Iso Kern’s Interpretation Of Wang Yangming’s Liangzhi

Wang Yangminig’s belief of Liangzhi was mainly exposed in the dialogue with his students and friends in the letter revealed.With the intricate circumstances,the belief itself changes a lot,sometimes even self-contradictory,which makes Wang’s thought full of ambiguity and polysemy,also brings about afterwords debates and controversies.In the book The Most Important Thing in Life Iso Kern tried to reconstruct Wang’s thought in a more philosophical and systematical way,in which polysemy of Liangzhi was analyzed and a consecutive but clear interpretation was made.Then,will his work do any help in understanding Wang’s thought? Will it lead to an excessive interpretation? This paper aims to investigate Iso Kern’s work with the help of his book The Most Important Thing in Life and other relevant works.Iso Kern prefers to define Liangzhi as something Eigentliches and Ursprüngliches,so he translates it into"ursprünglichen Wissens”in German which means original knowledge,or we can directly take it as“原初知识”or“本原知识”in Chinese.With the German word,Kern believes it suits all the contexts of Wang Yangminig’s time.The original elucidation of"ursprünglichen Wissens”not only reflects the basic view of Mencius and Wang Yangming towards Liangzhi(Liangzhi-the origins and seed of virtues),also embodies Kern’s interpretation of Lianghzi from the perspective of phenomenology.Iso Kern proposes to understand Wang Yangminig’s teaching from the footstone called“self-knowledge”,which could immediately brings about a distinct consistency and systematicness.Kern classifies two connotations of Liangzhi: one is the original virtues expressed through the spontaneous compassion,love,respect,shame and other moral feelings,while the spontaneous feelings are the ‘seeds of virtues’,only with the resistant to selfishness could it be possibly implemented thoroughly;the other is the moral consciousness which are directly related to one’s own intentional experiences;it is usually more or less covered,and with wholehearted and hard efforts could it be possibly clarified.Through the discussion of conscience,we find that Wang Yangming and Iso Kern share with no same focuses.Wang Yangming focused on how to make conscience better displayed in their own hearts,and then consciously “deed depend on conscience”.In other words,Wang Yangminig’s concern is how the individuals present their own conscience in real life,that is ‘Bring out conscience’ in short.This is a pre-problem of understanding and experiencing.Iso Kern’s interpretation towards Wang Yangming’s Liangzhi is a kind of problem research on the level of meta-conscience,that is to say his work is to explore in what structural position Liangzhi operates in the universal experience of human conscience.