The first Han emperor, Gaozu, is celebrated as the man of the people who overthrew the tyranny of Qin, but that image is misleading, because Liu Bang was not a peasant, but an official of the Qin empire itself. He thus came from the lower middle class, that territory where nobility is lost to the pursuit of power, although ambition still retains the practical tone of work and obedience is disguised as virtue.
His rusticity was not natural but strategic; he understood the world from the middle ground, not from the grassroots, and that ambiguity gave him a unique moral flexibility, without the heroic stoicism or candor of the people. In that ambiguity, he absorbed the rigidity of the system without becoming its victim, and took advantage of Chu’s violence. With him, imperial culture found an adjustment valve, a figure capable of breaking the deadlock.
But that same gift condemned him to inconsistency, since his own origins separated him from his base; he could not embody the universality he proclaimed because his class lacked a stable structural consciousness. Thus, the Han dynasty was born in a precarious balance, and its founder’s flexibility was exhausted in the founding impulse, leaving a void that only the rigidity of the empress dowager could fill, crystallizing in intrigue and control.
That was the inevitable price of an ambiguous origin, for the empire had to assert its form in order not to dissolve; but it had been engendered in the mobility of a minor official, whose pragmatism is relative. True stability came with Emperor Wen, who did not represent the triumph of power, but its maturity; for Wen did not rise from the people, but descended to them like a prince born in disgrace.
Educated in the shadows, it is this transition that explains what neither Qin nor Liu Bang had been able to understand: that power is not imposed, but adjusted, and that authority is not born of rank, but of balance and experience. Prince Wen’s class consciousness was not dissociated from the pragmatism of the humble life he was forced to lead; that is why he was able to absorb the popular experience without corrupting it and exercise power without straining it, in balance.
Wen’s character was not virtuous in the Confucian sense, but congruent, corresponding to his position; and this coincided with the rhythm of the world, because it was the rhythm of the world that had shaped him. This is dangerous, because it contains the Arcadian myth of poverty that Liu Bang nevertheless had; only he lacked humility, with his aspirations as a minor official who envies the golden sleeves.
This is the difference between specialization, because popular pragmatism is not political but existential; therefore, its very promotion corrupts it, imposing objects that transcend its immanentism. For that very reason, the prince lacks existential pragmatism because he lacks existential needs, and must seek them outside of all abstraction, knowing them because stones break his fingers, not because of altruism.
Altruism is perhaps the most perverse of human pretensions, because it is based on abstraction; it ignores the reality that men eat men, and the banality with which they exhibit themselves. That is the moral behind this paradox of Prince Wen and the parable of Liu Bang, which Confucianism does not explain, but which, if you look closely, very calmly and quietly, resonates with the path of the Tao, curiously popular.
A truly popular character has no political interests, living in the immediacy of their existence; based on the calculation that satisfies their vital needs, not on the abstraction of the order that justifies them. Only the prince, if he has descended into that precariousness, can elevate it to order, which is thus renewed; not as the pure abstraction of its very origin, but also not in the impurity of the false proletariat.
