A Study On The Thought Of Wang Gen’s Gewu Theory Of The Taizhou School

As the inheritor of Yangming’s philosophy and the founder of the Taizhou school,Wang Gen,in the face of the social changes and the awakening of people’s subjective consciousness in the late Ming period,responded to the needs of the times by transforming Wang Yangming’s "theory of conscience" on the basis of his inheritance of traditional Confucianism.He took the interpretation of the Daxue as the starting point and developed his own distinctive thought on materialism,establishing the ontological proposition of "the body as the foundation" and then deriving the methodology of "the philosophy of protecting oneself",making it distinctly Confucian.The essay revolves around Wang Gen’s thought on Gewu.The essay is divided into three main parts,which focus on Wang Gen’s thought of Gewu.In the first part,we look at the historical materials of ancient texts to understand the ideological changes of the doctrine of Gewu,examine in detail the process of the development of the doctrine of Huainan Gewu,then study the origin of the doctrine of Huainan Gewu and the reason why it was named so,compare the doctrine of Gewu of previous generations,analyze the connection between it and Wang Gen’s thought,and finally outline the influence of the doctrine on later Confucianism and the evolution of its transmission by later scholars in Taizhou.The second part,on the basis of the previous article,focuses on analyzing the scientific cognitive thought contained in Wang Gen’s Gewu system and tracing its changes and development.Based on Huang Zongxi’s "The Case of Ming Confucianism",the second part explains the rational thinking of Wang Gen’s Gewu theory that "everything in heaven and earth depends on the body,but not the body depends on everything in heaven and earth",and compares the traditional Confucian thought of the relationship between heaven and man to discover the innovation and breakthrough of Wang Gen’s theory of "the great man-made life".In the third part,we study the status of Wang Gen’s theory of Gewu in the history of Chinese thought,and analyze the inheritance and changes of Wang Gen’s theory of Gewu to the traditional science and teleology by comparing it with the inheritance of Zhu Xi’s science and Yang Ming’s teleology,and compare it with the thought of Wang Tingxiang’s qiology,another major thinker in Ming Dynasty.