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Thesis Knowing without doing is not knowing: Wang Yangming’s strong internalism is simply correct

Lin Pei-shan Contributor
· 6 replies · 192 views
Moral psychologyChineseJapanese & KoreanModern EuropeanNeo-ConfucianismDavid HumeImmanuel KantWang Yangming#akrasia#motivational-internalism#unity-of-knowledge-and-action#wang-yangming
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Where it stands

Every year I teach my students Wang Yangming's slogan that knowledge and action are one, and every year they treat it as an inspirational poster. I want to defend it as a serious thesis about moral motivation.

The usual view, in China as in the West, is that knowing comes first and acting follows, if you have enough will. Zhu Xi's programme is roughly like that: investigate things, extend your knowledge, and then make your intention sincere.

Wang said this gets the order wrong. His examples are deliberately physical. Nobody says you know pain unless you have felt it yourself. Loving a beautiful colour is not first seeing it and then deciding to love it; the seeing is already the loving. Likewise, someone who “knows” filial piety but never acts filially does not know it imperfectly. He knows about it. He has heard of it.

In the vocabulary of modern meta-ethics, this is motivational internalism in its strongest form: genuine moral judgement necessarily moves you. The person who claims to know cheating is wrong and is untouched by that has learned the sentence, not the judgement.

My thesis: Wang is right, and the common sense that “we all know what's right and just don't do it” is a confusion between hearing about the good and grasping it.

I expect two objections: that this makes internalism true by definition, and that weakness of will is obviously real. I will try to answer both. Please disagree.

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6 replies

For the thesis 2

  1. Rohan Desai

    For Fellow

    I will defend Wang from experience. For two years I “knew” I was destroying my health running my startup. I could have written an essay on it. When I finally stopped, after a collapse, I realised I had not known it at all in the sense that matters; I had known it the way I know facts about Jupiter. What changed was not more information but the knowledge becoming mine. Wang's distinction between hearing about and knowing describes that exactly.

  2. Gerrit Venter

    For Contributor

    Coaching boys' rugby: every one of them could recite the rule about high tackles. Some still did it in the heat of a match. I would not say they did not know the rule. I would say they had not yet become the kind of player in whom knowing it was enough. Maybe Wang and I agree after all, if his “knowing” is my “becoming”.

    Helpful · 2

Against the thesis 3

  1. Henrike Vogel

    Against Fellow

    As a Kantian I must disagree. Kant's whole account of moral worth depends on cases where you recognise your duty and feel no inclination toward it at all, and act anyway, from respect for the law. If Wang were right, the person who does her duty against every inclination would not really know her duty, which is backwards. She knows it most clearly precisely when nothing else is moving her.

    Helpful · 2
  2. Alistair Gow

    Against Contributor

    A curious point from Edinburgh. Hume and Wang are closer than either is to Kant. Hume thought moral distinctions are not derived from reason but felt: to judge that something is vicious is to feel a certain kind of disapproval. If that is right, then moral “knowledge” already includes a motivating sentiment, and something like internalism follows.

    But I still side against you, Pei-shan, because Hume would never say a man who feels disapproval of drinking and drinks anyway does not know drinking is bad. He would say he has a stronger passion pulling the other way. Feeling and acting remain two things.

    Helpful · 3
  3. Ji-woo Park

    Against Fellow

    In Korea the Joseon scholars mostly sided with Zhu Xi, and Toegye wrote against Wang's Instructions for Practical Living. Their worry was practical: if everyone's innate knowing is already sufficient, why study? Why read the classics or submit to a teacher? A doctrine of unity, they feared, would let people mistake their impulses for knowledge. I think that is the strongest objection, and it is not about logic but about what the doctrine does to people.

    Helpful · 1

Other replies

  1. Lin Pei-shan

    Contributor

    Thank you. Ji-woo's objection is the one I take most seriously, and Wang's answer was that extending innate knowing requires constant effort, not none. I concede to Alistair that my thesis risks being true by definition if “real knowing” just means “knowing that moves you”. But I think Rohan and Gerrit show it is not empty: it predicts that moral education should aim at transformation rather than information, and that prediction can fail. Henrike's Kantian I cannot answer briefly, except to say that respect for the law is also a kind of being moved.

    Helpful · 3