Experience common sense and conscience 1. What is conscience?

Communication about Conscience He Huaihong Ni Liangkang Liang: Hello! Recently, I read your long article Conscience: Between Self-knowledge and * * * knowledge published in the first series of China Academic. In this article, you have carefully combed the structural connotation and historical development of the concept of "conscience" in European philosophy, and also criticized my theory of conscience.

I think this is an educational paper. For example, it is instructive to explain that the prefixes such as "con-" include "* * *" and "same" and "self" or "same", that is, the actors are aware of the significance of their actions at the same time, and Socrates is taken as an example to raise the question of "truth and majority". And because this article criticized my work, I certainly benefited more. It helps me rethink my point of view.

Therefore, I am very grateful for your criticism. I want to respond here and hope that this interaction will lead us into some important issues that need in-depth discussion. I also have a personal wish, that is, I hope that in our current academic circles, in addition to correcting the style of study and clarifying the position of criticism (which is really necessary), there will be more in-depth academic criticism, as well as serious responses and discussions.

However, before discussing more fascinating issues, I want to clarify two points about your specific criticism of my point of view. The first point is about how to treat the position of conscience theory in the history of western thought.

In the fifth section, you wrote: "Mr. He Huaihong compared the concepts of conscience in Chinese and Western philosophy in The Theory of Conscience (12- 13), and reached the conclusion that Confucianism was from beginning to end"; Attach importance to the development of inner moral world; (The original text is actually'; Inner moral consciousness'; In addition, I added all the bullets in this paragraph, and'; Western thinkers are far from putting the discussion of conscience in such an important position'; . This conclusion obviously has'; Confuse the concept'; Traces of.

Because, if we just discuss'; Conscience'; The concept itself, that is, conscience in the narrowest sense, is what I call'; "Moral obligation consciousness"; 、'; Moral responsibility'; Then it is hard to say that it occupies a central position in China's philosophy and even in Confucian psychology; If the discussion is correct; Conscience'; A broad understanding, that is, what I said'; Moral consciousness'; Then, of course, it also occupies an important position in the history of western philosophy. "Because I clearly said' moral consciousness' in the original text, the concept here should be said to be very clear, and there is no suspicion of' confusion'.

As for whether western thinkers regard this kind of conscience as a discussion of "moral consciousness" and put it in an important position like China Confucianism, especially in the Ministry of Mind, they can discuss it again. Even if there is no such important position, it does not mean that they attach importance to the development of the inner moral world ",because it is entirely possible that there is another way of development-of course, brothers may not mean this, but the incomplete quotation here does give readers such an impression. So when I was writing, in the following paragraph, I wrote: "West Renye Fang has its profound ultimate concern and passionate spiritual pursuit, but its basic point is not fixed on the concept of conscience.

"(The Theory of Conscience, Shanghai Sanlian Bookstore, version 1998, page 13) So far, I think my judgment can still be established, because even western thinkers who discuss conscience more in your article, such as Hegel, Kant and Heidegger, can hardly say that there is a concept of" conscience "in their philosophy (even. Western thinkers who respect conscience include Butler and Rousseau, but they are not among the most important philosophers in the history of western thought (such as Butler). Or the discussion of conscience has not been systematized (Rousseau, for example), and there is God or God above their conscience.

Therefore, this position cannot be compared with the position and influence of the theory of conscience in the history of China's thought. Therefore, the theory of conscience may not be enough to judge the development trend of the whole western moral philosophy since modern times.

The second clarification involves how to understand the position of "don't do to others what you don't want others to do to you" in a universal ethics. In the seventh section, you wrote: "Mr. He Huaihong put it"; Do to others what you don't want them to do to you'; Regard it as a door'; Bottom line ethics'; The last line of defense (The Theory of Conscience, the last page 4 16), this practice is actually to build the final foundation of ethics on the second sex'; "artificial virtue"; On the basis of, because'; Do to others what you don't want them to do to you'; It is nothing more than the result of rational reasoning according to the principle of compassion first.

It can be roughly concluded that a universalist ethics cannot find a deeper moral foundation. "To tell you the truth, I was a little surprised when I first saw this passage, because I wouldn't express it like this. I did say that "bottom line ethics" is the "last line of defense".

I just said there: "In China's vocabulary, this bottom line may be summarized in the most general way:'; Do to others what you don't want them to do to you'; . "(Conscience Theory, Shanghai Sanlian Bookstore, 1998 edition, 4 19 pages).

In other words, the phrase "don't do to others what you don't want others to do to you" is only a general expression of "bottom line ethics", and it also belongs to the second level, that is, the level of self-awareness or practice, rather than the first level, that is, the level of general principles. It still retains the titles of "person", "self" or "you" and "me", and a general principle is that this kind of first is not allowed. In my opinion, this expression of ancient Confucianism in China is really great, but I regard it not so much as the proof and foundation of a universal moral principle at the bottom line, but as an excellent experience and summary of this principle.

If this also includes proof, this proof is not enough. Need to find deeper and broader evidence elsewhere. I think the argument of universal ethics can be multi-faceted and multi-path: of course, it mainly depends on rationality, but it does not exclude feelings, intuition, experience, and even historical traditions and civilizations condensed by experience.

But universal ethics is not based on "don't do to others what you don't want others to do to you", that is to say, it is a universalist ethics.

2. How to treat knowledge as power and conscience as direction?

People often say that my speech is full of * * *, but after listening to the speeches of the two previous guests today, I feel killed.

Teacher Shang (Shang) and Dean Xu (Xu Jiang), their love for culture. Culture is indeed a noble thing that can inspire our feelings, which is different from knowledge.

A literate person, you will find his vitality is very strong. He is not cold, but full of feelings, love and poetic longing for the world.

But today, from primary and secondary school to university education, we teach more knowledge, technology and specialty, but lack culture. We have trained many exquisite egoists, many barbarians with higher education, and they are ruthless.

There is a famous saying: knowledge is power. China people are familiar with it, and they agree with it.

Historically, after 1840, China was vulnerable to western science and technology, so it was concluded that it would be beaten if it fell behind. This backwardness means the backwardness of science and technology.

In reality, if we can't answer a standardized test paper with knowledge today, we may not be able to go to a good university, major and find a good job to better satisfy our material desires. Whether from historical experience or realistic pressure, we all know that knowledge is too important.

But what I want to tell you today is that although knowledge is really important, it also has limitations. First of all, knowledge is infinite.

What is knowledge? Knowledge is knowledge about all the facts in this world. Since the world is infinite, so is knowledge. Sadly, life is limited.

Zhuangzi once said: "My life is limited and my knowledge is limited; It's embarrassing to have restrictions and no restrictions. "The world is infinite, and our life is limited. If we use our limited life to pursue the infinite knowledge contained in the infinite world, our life will be wasted.

When knowledge is not systematic, it is useless, just fragments. For example, a newspaper once held a knowledge contest on Chinese studies, and found a group of experts to come up with a set of topics on Chinese studies.

The topic is finished, and the editor wants me to check it. I watched it for five minutes, and I judged it with six words: boring, boring and useless.

For example, there is a question: In which era in the history of China, eunuchs can get married? This is very serious knowledge. If you specialize in eunuchs and understand their living conditions, psychological state and their position, influence and role in the history of China, you will become a great expert.

But if your main energy is not here, such fragments of knowledge are of no use to you. One more question: When were carrots introduced to China? If we can turn it into systematic knowledge for analysis and research, it is meaningful.

But if a person doesn't have such will and goal, he only knows when carrots were introduced to China. Such knowledge is not only useless to him, but also may have a negative impact. Because he knows that most people don't know the answer, he feels secretly happy and feels that he is the best person in the world, and he especially wants others to know this.

So he waits for other people's questions every day in order to gain others' admiration. In order to wait for this day, he may order carrots every time he has dinner with his friends. (Laughter) Others eat well, and he is just waiting for a question.

This carrot has tied him to death all his life. The German philosopher Nietzsche wrote an article called "Why am I so smart".

His conclusion is one sentence: I am so smart because I never waste my energy on unnecessary things. Once I took a taxi and the driver was listening to a knowledge contest.

In the program, the host played five pieces of music, each for a few seconds, and then asked: two of these five pieces of music belong to the same song. Who knows? A young man rushed to answer that he knew and answered correctly. So the second question is: Do you know that there are two songs from the same music album? At this time, I was nervous, and I was afraid that he would know.

He doesn't know, which means he is still a normal person. If he knew, his life might be ruined. But I didn't expect him to know.

Then I asked the driver to turn off the radio. The driver was startled and asked why. I said, "This is insulting our IQ and misleading our life direction."

This is called useless knowledge. There is too much useless knowledge in life. For example, many people care about a star's favorite color and constellation, and have been married and divorced several times.

When a person spends his energy in these places, he may gain knowledge and be able to chat with others at the dinner table, but he will become particularly trivial. I once wrote an article entitled "Be alert to knowledge".

The main reason is that our life can't have infinite knowledge. More sadly, boring knowledge will make life boring, and trivial knowledge will make personality obscene or even obscene.

Xia Zi, a student of Confucius, said long ago: "Although there are trails, there are bound to be considerable people", but "it is a gentleman's fault to be afraid of mud". Even if you know when carrots were introduced to China, you can brag about it, but if you always focus on this information, you will definitely not achieve anything in your life.

You use trivial knowledge to turn life into pieces, and a gentleman does not do it. Xunzi once put forward the identification of knowledge.

He said that some knowledge is boring, useless and boring. Xunzi has a judgment on such knowledge, which is called "I don't know, it's harmless for a gentleman;" Knowing it, it is not a villain. " Knowing this knowledge is not a gentleman, and not knowing this knowledge is not a villain.

Some knowledge is of no help to your life, so why waste energy and time? But in life, there are indeed many people who use trivial knowledge to cut their lives into pieces, conscientious, high-spirited and enthusiastic. There are more important things besides knowledge. In fact, there are more important things besides knowledge.

3. Briefly describe the modern significance of Yangming's conscience.

Wang Yangming's theory of conscience is not only ontology and ontology, but also subjectivity and practicality, or it has connected the world of ontology, ontology, subjectivity and phenomenology, which can show the truth of the life universe in a popular or explicit way, awaken people's existential life consciousness, and thus participate more actively in the construction of the meaning world.

The unity of conscience ontology and life realm needs to be realized through concrete life practice activities. From the point of view that noumenon is work and noumenon and work are inseparable, conscience must point to the improvement of people's spiritual consciousness and spiritual realm, so that human beings can develop more reasonably and healthily according to the flexible use of conscience.

Because there are still various defects and disadvantages caused by the concealment of conscience in real life, conscience is actually the greatest project to expose and transform human nature, and it is also the most summative conclusion of Yangming's lifelong learning thought. This paper intends to discuss this issue and seek advice from local scholars at home and abroad.

First, innate conscience and acquired experience conscience theory conscience theory is the last teaching method of Yangming's "teaching three changes" and the peak of his mind thought development. Conscience and conscience theory not only integrates noumenon and effort, undeveloped and developed, mind and matter, inner (subject) and outer (guest), static and dynamic, knowledge and action, which makes his metaphysical psychology more subtle and open, but also simplifies and practices the cultivation of saints, which is easy to awaken the self-consciousness of the existing subject and make everyone exist.

As Yangming said, the word "my conscience" has been out of my mind since Longchang, but I just can't say it. It takes a lot of time to talk with scholars. Today, I am very happy to see this idea. In short, I have insight into the ontology. This is really a pleasure. I don't want to dance.

Scholars have heard of it, and they have saved a lot of time looking for it. Learn your mind, so far it has been said very badly.

The word conscience comes from Mencius: "People who have the ability but don't study are good at it;" Everything you know, everything you can say. All children love their relatives and their elders, and they all respect their brothers. "

Later Song Confucianism, such as Hengqu, Ercheng and Zhuzi, did not give full play to their good knowledge and ability. Although Lu Xiangshan mentioned that "the end of conscience is shaped by love and respect, and saints are also saints", he did not fully elaborate. However, Yangming directly inherited Mencius' theory of mind and nature, and combined with his own life experience, it was the most concrete in GAI, combining the "four ends" of human nature with conscience, saying: "The heart will naturally know, the father will naturally be filial, the brother will naturally know the younger brother, and the son will naturally be merciful when he enters the well. This is conscience, and he does not ask for anything else. "

In the view of Mencius and Yangming, conscience is the inner truth of virtue, the ultimate goodness, and the transcendental moral potential or moral rationality. People's hearts have moral values and ethical qualities, and they can study carefree, but they can be presented and experienced at any time.

Conscience in the value sense of ultimate transcendence is innate and transcendental. It does not need any logical inference of inevitability, and it is completely out of the scope of intellectuality or knowledge analysis. Whether conscience as a transcendental ontological existence can be established, in order to explain the problem easily, we may try to quote the great linguist Noan Chomsky's generative grammar theory as a reference, which may help to solve this kind of philosophical transcendental problem.

Joe believes that innate thought and mental mechanism, as a transcendental internal universal law, determine the form of human knowledge acquisition, and prove that it is extremely important for children to master extremely complex and abstract grammatical structures without sufficient language materials. Of course, natural concepts and mental mechanisms are not limited to the language field, and moral potential or moral rationality is also innate, which can only be activated through the trigger of external sensory experience, and it is not difficult to "discover" the experience through the conscious test of subject consciousness.

"Seeing the sage Si Qi, knowing the sorrow naturally" not only shows its immanence and universality, but also shows its congenital and inevitability, that is, its inherent characteristics of detachment without seeking outside. Compared with Chomsky's theory, it can highlight the power of Yangming theory.

More importantly, conscience can be presented as moral reason and moral emotion in the context associated with the object, calling and displaying its existence in the most authentic way, integrating specific historical and cultural contents into various intentional activities of blending mind and material, spilling over the experience world and life world and providing meaning for it, and using it as a value choice and behavior mode to become the basis for its decision-making. This is a process of revealing human nature from transcendental experience, and it is also the fundamental reason why the metaphysical world and the metaphysical world are inseparable, that is, learning from a lower level to a higher level can completely penetrate each other.

Karl Jaspers' theory of "extreme situation" or "marginal situation" can best reveal the experience presentation of conscience, that is, people's critical choice in the fight to the death can best present kindness. On the one hand, the deadline and intimidation of death will fundamentally shake the original daily secular existence, and the cornerstone of meaning that everyone regards as normal is in danger of being dissolved; On the one hand, premature death or the referential superposition of life and death will also force people to re-examine the indispensable value of life and find out the ultimate meaning of human beings.

The end result is to discover the truth of the conscience inherent in the heart. The double marginal situation of "life" and "death" awakened the moral awakening of existential life and triggered a complete transformation of the subject self.

This is the rearrangement and occurrence of existence, and the re-entry and re-opening of meaning. The ontological basis can only be the inherent truth or innate goodness of human nature, which cannot be separated from the presentation or call of the absolute subject of conscience. However, the actual existence of conscience only provides metaphysical possibility for moral behavior, and it needs concrete social and cultural practice to truly transform it into moral behavior.

This is why Yang Ming talks about conscience at the same time. Just as Wang Yangming said: In order to learn, we must have an origin, and we must make efforts from the origin and gradually forge ahead.

Fairy experts say that babies are also good at analogy. When the baby is in the mother's womb, it is just essence. What is knowledge? You can't cry until you are born, then you can laugh, then you can admit your parents and brothers, then you can stand up and do it, you can hold it and be negative. Death is the problem of the world.

4. Whether humanity and conscience depend on attitude ~

Conscience and human conscience are the accumulation of life experience. In the process of human life, we can understand and feel through the appearance of human behavior, enter a deeper understanding, understand the appearance of human behavior, and then deeply understand the internal form of human beings, that is, the form of human psychology and thought. It can be a conscious judgment ability established by people's experience or knowledge literacy. According to people's behavior, and then infer people's mentality and ideas, combined with the results, we can find out whether a person has a conscience and conscience. This is not a general rule, but depends on a person's guessing ability, that is to say, the experience and knowledge he has gained and the ability of subjective factors determine the result of his judgment, the reasonable criterion of the result, and the situation reflected in other people's thoughts, and then affirm whether a person's judgment on human conscience and conscience is reasonable.

The conscience of human nature must be thought and judged from the level of human nature. For us, people's conscience is not innate, nor is it immutable. It doesn't mean that knowledgeable people have conscience, illiterate people have no conscience, nor does it mean that noble people have conscience and humble people have no conscience. Such views are all wrong. For example, when a rich man saw a beggar, he not only gave him nothing, but also cursed the beggar for driving him away. The beggar's companion, after begging for some food, distributed the food to the beggars who didn't get it. From the perspective of human nature, beggars who distribute food have more conscience than rich people who drive away beggars. Therefore, the conscience of human nature must be based on the instinct and essence of human nature. From the perspective of human nature, it is easy to infer whether a person has a conscience and conscience.

For our human world, we need virtue and kindness, which is actually part of our conscience. People's virtue and goodness are different. In different people's outlook on life, he will form different rules consciousness, produce different views, and thus produce different results. Different nationalities and countries have different ideas about life, and the established concepts of judging virtue and kindness are also different. However, no matter who we are, we are all human beings and our outlook on life is based on human nature. If so, people's conscience and the essence of conscience can never be separated from their ancestors, and can only be built around one aspect of human nature.

As human beings, we can make ourselves have a conscience. The conscience of human nature can be awakened in one's life because of human desire and desire to do good. It can also be because of greed that a person's conscience will disappear. An insatiable person, his conscience has been completely covered by his greedy mentality in life. It's hard to see him show his conscience, let alone that he will go to the disaster relief. Therefore, people's conscience is highly respected, and people who lack conscience are often easily abandoned. Conscience, in the category of human nature, represents the good side of human beings, and will not be hated, but will be praised. This is the conscience of human nature.