Is it enough to do the job well?

Confucius would say it is a great deal more than enough — that fulfilling your role properly is not a substitute for becoming someone, it is the method.

The apparatus is li, ritual propriety: the learned forms of conduct that make social life legible. Not empty ceremony. His striking claim is that the outward form is part of how character gets made rather than a mask over it — you become patient partly by conducting yourself patiently, and the practice runs from how you greet someone to how you do your job. The aim of all of it is ren, the disposition to treat others as fully human, which is what turns the forms from etiquette into something worth doing.

This is a genuine alternative to the modern demand that work express an inner self. Here the self is constituted from the outside in, through relationships and obligations you did not select. The junzi is made, not born, and made in exactly these ordinary places.

It has teeth in both directions. The the rectification of names insists things be called what they are — a manager who does not manage is not really one, and a role that describes nothing is a genuine wrong rather than an inconvenience.

Confucius takes more incoming fire in this gate than anyone. Sartre, Zhuangzi, Heidegger and Russell each think he has described a trap.