作者：张庆熊

出版社：Routledge

出版时间：2023年4月

ISBN: 978-1-032-46856-3 

The traditional Chinese Confucian culture is characterized by the following theses: conscience is the foundation of all beings, intuitive grasp of conscience is the inception of moral cultivation, extending conscience, which emphasizes the unity of cognition and action, is the path to becoming a sage and bringing peace and prosperity for future generations.

   At the beginning of my academic career, one of my tasks was to compare Xiong Shili's New Treatise on the Uniqueness of Consciousness with Husserl's phenomenology. The academic dispute lingering on my mind is the debate between Xiong Shili and Feng Youlan over conscience. The former believes that conscience is a self-presentation and the latter believes that conscience is an assumption. Nowadays those who identify with Chinese philosophy admire Xiong's keen insight, that is, conscience is a self-presentation. However, the practice of focusing solely on cognition rather than conscience, on facts rather than values, is quite prevalent among researchers in social science. They believe that the concept of conscience is not only an assumption, but also futile in social research. Whether Feng has said conscience is an assumption is not what I will look into; instead, what I am concerned about is the vicious consequences of rejecting the concept of conscience in social research. Society is a community of people , in which individuals carry out social activities under the guidance of values. The goal of social research is not only to abstract social laws from social facts, but also to promote the positive energy in society, cultivate people's moral consciousness and promote moral education and the development of society. To this end, it is necessary to combine conscience with cognition and integrate the interpretation of meaning in social life with the exploration of feasible projects for social development. A social scientist should be both a researcher of social phenomena and an exampler of social conscience.

   In my view the claim that conscience is an assumption originates from positivism. As spokespersons for the scientific spirit, positivists assume that conscience cannot be verified, hence a fiction. However, what embarrasses them is that once people have lost their moral conscience, they also lose the motivation to do good, hence morality is reduced to empty talk. The positivists have tried to demonstrate morality from the perspective of utilitarianism, yet the outcome runs counter to morality because the essence of morality is altruism. Moral education should stimulate and cultivate people's conscience.

   Presently, Western scholars are examining the mistakes of Enlightenment Rationality. Renowned philosophers in the West, such as Habermas, believe that the Enlightenment lacks a moral dimension, which has led to various spiritual crises in modern society. They advocate learning from traditional cultures, including religion, to cultivate moral consciousness and make up for the defects of Instrumental Rationality. Looking back on the situation in China, I think that positivism in the name of science has a huge impact on traditional Chinese culture and nothing has caused more harm than the loss of conscience. Now, people do not believe that there is such a thing as conscience, so they have lost the moral awareness to resist immoral actions. Moral decay and corruption is certainly connected to imperfection in the legal system, but the disappearance of conscience or the rejection of conscience as an unscientific concept is also one of the reasons for losing the original driving force behind moral awareness.Moreover, if the heart of right and wrong is gone, we will lose the criterion of justice and injustice, and the legal system will lose its solid foundation.

   There is the concept of conscience (liang zhi,良知) in both the Chinese and Western contexts.The heart of right and wrong (Romans 2:14) in the Bible is conscience. Etymologically, the original Greek word συνειδεσις has the meaning of know/see-together-with, which coincides with Mencius's idea that everyone has the heart of compassion and the heart of righteousness. Habermas advocates Communicative Rationality and argues that the validity of Communicative Rationality depends on sincerity, truth and rightness. The first thing mentioned here is sincerity: communication participants need to treat others with sincerity, so that communication can be developed to enhance solidarity and to reach consensus. This naturally reminds Chinese scholars of Wang Yangming's doctrine of extending conscience: now the one truth is sincerity, the way of Heaven. That which makes [ us ] sincere is intelligence, the way of man, the extension of liang-chih (conscience ). Communication between people is necessary, but if communication lacks sincerity or conscience, such communication merely counts as communication in the sense of Instrumental Rationality, not in the sense of Communicative Rationality expected by Habermas.

   It is not an easy task to demonstrate that conscience is a self-presentation rather than an assumption. This requires a great deal of analysis and different approaches, including the elaboration of a way to rediscover the original mind, the revealing of conscience based on one's life experience and the expression of genuine human feelings through interpreting Confucian classical texts and literary works, such as poetry. In his works, such as Explaining the Mind, Xiong reveals the authentic flow of conscience through his interpretations of Confucian classics, Dao Te Ching, and Wang Yangming's poems related to conscience and Zen poems. In Western philosophy, phenomenology has made great contribution to the clarification of structure of human consciousness and the description of experience including moral consciousness. Therefore, I will make a comparison by changing the perspective:to understand the existential concerns and lofty sentiments of Chinese poetry by way of Heidegger's elucidation of the relationship between poetry and thinking, to analyze moral consciousness, such as conscience, from the phenomenological perspective; to sort out the relationship among religion, theology and philosophy in light of the relationship between belief and action.

   Xiong argues that conscience is a self-presentation, and conscience not only appears in the heart, but also in the manifestations of the Great Function. As for people' s moral practice, conscience is embedded in social concerns. People can not only become aware of their kind wishes, but also show their love in social services. In this sense, the presentation of conscience is both thoroughly external and internal. In my view,one strength of Chinese traditional culture lies in its full exploration of people's inner experience of conscience, from inner self-awareness to external transcendence. The Western culture has its strength in the design of social systems. For example, Habermas is very concerned about enhancing the solidarity of citizens. He tries to explore the potentials of traditional cultures in moral education by improving the function of public sphere and by introducing religious beliefs and cultural groups into the rational communication of public sphere. The articles in this book attempt to deepen the understanding of the relation between conscience and cognition by comparing the Chinese and Western cultures and their methods in social research, seeking to learn from each other for constructing a better society.

Note 

1. Huang Tsung-his. The Records of Ming Scholars. A Selected Translation edited by Julia Ching. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press,1987, p.59.