhu’s interpretation. The Doctrine of the Mean was not read.

[4] Kirill Thompson, “Zhu Xi”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, revised 25 January 2025, for cultivation and the relation of principle and qi. The opening, §2, the opening of §3, the first four paragraphs of §3.1 and §4.2 were read; linked notes and cited works were not independently examined.

[5] Bryan Van Norden, “Wang Yangming”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, revised 17 September 2024, for Wang’s teaching and Zhu’s comparison of knowledge and action. The opening and §§2–4 were read.

• Zhu’s passage on knowledge and action: quoted in §4 from Justin Tiwald and Bryan W. Van Norden, eds., Readings in Chinese Philosophy: Han Dynasty to the Twentieth Century, 2014, pp. 180–181.
• Wang’s words: quoted in §§3–4 from pp. 264–268 and 247–250.

Those selections were read within the article, not independently in the anthology. The article marks some translation modifications and glosses.

The committee case, its application and the exercise are original teaching material. No whole book, Chinese-language collation, independent specialist review or learner testing was completed.