Confucian Moral Experience and Its Metaphysical Foundation: From the Point of View of Mou Zongsan

Abstract

It is argued here that Mou Zongsan, the representative thinker of contemporary Neo-Confucianism, is committed to act-deontology instead of rule-deontology. Accordingly, Mou maintains that one knows one’s duty in a concrete situation through “affectedly crossing-over” to others, which reveals the metaphysical unity of the world. Mou’s idea of intellectual intuition can be explained against the background of this metaphysical monism. Further, some critical observations are made based on a reconstruction of Mou’s philosophy with a focus, first, on how normatively relevant his philosophy is, and second, on whether his metaphysical grounding of morality is successful.