31. Mou Zongsan: Appearances and Things-in-Themselves
A Sourcebook in Global Philosophy - Mohammed Rustom
David Elstein [+]
State University of New York, New Paltz
Description
Mou Zongsan (d. 1995 CE) is widely recognized as the foremost Chinese philosopher of the twentieth century. His final works were a sustained dialogue with Kant in which he sought to demonstrate that Confucianism surpassed Kant in several respects. Mou felt that Kant failed to give morality a stable foundation. That is, he agreed with Kant that morality requires a free will capable of giving a law to itself. However, for Kant, we can never know that we have free will. Human knowledge is limited to the world of appearances, and in this world, everything functions according to causal laws. We can have no knowledge of a free will outside natural causality. This would require a different kind of awareness, knowledge by intellectual intuition. In this excerpt from Appearances and Things-in-Themselves, Mou argues that humans have a limited form of intellectual intuition. Through moral responses, the intellect can reflect back on itself and become aware of its own freedom and capacity for determining itself. It is a form of intellectual intuition in which we know the mind in itself. Then we can know that we are free and capable of true moral action.