Reason Or Sympathy: Two Dimensions Of Moral Philosophy

People of the time have all witnessed the crisis of moral. There are mainly two reasons:personal causes of our human-being (i.e. more pursuit of selfish desire than that of moral, and the demand of interest takes precedence of the study of ethics) and the problems of Morals (or we say Ethics) itself (i.e. Morals has degraded itself from the study of one's nature mind to rigorous self- restriction by the ice-cold Morals judged from its surface, and that is why people consider it harder to accept it). But Immanuel Kant was a great achiever of this type of Morals, who was often criticized by the following philosophers and moralists, including Arthur Schopenhauer, a philosopher from Germany. However, philosophy field never pay attention to their criticisms, especially in China.There existed some basic disagreements on the problems of Morals between Arthur Schopenhauer and Immanuel Kant. To begin with, both of their attitudes toward reason were different. The behaviors of Morals Immanuel Kant insisted on were those which were consistent with reason as well as its rules, while Schopenhauer thought what reason resulted in was private desires rather than morals. Secondly, in Schopenhauer's opinion, Kant based his Morals on its rules of practical reason, but as for the question how does reason practice? Kant just turned to vague words to put us off instead of definite answers. Lastly, Schopenhauer pointed out the incompleteness in Kant's Morals, in that Kant excluded the element of happiness in Morals at the very beginning of his theory, however, he eventually agreed with it in the theory of Supreme Good. With the dissatisfaction to Kant's Moral, Schopenhauer put forward his complete and profound criticism of Kant's Morals, including its basis, motivation, and main principles, etc. Besides, Schopenhauer also uncovered demerits together with weaknesses in Kant'Morals, creating his own Morals based on sympathy while criticizing.Although Schopenhauer brought up complete and detailed criticism on Kant's Morals, fundamentally speaking, he made the same mistake on Morals as Kant did. Firstly, Morals in their eyes were superficial, either respects to its rules or behaviors that were absolutely out of others' interests. Secondly, both of them held their own incomplete and unfair sayings:reasonor sympathy.Judged from the aspect of Morals itself, Morals first has a character of norms, whose formation is accompanied with the comment function of reason. And if judged from the usage of the moral norms, Morals is close related to human-being's realization and internalization. And among these,understanding of reason together with the function of cognition and internalization of emothion as well as sublimation are also included. The personal ethics formed after the sublimation of emothion also make up a level of personal Sprittual World. Therefore, as a whole, Morals consists of both reason and sympathy. Only with an integral perspective could we comprehensively understand Morals.