In both Lu Xun's "The New Year's Sacrifice" (1924) and Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" (1948), a woman is made a sacrificial victim by her village community, one symbolically and one literally. Using the tw...In both Lu Xun's "The New Year's Sacrifice" (1924) and Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" (1948), a woman is made a sacrificial victim by her village community, one symbolically and one literally. Using the two stories as my cross-cultural examples, I ponder the connection between the failure of sympathy and patriarchal sacrificial logic, and ask what literature can do to help create the condition of possibility for moral agency.展开更多
This article aims to argue that interpreting liangzhi 良知 as innate, original, or cognitive knowledge is likely to fall into "interpretative obfuscation regarding knowledge." First, for Wang, what is inherent in ma...This article aims to argue that interpreting liangzhi 良知 as innate, original, or cognitive knowledge is likely to fall into "interpretative obfuscation regarding knowledge." First, for Wang, what is inherent in mankind is moral agency rather than innate or original knowledge. Therefore, the focus ofzhizhi 致知 and gewu 格物 is instead on moral practice and actualization of virtue rather than on either "the extension of knowledge" or "the investigation of things." Apart from that, drawing support from cognitive knowledge to explicate liangzhi also leads to three related but distinct misconceptions: liangzhi as perfect knowledge, the identity of knowledge and action, and liangzhi as recognition or acknowledgement. By clarifying the above misinterpretations, the meaning and implication of liangzhi will, in turn, also become clearer.展开更多
文摘In both Lu Xun's "The New Year's Sacrifice" (1924) and Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" (1948), a woman is made a sacrificial victim by her village community, one symbolically and one literally. Using the two stories as my cross-cultural examples, I ponder the connection between the failure of sympathy and patriarchal sacrificial logic, and ask what literature can do to help create the condition of possibility for moral agency.
文摘This article aims to argue that interpreting liangzhi 良知 as innate, original, or cognitive knowledge is likely to fall into "interpretative obfuscation regarding knowledge." First, for Wang, what is inherent in mankind is moral agency rather than innate or original knowledge. Therefore, the focus ofzhizhi 致知 and gewu 格物 is instead on moral practice and actualization of virtue rather than on either "the extension of knowledge" or "the investigation of things." Apart from that, drawing support from cognitive knowledge to explicate liangzhi also leads to three related but distinct misconceptions: liangzhi as perfect knowledge, the identity of knowledge and action, and liangzhi as recognition or acknowledgement. By clarifying the above misinterpretations, the meaning and implication of liangzhi will, in turn, also become clearer.