Wang Yangming's Doctrine of the Unity of Conscience and Action: A Hermeneutic-Ethical Interpretation

Title

Wang Yangming's Doctrine of the Unity of Conscience and Action: A Hermeneutic-Ethical Interpretation

Author

Wei-Chieh LIN

Page

205-235

DOI

10.6163/tjeas.2011.8(2)205

Abstract

In the history of Confucianism, there have evolved at least three distinctive ways of defining the relationship between ”zhi and xing;” they were the discourses of difficulty (difficult and easy), of priority (prior and posterior) and of unity. It was no later than Cheng Yi and Zhu Xi of the Song dynasty that the discourse of ”difficulty” was inseparably connected with the discourse of ”priority,” and Wang Yangmig, arguing strongly against the idea that zhi took priority over xing, claimed the unity of ”zhi and xing.” Wang, nonetheless, was still influenced by the discourse of priority, even when he was endeavoring to justify the unity between ”zhi and xing.” The evidence comes from two observations which also indicate two approaches to Wang's discourse on the unity of conscience and action. First, Wang oriented, primarily, his thinking to what the concept of zhi meant and followed Mencius in interpreting zhi as conscience (liangzhi) and xing (action) as the activity of conscience itself. Secondly, xing also implicates that the conscience acts in the life-world. As a result, Wang's two different interpretations of xing have shaped two discourses of ”zhi and xing.” For a better understanding of Wang's discourse, I also explicate in the end the discussions of Kant and Gadamer of the relationship between theory and practice.

Keyword

zhi and xing, unity, prior and posterior, Kant, Gadamer

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