/lit/ - Literature

>The accuracy of Mou’s classification is debatable, although once we understand the Kantian background, and appreciate the underlying mission that Mou had set himself, it may seem reasonable. Mou wanted to show that it is possible to develop the ‘cognitive mind’ from what in traditional Chinese philosophy is called Liangzhi, meaning conscience, or knowing of the good, and which involves a certain ‘self-negation’. He believed that this focus on Liangzhi owed to the fact that, within the Chinese tradition, philosophy aims to experience a cosmological order which is far beyond any phenomenon. Liangzhi comes from Mencius, and was further developed by the great Neo-Confucian Wang Yangming (1472-1529). In Wang’s version we find a metaphysics that is much richer than Mencius’s, which limited itself to the moral implication of Liangzhi. For Wang, Liangzhi is not knowing, but knowing eyerything and is furthermore not limited to the human being but also applies to other beings in the world such as plants and stones. That is not to say that Liangzhi exists everywhere, but that one can project Liangzhi into every being:

>When I say zhi zhi ge wu to study the phenomena of nature in order to know the principles], it means directing the liangzhi everywhere. The Liangzhi of my heart is the reason of Heaven [tian li]. By directing the tian li of liangzhi into things, they also acquire the reason. Directing the liangzi of my heart is zhi zhi [to know] everything that acquires reason ('contemplating the thing'). Therefore xin [heart] and li [reason] are combined.

>The supreme level of knowing consists in the conscious return to the liangzhi and its projection into every being. Liangzhi, in this interpretation, becomes the cosmic mind, which has its origin in Confucius’s teaching of ren (‘benevolence’). The cosmic mind is an infinite mind. Here Mou combines Buddhism with Wang’s thought and achieves a certain coherence of thought, or what is called tong (integration in a systematic sense).

>The question is as follows then: if what occupies itself with liangzhi is a moral subject rather than a knowing subject, and if objective knowing has no position in liangzhi, then does this explain why there was no modern science and technology in China, allowing us them to conclude that, if China continues to rely on its classical Confucian teaching, it will never be able to develop any science and technology? This is the dilemma of New Confucianism: how to affirm Confucian teaching and at the same time allow modernisation to proceed, while not presenting the two as a separated tong.