Taoism Essay Research Paper Classical Chinese theory — страница 3

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because the standard of correctness was discourse. It threatened a regress?we need a discourse to guide our practical interpretation of discourse. Philosophy of mind played a role in various attempted solutions. Chinese philosophers mostly agreed (except for innatists) that actual distinguishing would be relative to past training, experience, assumptions and situation. However, they did not regard experience as a mental concept in the classic Western sense of the being a subjective or private content. An important concept in philosophy of mind was, therefore, de (virtuosity). One classic formulation identified de as embodied, inner dao. De though "inner," was more a set of dispositions than a mental content. The link seemed to be that when we learn a dao?s content, it

produces de. Good de comes from successful teaching of a dao. When you follow dao, you need not have the discourse "playing" internally. We best view it as the behavioral ability to conform to the intended pattern of action?the path (performance dao). It would be "second nature." We may think of de, accordingly, as both learned and natural. We can distinguish Chinese thought from Indo-European thought, then, not only in its blending affective and cognitive functions, but also in its avoiding the nuts and bolts of Western mind-body analysis. Talk of "inner" and "outer" did distinguish the psychological from the social, but it did not mean inner was mental content. The xin has a physical and temporal location and consists of dispositions to

make distinctions in guiding action. It is not a set of inherently representational "ideas" (mental pictograms). Similarly, we find no clear counterpart to the Indo-European conception of the faculty of reason. Euclidean method in geometry and the formulation of the syllogism in logic informed this Indo-European concept. Absent this apparatus, Chinese thinkers characterized the heart-mind as either properly or improperly trained, virtuous, skilled, reliable, etc. Prima facie, however, these were social standards threatened circularity. The heart-mind required some kind of mastery of a body of practical knowledge. Chinese thinkers explored norm realism mainly through an innatist strategy. Innatists sought to picture the heart-mind?s distinctions as matching

"norms" or "moral patterns" implicit in the natural stasis or harmony of the world. Return to Outline Historical Developments: The Classical Period Confucius indirectly addressed philosophy of mind questions in his theory of education. He shaped the moral debate in a way that fundamentally influenced the classical conception of xin (heart-mind). Confucius? discourse dao was the classical syllabus, including most notably history, poetry and ritual. On one hand, we can think of these as "training" the xin to proper performance. On the other, the question of how to interpret the texts into action seemed to require a prior interpretive capacity of xin. Confucius appealed to a tantalizingly vague intuitive ability that he called ren (humanity). A person

with ren can translate guiding discourse into performance correctly?i.e., can execute or follow a dao. Confucius left open whether ren was innate or acquired in study?though the latter seems more likely to have been his position. It was, in any case, the position of China?s first philosophical critic, the anti-Confucian Mozi. Again concern with philosophy of mind was subordinate to Mozi?s normative concerns. He saw moral character as plastic. Natural human communion (especially our tendency to "emulate superiors") shaped it. Thus, we could cultivate utilitarian behavioral tendencies by having social models enunciate and act on a utilitarian social discourse. The influence of social models would also determine the interpretation of the discourse. Interpretation takes the

form of indexical pro and con reactions?shi (this:right:assent) and fei (not this:wrong:dissent). The attitudes when associated with terms pick out the reality (object, action, etc.) relevant to the discourse guidance. We thus train the heart-mind to make distinctions that guide its choices and thereby our behavior?specifically in following a utilitarian symbolic guide. Utilitarian standards also should guide practical interpretation (execution or performance) of the discourse. At this point in Chinese thought, the heart-mind became the focus of more systematic theorizing?much of it in reaction to Mozi?s issues. The moral issue and the threat of a relativist regress in the picture led to a nativist reaction. On the one hand, thinkers wanted to imagine ways to free themselves from