- Length
- 480 pagesStudent Book Company, Taipei, 1975; no complete English translation exists
- Reading
- SpecialistWritten for a school and normally read with a commentary
- Availability
- Specialist pressIn print from an academic publisher, priced accordingly
Phenomenon and Thing-in-Itself
A Confucian philosopher who translated all three Critiques into Chinese argues that Kant was wrong on one point and that everything else follows. Where Kant denied human beings intellectual intuition, Mou says the Chinese traditions have been describing and cultivating it for two thousand years.
- Date
- 1975
- Author
- Mou Zongsan
- Region
- Hong Kong and Taiwan
- Language
- Chinese
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Demonstration — Proof from premises the opponent already grants
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years back to what it answers
- 194 years
The central work of New Confucian philosophy, written in exile from the mainland, and still without a complete translation into any European language.
What the book says
An argument that Kant's system contains a gap which the Chinese traditions had already filled. Kant had distinguished things as they appear from things as they are in themselves, and held that we can know only the first, because our minds must receive what is given through the forms of space and time - a being who could know things as they are would need an intellect that produces its object in knowing it, which Kant reserved for God and denied to human beings. Mou's claim is that this denial is the point at which a European assumption is doing the work of an argument. Confucian, Daoist and Buddhist thought all describe a mode of knowing that is not receptive in Kant's sense: the sage's apprehension of moral reality, which is not inference from experience and not divine revelation but a capacity human beings actually have and can cultivate. If intellectual intuition is available to us, the thing in itself is not permanently beyond us, moral metaphysics becomes possible, and the limits Kant drew have to be redrawn.
What it argues
That moral metaphysics is possible, and that Kant came within one denial of it. The disagreement is precise. Kant's limits on knowledge follow from the claim that our intuition is sensible and receptive; grant a non-sensible intuition and the whole boundary moves. Mou argues that the Confucian tradition's account of the moral mind - which knows the good immediately, not by inference, and whose knowing is at the same time its realisation - is exactly such a capacity, and that the Daoist and Buddhist traditions describe analogous ones. The consequence is a two-level ontology rather than a wall: phenomena as we ordinarily encounter them, and the same reality as apprehended by a mind that has cultivated itself, with the second accessible in principle to anyone. Kant's moral theology, which had to postulate God and immortality to make sense of morality, becomes unnecessary.
What it answered
Kant, and behind him the assumption that Chinese thought is wisdom rather than philosophy. Mou's larger project was to show that Confucianism could meet Western philosophy on its own technical ground - which is why he spent years translating the Critiques rather than writing about them at a distance. He was also answering the May Fourth generation inside China, who had concluded that Confucianism was an obstacle to modernity and had to be discarded; his position is that it contains what modernity needs and had been misread by its defenders as much as by its critics.
How it argues
By close technical engagement with Kant's text, conducted in Chinese with a vocabulary Mou largely had to construct. The difficulty is doubled: the argument is as demanding as Kant scholarship anywhere, and it is conducted in terms that map onto neither tradition's existing usage. He is also arguing at two levels at once - about what Kant's system requires, and about what the Confucian texts describe - and readers who know one side well and the other slightly find it very hard to assess.
The moment
Mou left the mainland in 1949 and spent the rest of his life in Taiwan and Hong Kong. He was a signatory of the 1958 manifesto on Chinese culture addressed to the world, which announced the New Confucian project of reconstructing the tradition philosophically rather than defending it culturally. The work was done in exile, at institutions with limited resources, in a Chinese-speaking world where the mainland tradition had been officially repudiated and where his readership was small.
How it travelled
Barely, in the sense that matters for this section. Mou is the most important Chinese philosopher of the twentieth century by the estimate of the field, and there is no complete translation of his central work into any European language, which means that most Western philosophers who could evaluate the argument cannot read it. Within Chinese-speaking philosophy his influence is enormous and his New Confucianism is a major school; on the mainland he has been read increasingly since the 1990s. The English-language literature on him is growing and is almost entirely secondary.
The strongest objection
That the capacity Mou identifies is not what Kant meant, so the two are not disagreeing. Kant's intellectual intuition would create its object in the act of knowing - it is God's way of knowing a world God makes - and the Confucian moral mind, however immediate, does not make what it apprehends. If so, Mou has described a non-inferential moral knowledge that Kant might have accommodated some other way, and has not touched the argument for the limits. Kant scholars press this hard. Mou's defenders reply that in the moral case knowing and realising genuinely coincide, since apprehending the good is not separable from becoming good, and that this is closer to Kant's sense than the objection allows. The dispute is technical, live, and conducted by very few people.
Why read it
Almost nobody outside the field can, which the section records as a fact rather than a judgement. Readers who want the argument should go to the English secondary literature, which is now reasonably good, and to Mou's shorter works in translation. This entry exists partly to note that the most important Chinese philosopher of his century is not readable in English.
- First printed
- 1975
- First in English
- 0
- Digitised
- No
Mou translated the first Critique, the Critique of Practical Reason and the Critique of Judgment into Chinese with extensive commentary, and his multi-volume study of the Song and Ming Confucians is the companion work.
There is no complete English translation of this book. Selections and studies exist; the field's growth in English has been recent and is still limited.
Where it stands
Live and unevenly accessible. New Confucianism is a substantial position in Chinese philosophy, and the specific argument about intellectual intuition is discussed in comparative philosophy - by a small number of people who read both Kant and classical Chinese.
On quoting this book
In copyright, and no complete English version exists to quote from. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Whether Mou's intellectual intuition is Kant's is the central technical dispute and has no agreed resolution. Whether the New Confucian reconstruction is faithful to the classical sources or reads Kantian concerns into them is argued by historians of Chinese philosophy. Whether a philosophy developed in exile in response to the mainland's repudiation of the tradition can be separated from that political situation is a fair question. And the absence of translation is itself a subject: what a section like this can say about a body of work its compilers cannot read directly is a limit worth stating rather than concealing.