An Exploration Of Freedom Proposed By Confucius And Mencius

People in Zhou Dynasty put forward the idea about the impermanence of the destiny and the concept of matching heave with virtue, which share a deep relationship in originality with the concept of freedom proposed by Confucius. On the one hand, the heaven in the eyes of the People in Zhou Dynasty is quite different from "the heaven" proposed by the people in Shang Dynasty. The heaven put forward by Zhou Dynasty is sovereign and dominates everything. People can not realize the dream of freedom but to obey the destiny. In the early time of Western Zhou Dynasty, the heaven of personality was replaced by the heaven of morality gradually; from then on,people had realized that men should conform to the heaven of morality through awareness of morality and rationality. Therefore, the heaven in the eyes of people in Zhou Dynasty is the heaven of morality rather than the heaven of religion, which highlights the awareness and the development of people’s morality and rationality through the communication between man and deity. On the other hand, people in Zhou Dynasty feel anxious inwardly, which is the spiritual awareness that people should be responsible for themselves. This awareness of spirit stems from awe, which embodies in the observation and the introspection of the man’s concrete behaviors. The ideas stated above manifest that people in Zhou Dynasty attach importance to freedom of morality, which exists in the inner heart of man rather than in the external forces. Without the heaven of morality of people in Zhou Dynasty and the extinction of the heaven of religious, there is no Confucius’concept about freedom. The humanistic ideas of people in Zhou Dynasty provide the fountain of ideas for the Confucius’concept about freedom. However, the morality of people in Zhou Dynasty doesn’t exist in the inner heart of man completely. Confucius proposes that "the generosity" is the basis of life and spirit for man. He brings the heaven of morality totally into the inwardness of man, putting forward the view that freedom originated from inwardness. Different from the Laotze’s external freedom which regards Tao as the root of the freedom, the freedom of Confucius is internal. Laotze’s freedom conforms to the order of nature. Hence the freedom of Laotze is the naturalness, and the essence of the Laotze’s freedom is naturalness and clarity. Naturalness is beneficial in Laotze’s eyes. The freedom of Confucius is a kind of freedom that can be achieved by introspection and meditation of man, while Confucius achieves the naturalness and clarity of the generosity by breaking the obstacles and dispelling the disadvantages, and therefore the essence of Confucius’freedom is naturalness and clarity, so is the freedom of Laotze. Confucius employs the generosity to endue morality with feature of infinity. The state of the generosity can awaken men’s moral and unfettered consciousness, which can improve the men’s moral vitality.Comparing with Confucius’ freedom, Mencius’s freedom is more exquisite and more profound. It embodies in that Mencius keep himself with the heaven by "loyalty", leading the development of inwardness towards delicacy. Mencius highlights the peaceful intendancy of the inwardness in order to achieve the policy of benevolence; moreover, it acquire the universal law of the social development by emphasizing that the principal part of the morality must break through the limitation of external factors. Mencius claims that there will be a prosperity every five hundred years in the history, which provide the objective evidence for the legality of the policy of benevolence proposed by the Confucian school, and it also paves the way for achieving the generalization of liberty. The freedom surpassing the life and death is the destination of all forms of freedom, because all crimes originated from men’s cowardice. The freedom surpassing the life and death manifests that generosity is the root of all forms of freedom. Without "generosity", there is no so-called moral freedom.