探寻自我:从自身意识到人格生成

Exploring Ego:From the Consciousness of Self to the Emergence of Personality

东西方思想史上关于"有我"、"无我"问题的思考和争论从未间断,而意识现象学与佛教唯识学、儒家心学的比较研究为此问题提供了一个当代解答方案。一方面,在反思中对"自我"的"横向本质直观"只能提供对"纯粹自我"的结构理解,它相当于整个意识流的一个极点,所有经验活动都从这个"点性自我"出发,但它本身不具有任何经验内容;另一方面,发生现象学、佛教缘起论和当代儒家心学在运用"纵向本质直观"方法的基础上,揭示"线性自我"的发生意义,从而为自我的"人格生成"问题提供了发生—历史的理解方案,并使"人格"的经验内涵得到具体展示。即人格本性与习性的发生,以及作为单子的个体人格与作为社会的交互人格的发生。从理论的自身认识到实践的自身修养(自身人格完善)因而构成一门当代自我学的基本思想脉络。

Thinking and debating the question of“being”and“non-being”is a constant thread in the intellectual history of the West and the East.Comparative study of the phenomenology of consciousness,the Buddhist consciousness-only(Vijāptimātratāsiddhi)theory and the Confucian philosophy of the mind offer a contemporary solution to this question.On one hand,the horizontal intuitive reflection of the essence of self can only provide a structural understanding of“pure self”;it is equivalent to an extreme point of the entire stream of consciousness,and all experiential activities set out from this“punctiform self,”but it has no experiential contents itself.On the other hand,the phenomenology of genesis,the Buddhist theory of interdependent origination(pratitya-samutpada)and the contemporary Confucian philosophy of mind reveal,via vertical essential intuition,the meaning of the emergence of the linear self,and offer a solution to the question of the emergence of personality in the self from an emergent-historical perspective.Specifically,they display the experiential contents of personality,that is,the emergence of the natures of personalities and habits,and the emergence both of individual personalities as monads and of interacting personalities as society.The process from the theoretical cognition of self to the practical cultivation of self(the improvement of one’s personality)thus constitutes a basic approach for contemporary study of the self.