The Study Of Mou Zongsan's "The Understanding Of Life"

The life of human is confronted with two problems:the settlement of spiritual life and the satisfaction of natural life.These two problems are not so easy to solve.The thought of these two questions forms "the understanding of life".For the Chinese in twentieth Century,these two issues are particularly prominent:on the one hand,the repeated negation of traditional culture makes Chinese people feel the pain of losing value.On the other hand,the prolonged war,social unrest and the slow progress of democracy and science make Chinese people live in poverty.Mou Zongsan described the life state of Chinese as "lost root"and "hang empty"."Lost roots" means that life has no power to dominate," hang empty" means that life has nothing to rely on.Such a life can not stand up or be full.It floats everywhere,therefore,we are very painful.As a member of the Chinese people in the twentieth Century,Mou Zongsan also inevitably suffered the pain of life.On the basis of his own life experience,Mou Zongsan felt the pain,kindness,consciousness of life and constructed of a large-scale "the understanding of life".First of all,he believed that the anxious life must be stable,all the external things such as wine,beauty,wealth,logic and faith and so on can not make life stable,only beneficence can make life stable,and when you find beneficence,life will get root.Chinese traditional culture can help us find the root of life.Chinese philosophy,including Confucianism,Buddhism and Taoism,highly emphasizes the subjectivity and morality of human beings.When it focus on the moral life of human,the essence of life will be captured.Second,we should both pay attention to the settlement of the moral life of human beings,and don't ignore the satisfaction of people's natural life.Life has to be stable,meanwhile,it also supposed to be dynamic.Otherwise,it will become dead,dry and cold.This requires the life to go both inward and outward.Only if the material world is rich and abundant,the natural life of human beings can be full.It must be admitted that western culture has great advantages in material creation.However,Westerners are too close to the physical world and often compete.As a result,the created material civilization is easily destroyed by the flames of war.This shows that material civilization or nature life needs moral protection.China lags behind the West in material civilization,especially in democracy and science,but it is not a big problem.As long as we are aware of this problem and "let one step out",our beneficence will spontaneously produce democracy and Science.This is a process from nothing to something.In this process,the Chinese people's natural life can be satisfied.Third,what we said above is the key to the satisfaction of human moral life and natural life.Here,another problem is how to make moral life and natural life in harmony,which is the issue of harmony between morality and happiness.It is impossible for Kant to ensure the harmony between morality and happiness through god.Buddhism provides us with a way to solve this problem.Through" A with non A together ",We can associate morality with happiness and go to the perfection of life.This is not the best of life because in this process our hearts have been in a state of tension.We can get the best life if we put everything down and make our life comfortable,happy and free.As an integrator of modern Confucianism,Mou Zongsan's "the understanding of life" is an important part of the history of Chinese ethical thought in the twentieth Century.As with liberalism and Marxism,it actually answers the question of "salvation and Enlightenment" faced by individual life and national life.In comparison with other thoughts,we can find the value and limitation of Mou Zongsan's "the understanding knowledge of life":It finds a way out for the Chinese who have lost their value,and provides a direction for the modernization of Chinese traditional culture.However,it emphasizes too much on "moral idealism"instead of the real world.It pursues the form,the universal and the surmounting things,but has forgotten the reality.The value and limitation of Mou Zongsan's "the understanding of life" means that it needs to be inherited,criticized and developed.Taiwan's"Ehu school" has done a lot of work in this area.They inherited or expanded Mou Zongsan's "the understanding of life "in the aspects of subjectivity and morality",or from the perspective of the real life criticized and promoted Mou Zongsan's "the understanding of life".We believe that the inheritance and development of Mou's "the understanding of life" needs to interact with liberalism and Marxism,as well as politics and economy,which is also a new trend of the development of Confucianism in the period of "post Mou Zongsan".