Lu Xiang-Shan on Human Good and Evil by the Self of Two Minds in One
Author:Shih-Chen Chen
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In this paper I discuss Xiangshan’s unity of two minds in order to explore its ethical implications and the roots of its philosophical history. The two minds mean Dao mind and human mind, and the so-called one mind is the unity of the two. And this unity in my paper is regarded as the one-mind’s rise or fall by the interpretation of Tang Junyi(唐君毅), and as a concept of self to combine two minds in according to Xiangshan’s text, the unity is a self who makes a decision for or against his original mind, thus it is two beginnings of the same mind. In a word, the mind rises when the self’s decision conforms with his original mind, and the same mind falls when his decision violates it. In according to the concept of self the possibility of human’s moral norm and responsibility can be explained. The distinction between the two minds is established by a transcendental analysis of their respective conceptual content, and the point is to reveal the character of original mind. But the concept of original mind doesn’t demonstrate the whole but only a part of moral consciousness, because it doesn’t imply the possibility of evil and thus fails to explain the concept of evildoer and the possible responsibility for his evil. The concept of the self indicates the two beginnings of the human consciousness and as such constitute the whole of moral consciousness: the original mind is mine, and I am also the evildoer, thus the self is nothing but the ultimate subject for the possibility of good and evil. The above analysis is based on the Mencius text quoted by Xiangshan. That is, Xiangshan’s two minds in one, in both its ethical implications and philosophical history, is dependent on his interpretation of Mencius text.