The rulers of feudal society in China always attached importance to the spiritual rule of people. Qin Shihuang burned books to bury Confucianism. His hobby is legalism. Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty "ousted a hundred schools of thought and respected Confucianism alone", which led to Confucianism dominating for more than two thousand years. Especially in the Song and Ming Dynasties, Neo-Confucianism, represented by Cheng and Zhu, became a kind of ideological bondage, and "preserving nature and suppressing human desires" became synonymous with destroying human nature and restricting people's free development, and its negativity and disadvantages became increasingly apparent. This situation seems to have taken a turning point in the late Ming Dynasty. The era is obviously no longer dominated by Neo-Confucianism under the iron hoop, and the concept of daily life is also changing quietly. When Sejong people were immersed in setting up an altar to pray for longevity, what the court ministers had to do every day was to write empty and boring green words in the West Garden with flags flying, to please the emperor and learn Neo-Confucianism based on Confucian classics. As a belief and norm in politics and life, it has been superficial since the upper class of feudal society and cannot be observed. The whole society has lost the spiritual norms of Confucian morality and gradually moved towards morbidity and decline. It is such an era that the one-card system of Liaoning University of Technology failed, which provided Wang Gen with a relatively relaxed and free development space, enabling him to easily wander the streets of rural areas and cities and tirelessly publicize his idea that "food is the most important thing for the people", thus forming a powerful ideological trend.
The confrontation between Zhu Confucianism and Wang Confucianism
In the era of ideological imprisonment and shrinking personality, Wang Gen's thought has the positive significance of ideological innovation and personality liberation.
Based on human's "goodness", Confucianism regards sadness, shame, evil, rebellion and right and wrong as "four hearts", and determines the psychological basis of "four virtues" of benevolence, righteousness, courtesy and wisdom, and holds that a virtuous life is the most valuable and just thing in life. Related to this, everything else in life is secondary, even ugly. Therefore, Mencius believes that the reason why people are different from animals lies in their benevolence, righteousness, propriety and wisdom. Only by developing them can people truly become people: "The reason why people are different from animals is just a few hopes. Go to Shu Ren and the gentleman will stay. " When benevolence, righteousness, propriety and wisdom were interpreted by later generations as the Three Cardinal Principles and Five Permanent Principles and applied to real life, they became irrational tools of violence to suppress human desires, and eventually developed into a cannibalism phenomenon of "hunger is small and humiliation is great".
Wang Gen said: "Nature is lively; It is this body that flies kites. " Flying kites at the vernal equinox, peaches and plums are all over the world, and endless rivers are natural. Similarly, people's desire and impulse for life are also endowed by nature. People should live a natural life and live according to their own nature, just like the spring and autumn of nature. Obviously, Wang Gen believes that human nature is natural, and good and evil have no innate stipulation. Accordingly, people's secular desires have the rationality of existence. This caused him to rethink the issues of "justice" and "human desire". He said:
Heaven has its own justice, but how to arrange it is up to you, that is, what people want.
"Righteousness" and "human desire" are the most basic concepts in Neo-Confucianism in Song and Ming Dynasties. "Righteousness" generally refers to feudal ethics such as loyalty, filial piety, faithfulness and benevolence. "Man's desire" is generally man's material desire and physiological demand, also known as "eat drink man woman". In Neo-Confucianism of Song and Ming Dynasties, "human desire" must obey "righteousness". If there is a conflict between the two, it is necessary to unconditionally "save the reason and destroy the desire."
Wang Gen regards "reason" as "natural reason", which is actually equal to "recognizing desire as reason", and regards people's material desires and physiological needs as a part of reason. this
Wang Gen's "natural principle" is called "natural conscience". Wang Gen consistently put his theory into practice, and formed a unique "people's daily life" in the history of China thought.
The basic feature of Wang Gen's "people's daily life" is to take "people" as the standard, whether it conforms to "people's daily life" as the standard, and even take this as the criterion to test whether it is a "saint's life". In his view, all the thoughts and theories that meet the daily needs of ordinary people are the real "sage's way", otherwise, it is "heresy".
Traditional Confucianism always distinguishes between "sage" and "Shu Ren" and deifies the sage's "sage" and "Tao". Otherwise, Wang Gen's "common people's daily way" is to try to bridge the gap between saints and fools, raise the common people's daily life to the spiritual level of "Tao", pull the traditional sanctified "Tao" down from the altar and integrate it with the lives of ordinary people. It is worth noting that when Wang Gen put forward that "learning is learning, that is, learning is the Tao", he emphasized that "those who are trapped and frozen will lose their roots if they don't learn". This idea of getting rid of poverty and striving for personal survival is the basic starting point and social ideal of Wang Gen's "daily life for the people".
The thought of "daily use for the people" undoubtedly represents the spiritual interests of civil society. With its strong enlightenment color, it had a strong impact on the late Ming society in the16th century, and provided a strong ideological foundation and moral shelter for the growing individualism and liberalism in the civilian society.
Let's not discuss how it subverts the traditional values of respect and inferiority. This is enough to show that just because of the active potters and carpenters in the ideological circle in the late Ming Dynasty, a brand-new social atmosphere was created.
Wang Gen not only pays attention to people's material life, but also pays attention to people's life value. People's value is generally manifested in two aspects: personal value and social value. Starting from maintaining political authority and the cohesion of feudal society, traditional Confucianism has long advocated that social value is higher than personal value, and individuals are often in the corner of being "forgotten". During the 400 years from the Southern Song Dynasty to the end of the Ming Dynasty, Neo-Confucianism occupied a dominant position in the ideological circle, which not only prevented them from expressing their will freely, but also deprived them of their due needs for life. The extreme squeezing of personal living space will inevitably lead to the imbalance of life value balance. Wang Gen gave full play to the free spirit of trusting his kind heart, broke the shackles of justice and measured all values by himself.
He declared that "I was born in heaven, but I made it", which gave full play to human subjectivity. In On Huai Nan Zi Wu Ge, he said: "It is the same thing with the world, the country and the family." Since the body, the world, the country and the family are all "one thing", there is no distinction between high and low. Then he put forward the idea of "respecting the body and establishing the foundation". He took the "format" of the world as the foundation, took the country of the world as the goal, and the home country followed him. He believes that the individual is the first, and there is no country in the world without individuals; If a person's body can't be repaired and all countries in the world can't be cured, then it is logical to sort out his thought of respecting the body and establishing the foundation. The acme of Wang Gen's individualism thought of "respecting one's life" lies in his theory of "cultivating one's health with wisdom". According to the Chronicle of Wang Gen, when he was 44 years old, "all comrades embarked on their official careers, or were remonstrated to death or sent away. The teacher thought, "If you can't protect yourself, how can you live for everything in the world?" "This idea of putting personal life first seems to run counter to the Confucian sense of social responsibility, but it can never be simply understood. Wang Gen's emphasis on himself cannot be equated with selfishness, nor does it mean giving up his social responsibility. He advocated protecting himself through love and respect for others, and on this basis, Qi Xin worked together to govern the country and level the world. Its rich connotation deserves our careful taste and experience.