The Logic of Circumstances versus the Logic of Intentions: Guan Yu's Deadly Bet with Zhuge Liang

The amazing case of a deadly (albeit only for one of the parties) “bet” between the two central characters of the classic novel “The Three Kingdoms” (Guan Yu and Zhuge Liang) is discussed. The reason for the dispute was an insulting statement to Guan Yu by the famous strategist and skilled diplomat. He suddenly questioned the valiant hero’s loyalty to his military duty (at the critical moment of the upcoming capture of their common enemy at that time in the person of Cao Cao). Guan Yu's bet in this bet was his own head, and he lost it: Zhuge Liang's prediction came true. The main thesis of the proposed article is that this foresight cannot be reduced only to the brilliant guess of a clairvoyant sage. According to the author of the article, here we are dealing with an impressive example of predictive deduction (the latter has been repeatedly covered by him in previous publications).As fate would have it, the “man of honor/justice” 義士 found himself in a painful situation of double loyalty: on the one hand, the burden of obligations arising from the “oath in the peach garden,” which forever bound him with brotherly ties to his named brother Liu Bei, and on the other, generous favors, with which Cao Cao showered him at one time and thereby put him in the position of a debtor. The priority of the immutable laws of arithmetic, establishing “justice” in its basic quantitative sense of the equality of two quantities (for example, the balance between a gift and a reciprocal gift), over the normativity of verbal obligations was clear to the stratagem-minded Zhuge Liang as daylight. As for the clear vision of the entire layout of the game of giving/gifting between Guan Yu and Cao Cao, it allowed him to calculate with arithmetical certainty the victory of the “logic of circumstances” (outstanding debt to Cao Cao) over the “logic of intentions” (loyalty to the demands arising from the oath of brotherhood).

Predictive deduction, gestalt image, justice 義, hexagram “Receptivity”, magic square Loshu, computational rationality, balance between a gift and a reciprocal gift, defeat in the Battle of the Red Cliff