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What exactly is Wang Yangming’s liangzhi, and is it just the Chinese word for conscience?

Huang Wei-ting Contributor
· 5 replies · 282 views
Meta-ethicsChineseJapanese & KoreanMedieval ChristianNeo-ConfucianismMenciusWang Yangming#conscience#innate-knowing#liangzhi#neo-confucian-ethics
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I grew up in Tainan and met Wang Yangming in high school, where he was something to memorise: “unity of knowledge and action”, “extend liangzhi”, three marks on the exam. Now I design puzzle games and suddenly find him interesting, because liangzhi sounds a lot like what players have when they just know a move is unfair before they can say why.

My English-language reading translates liangzhi as “innate moral knowing”, “pure knowing” or sometimes simply “conscience”. Those seem quite different to me.

So three questions, if someone can help:

  1. Where does the term come from, and what did Wang add to it?
  2. Is it a faculty that gives you knowledge, like perception, or is it closer to a feeling of approval and disapproval?
  3. Is “conscience” a good translation, or does it bring in Christian ideas that do not belong?

I am not a philosopher, so plain answers are welcome.

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5 answers

Accepted answer

  1. Lin Pei-shan

    ✓ Accepted answer Contributor

    As a teacher of Taiwanese teenagers, I am happy someone is asking this after the exam rather than before it.

    Origin. The term is from Mencius, who says that what people can do without learning is their innate ability, and what they know without deliberating is their innate knowing, liangzhi. His examples are a small child's love for its parents and respect for an older brother.

    What Wang added. He made it the centre of everything. For Wang, liangzhi is the mind's own capacity to tell right from wrong, present in everyone, sage and street-sweeper alike. It does not need to be acquired from books; it needs to be cleared of selfish desires that obscure it, and then extended into every situation. That was a direct challenge to Zhu Xi's programme, which put much more weight on investigating principles in things and in texts.

    Faculty or feeling? Both at once, and that is the point. Wang says liangzhi is simply the mind's approving and disapproving; it knows right as it loves it and knows wrong as it hates it. Knowing and being moved are not two steps. That is why the unity of knowledge and action follows from it.

    Translation. “Innate knowing” is the safest. “Conscience” is not wrong, but see Aoife's reply on what it brings in.

    Helpful · 2
    1. Huang Wei-ting

      Contributor

      This is wonderful. So liangzhi is more like the sense a player has that something is unfair, if that sense also made them refuse to play the move. I think the closest thing in games is not knowledge of the rules but the feeling that stops you exploiting a bug. Some players have it and some have lost it, which seems very Wang.

      Helpful · 2

Other answers

  1. Aoife Brennan

    Fellow

    On the Christian side, the medieval vocabulary actually has two words. Aquinas distinguishes synderesis, a natural habit by which we grasp the first principles of practical reason (good is to be done, evil avoided), from conscientia, the act of applying that knowledge to a particular case. Conscience in his sense can err; synderesis cannot.

    From what Pei-shan says, liangzhi does both jobs at once, and it is affective as well as cognitive in a way neither Latin term quite is. So “conscience” translates half of it, and imports a structure of habit and act that Wang would not recognise.

    Helpful · 3
  2. Aiko Tanabe

    Fellow

    In Japan his school was called Yōmeigaku, after the Japanese reading of his name. Nakae Tōju in the seventeenth century made it a practical teaching for ordinary villagers. It also had a more dangerous career: the most famous Japanese follower is probably Ōshio Heihachirō, who led an uprising in Osaka in 1837 on behalf of the starving. A doctrine that says everyone already knows what is right, and must act on it, can sustain a quiet village life or justify rebellion.

    1. Rin Matsuda

      Contributor

      Aiko's Ōshio story is taught in Osaka schools as local history, though mostly as a story about famine rather than philosophy. Reading this thread I realise his slogan only makes sense with Wang behind it. You cannot claim to know the rice should be given out and then wait for permission.

      Helpful · 1