A Study On The Secularization Of Confucian Ethics In The Late Ming Dynasty

The secularization of Confucian ethics in the late Ming Dynasty is an innovation movement of Confucianism which starts from Wang Yangming and is led by Taizhou school.In this movement,the Confucian ethics separates from the traditional idealistic moral doctrine of the elite intellectual class and begins to pay attention to the development of commodity economy and the daily value evaluation of civilians.Then through the simplification of the methods of individual cultivation,the ethical construction of the civilian clan,the rural moral construction and the moral education in lectures,Confucian ethics enters civil society and begins to guide the daily life of the public.The secularization of Confucian ethics is an exhortation of the traditional ritual authority.It embodies the process of socialization,popularization and being to life of Confucian ethics.No thought can be divorced from the social basis on which it exists.The secularization of Confucian ethics is also rooted in the historical reality of social development in the late Ming Dynasty and can be regarded as an ideological and cultural reflection of the economic base and social structure changes.In politics,the corruption of the bureaucratic class and the implementation of stereotyped writing system caused the sharp contradiction between Tao and Power,forcing scholars to have to turn to the civil society and to seek to construct the order of the community at the grassroots level directly.In economy,the interaction between scholars and businessmen caused by the development of commodity economy not only led the boundaries of the scholar class and the merchant class to be blurred gradually,but also caused the infiltration of values between each other,promoting the change of traditional Confucian ethics.In culture,the infiltration of elite culture promoted the awakening of the public self consciousness,culture was no longer exclusive territory of scholars and the sacredness and mysticism of culture and knowledge disappeared,thus it further dispelled the monopoly on discourse right by knowledge authority.In this way,the civil society surfaced and gradually changed the old cultural pattern led by the elite.The thought of Taizhou school was shaped by the mixing of the elite culture and the civilians culture.It could be said that the social reality of the struggle of Tao and Power,the interaction between the Confucian and the merchants and the blending of the elegance and the vulgarity provided conditions for the integration of the civilian Confucian scholars represented by Wang Gen into the universal discourse of Neo-Confucianism.With the modern transformation and cultural changes of society,the value orientation of Confucian ethics began to change.Between ideal and reality,it gradually changed the excessive dedication to transcendence and turned to concern about the existence of human life and individual needs for value.The historical turning point of this change was the rise of Yang-ming’s philosophy of mind.Wang Yangming ’s remodeling of Confucian ethics laid theoretical foundation for the secularization of Confucian ethics.Since then,Wang Gen and Taizhou school strongly developed the aspect of Wang’s philosophy that faces the civil society.Compared with the traditional Confucianism,they don’t use man-made presupposition to set the human nature,but advocate the natural flow of human nature.Starting from this,preservation of life and other natural desire are affirmed."Respecting Tao and body","suppression of desire being not the experience of benevolence","cultivating desire"and so on are the embodiment of this value position.In addition,they strongly stresses the importance of daily life of the people and promotes the theories that"Tao can be embodied in the ordinary" and that "nature is Tao",giving the Confucian high standards of "Tao" plain content and translating the abstraction of human nature into the empirical facts through the "pure heart".These moral changes towards the civilian class makes Confucian ethics free from the value of purely intellectual elites and begin to have an important influence on the values of civil society.The secularization of Confucian ethics is not limited to the change of values,but also implemented on multidimensional moral practice towards secular life.In the individual self-cultivation,scholars simplify the cultivation methods of Cheng-zhu,such as "reading and sticking in studying the universal reasons and rules","respecting and sitting silently","reflection and restraint",to the cultivation methods suitable for the ordinary,such as "self-recognized conscience"," honing mind by working","relaxing and experiencing benevolence".In the ethical construction of the civilian clan,they further strengthen the clan construction,highlight the core values of filial piety and other ethical categories and demonstrate the necessity of filial piety with religious idea of karma.At the same time,they use family ethics,making parents and family feel glorious,to accommodate the pursuit of wealth,honor and other utilitarian values.In the construction of social morality,Taizhou school members as unofficial local elites,are committed to the rural moral education,using decree and countryside ordinances as text basis,the lectures as an educational form,and actively promote the Confucian ethics penetrating into the lower class.In particular,with the rise of the lectures,the relationship between people goes beyond the blood and geographical constraints,to an open social relation,which has an important impact on the individual personality construction.These moral practices incorporate everyone into the social enlightenment network,which is the key to the realization of Confucian ethics in civil society.On the whole,the secularization of Confucian ethics in the late Ming Dynasty is an reflection of social consciousness on social existence in the social transitional stage.It is also a process of self-reflection and sublation in the development of social consciousness.Compared with the traditional Confucian ethics,the secular Confucianism tries to weaken the institutional dependence and to transform the top-down path of moral education of the traditional Confucian into the bottom-up method of civil autonomy.It calls on people to get rid of the superstition of moral authority,advocates self-domination and regards the conscience of each person as judgment criteria of right and wrong.At the same time,it is opposed to the idle talk style of scholarship and scholars’ excessive ideal and harsh elitism,advocates administrative practice and pays attention to the needs of civil society for value.Because of having adapted to the needs of the time,the secularization of Confucian ethics contributes to the formation of the scholars’ uninhibited personalities and the gradually flashy and open social atmosphere,and also has played a great role in promoting the development of the business in late Ming dynasty and the rise of moral enlightenment between the Ming and the Qing Dynasties.The secularization of Confucian ethics eventually led to the sharp conflict between the elite Confucian ethics and the secular Confucian ethics,which gradually faded under the exclusion and suppression of the former and finally was replaced by the grand issue of national survival and death in the dynasty change.After the May 4th New Culture Movement,Confucian ethics was gradually withdrawn from various fields such as the state system,school education,grassroots organizations,and suffered the biggest dilemma in the past two thousand years.Since then,the formation of new values caused by globalization and the development of market economy highlighted the fact that the Confucian ethics was out of tune with modern way of thinking,which brought endless criticism and questioning.However,the development of science and technology and the spiritual difficulties caused by the proliferation of instrumental rationality and the crisis of cultural identity brought about by globalization also provide an opportunity for the revival of Confucian ethics.The secularization of Confucian ethics in the late Ming dynasty represents the attempts of Confucian scholars to get rid of the fetters of saints’ authority,the efforts that let the inner conscience dominate the spiritual world,and attempts to turn the discourse right from the elite to ordinary people.It precisely provides a way for us to solve the dilemma faced by today’s Confucian ethics,that is to get rid of institutional attachment and to return Confucian ethics to the domain of individual life as a kind of individual spiritual beliefs.