China & East Asia · 1909–1995
Mou Zongsan
Leading second-generation New Confucian and translator of Kant
Argued, against Kant, that humans do have “intellectual intuition” through the moral mind, and built a Confucian “moral metaphysics” that he traced mainly through the Lu–Wang line.
Life and thought
Mou Zongsan, born in 1909 in Qixia, Shandong, studied philosophy at Peking University, working on logic and on Russell and Whitehead, and in 1932 met Xiong Shili, who became his teacher. He left the mainland in 1949, taught in Taiwan and from 1960 in Hong Kong, and in 1958 co-signed with Tang Junyi, Xu Fuguan and Carsun Chang a manifesto asking the West to treat Chinese culture as a living tradition. He translated Kant’s three Critiques and died in Taipei in 1995.
Kant held that only an infinite mind, such as God’s, could have “intellectual intuition”, knowing things in themselves rather than as they appear. Mou argued that the Confucian tradition shows otherwise: the original moral mind, Mencius’s heart and Wang Yangming’s innate knowing, is an infinite mind in us, and in moral action it grasps reality directly as value. On this basis he built a “moral metaphysics” and claimed that science and democracy could grow from Confucianism if innate knowing deliberately “lowers itself” into ordinary cognition. Controversially, he judged Zhu Xi a side branch of the tradition. He shaped Confucian philosophy in Taiwan and Hong Kong for decades.