如好好色:中国哲学中的知与行

“Like Loving a Lovely Sight”: Knowledge and Action in Chinese Philosophy

"好好色"并不是指我们喜欢某种漂亮颜色,也不是指我们喜爱某种美貌,而是指对美人的性欲望。"如好好色"与"如恶恶臭"的比喻的实质性内容是我们对善的爱和对恶的恨应该在认知和情感上同时存在。对于《大学》"如好好色"和"如恶恶臭"这一比喻,朱熹解释为对我们每个人都追求的最终目标的描述。王阳明则认为这一比喻描述的并不是经过多年的努力后道德知识与道德动机完全结合为一体的修身目标,而是描述了真正的道德知识自始即是的模样。用西方伦理学的术语来说,王阳明是"动机内在论者",主张知善在本质上就意味着有动机去追求善。

The Confucian classic the Great Learning(Daxue大学)argues that one should love the good“like loving a lovely sight”(ru hao hao se如好好色)and hate evil“like hating a hateful odor”(ru wu e chou如恶恶臭).The substantive content of these metaphors is that our love of the good and our hatred of evil should appropriately combine cognition and motivation.In the case of“hating a hateful odor,”the spontaneous connection of our recognition of an odor as disgusting and our repulsion toward it is clear.But what about“loving a lovely sight”?I argue that this phrase does not refer to something like our fondness for a particular shade of a colour nor does it refer to our appreciation of a work of art like the Mona Lisa.Instead,the phrase refers to our erotic desire for an attractive person.Zhu Xi regards this combination of cognition and motivation as the ultimate goal that we seek in the process of ethical cultivation.In contrast,Wang Yangming believed that these metaphors described the spontaneous combination of cognition and motivation that all humans experience regarding morality from the very beginning.In the language of Anglo-American ethics,we would say that Wang is an advocate of“motivational internalism,”for whom genuinely recognizing something as good entails being appropriately motivated to pursue it,whereas Zhu advocates a form of“motivational externalism.”