The Tale of The Rabbit#4 commentary
What the Dragon King demands of the rabbit is simple. It is a straight, direct command: “Stick out your belly and receive the knife.” Put differently, it means, “I do not want to die, so you must die.” The rabbit could say exactly the same thing. “I do not want to die, so you die.”
“Pijangpajang.” It means that both sides are in the same position. Usually this expression is used to neutralize the other person’s criticism, in the sense of, “What gives you the right to blame someone else?” The reason the tu quoque fallacy is considered a fallacy is that, instead of addressing the content of the other person’s argument, it talks about the other person’s completely unrelated qualifications. But when examining the other person’s content is meaningless, it may not be a fallacy. In that case, it is not a distraction from the point, but the only factual statement one can make.
The Dragon King wants to kill the rabbit for the sake of his own survival, and the rabbit deceives the Dragon King for the sake of his own survival. Their motive is the same. And in the face of that motive of survival, there is no authority within this narrative that can judge which life is more valuable. The Dragon King asserts the superiority of his own life by saying, “I have received the mandate of Heaven,” but that is a justification he grants to himself, not a standard the rabbit has ever agreed to. There is, however, something that makes that authority seem real: the many soldiers surrounding the rabbit.
Because the Dragon King has power, he can state his desire in its raw form. Because the rabbit lacks power, he cannot dare say directly, “I do not want to die, so you just die instead.” So he is forced into an extraordinary act of cunning. The strategy the rabbit chooses is to disguise his own desire in a completely different form.
The rabbit’s real message is, “I do not want to die, so you die instead.” But if he says that directly, he dies. So he translates this message into the Dragon King’s own interest. “If you send me back, I will bring you the liver.” He creates a structure in which the rabbit’s survival becomes identical with the Dragon King’s recovery. He changes the statement from “Spare me” into “Your Majesty must spare me if Your Majesty wishes to live as well.” Now killing the rabbit becomes an act that harms the Dragon King himself. When one cannot pursue one’s own desire directly, one inserts that desire into the other person’s system of desire.
The rabbit uses a “genius mirroring strategy.” He returns to the turtle exactly what he himself suffered at the turtle’s hands. In the previous Episode 3, the turtle identified the rabbit’s sensitivity to gain as the deification of his self-narrative. “Sir, you are fit to become a high minister.” The rabbit reacts to this immediately. He realizes that he has been driven into danger because he could not make a balanced judgment about his own lack. What the rabbit identifies in the Dragon King is a sensitivity to loss, an extreme sensitivity to any choice that might contribute even slightly to his own death. Interestingly, the turtle had a hidden and dirty premise: “If it serves the goal, then deception is permitted.” Even that the rabbit copies and reflects back in exactly the same way. The logic of pijangpajang is not operating only at the level of content, “I do not want to die, so you die instead,” but is being reflected equally at the level of methodology.
When the turtle says, “Let us cut open his belly,” this is essentially a warning that says, “That creature may be using the same method we ourselves use.” But for the Dragon King to accept this warning, he would have to acknowledge, “Deception is a possible strategy,” while at the same time saying, “But when the other side uses it against me, it is unjust.” That is not logically sustainable.
Saying that one cannot revise the premise is an explanation at the level of logic. But what actually operates in this work is not logic but desire. The real reason the Dragon King fails to recognize the rabbit’s fraud is not that he is unable to revise a contaminated premise, but that he does not want to revise it. If we look again at the core structure of the previous commentary, the reason the rabbit failed to recognize the turtle’s fraud was not logical incompetence. The rabbit had a truth-speaker in the form of the fox, and logically he had enough reason to suspect. But he did not suspect, because to do so would collapse the narrative of “me becoming the prime minister of the Dragon Palace.”
The Dragon King is the same. He had a truth-speaker right beside him in the form of the turtle. But in order to accept that truth, he would have to face the possibility that “we might cut him open and find no liver.” And once he faces that possibility, he arrives at the conclusion, “I may die.” In other words, the fundamental motor here is desire.
The process by which the creatures of the underwater palace are deceived by the rabbit’s sophistry is not mere “stupidity.” It is a catastrophe that shows how a deductive system collapses when it encounters an unfamiliar and contaminated assumption, a false premise. The Dragon King and his ministers are full of deductive confidence, the confidence that “all principle is unified.” They try to derive judgment from authority and order they already regard as true, and when an unfamiliar proposition enters, they do not verify it through open observation but instead patch it into their existing authority. The rabbit injects into the underwater palace’s deductive engine the completely new but plausible false premise of “the detachability of the liver,” borrowing the logic of the moon and the tides. This is an entirely new proposition about an entirely new species, one the creatures of the Dragon Palace have never encountered before. They have never seen a rabbit as a species, nor have they ever verified the physiology of land animals. The only “verification” they perform is to order that the rabbit’s three rear holes be inspected, but that is not really open observation. It is going to confirm a conclusion that has already been decided.
Deduction, by its very structure, pairs well with authority. Deduction asks about validity. Deductive reasoning is, at its core, a true-or-false mode of thought. True or false, right or wrong. If a ruler were to say that something is correct with an 80 percent probability, his authority would not stand very well, because when it actually happened, when probability collapsed into reality, there would still have been a chance that he was wrong. But it is also difficult for a ruler to display every possible case and show everyone experimental results proving that something happened eight times out of ten. A ruler only needs to say, “This is correct.” And the reasons why it is correct can always be brought in later, from anywhere. What decides that is a kind of power.
What the rabbit does after gaining power is rather cute and insolent. He begins trying to decide, with his own mouth, what accords with principle. He looks at the ridge-beam inscription in the genealogy and says, “The expression ‘the dragon’s bones’ is not appropriate, so it would be better to replace the character for dragon with the character for whale.” A prisoner who, only a moment ago, had to stick out his belly and receive the knife is now evaluating the appropriateness of the words hanging in the Dragon King’s palace. The authority to determine which words are correct and which are incorrect is precisely the act of relocating the source of principle to oneself. And the Dragon King simply nods and says, “Indeed, your words are right.” Because it is the word of the benefactor who will bring him the liver. When power moves, principle moves with it.
This structure is actually repeated once more at the end of the work, in the scene where the rabbit wraps up his droppings and sends them to the turtle as medicine. After surviving the Dragon King’s deceptive logic, the rabbit uses that exact same deceptive logic on the turtle. “My droppings are a miraculous medicine that reduces fever.” Structurally, this is identical to the Dragon King saying, “Your death is an honor.” It is the force that wields power. It is rhetoric that packages something worthless as something valuable. What is amusing is that the Dragon King actually eats it and recovers. If the Dragon King had not recovered, then the story would end neatly with “a lie is a lie.” But he does recover. A false prescription that begins from a false premise actually works. What does not accord with principle ends up functioning in reality.
This ending touches the greatest intellectual tension of the late Joseon period. Neo-Confucianism begins from principle. The promise of that system is that if one investigates the principles of all things, one will arrive at correct action and correct results. But what this work shows is a world in which principle was correct, yet the result was wrong, the Dragon Palace’s deductive system could not filter out the rabbit’s false premise, and a world in which principle was wrong, yet the result was right, the rabbit’s droppings actually become medicine.
At the end, the narrator states directly: “If one who bears the name of human is not even equal to a rabbit or a turtle, how could that not be shameful? Let all remember this.” What, exactly, is this narrator telling us to remember?