Abstract
The living environment of human beings is increasingly deteriorating, and our ecological crisis has become a serious and urgent problem. More and more philosophers around the world have come to realize that the crux of this crisis lies not with the environment itself, nor with modern technological or economic changes and developments, but with our own human outlook and value systems.
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Notes
- 1.
Here, I need to say a few briefs words concerning the term “conscience” 良知 (liang zhi). The Mencius appears to be the first text to employ it, and the Song and Ming Dynasty Neo-Confucians made it into one of their central notions around which they constructed much of their thinking. Literally, it means “good knowledge” or “knowledge of good,” but the Neo-Confucians employed it in the sense of “innate knowledge of the good,” and it is standardly translated into English as “conscience.” While I adopt this standard translation, the range of meaning and signification of liang zhi in the writings of Wang Yangming in particular cannot be entirely contained in any single English translation such as “conscience,” as will be seen throughout the course of this study.
References
Chan, W.-T. (1965). A source book in Chinese philosophy. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Henke, F. G. (1916). The philosophy of Wang Yangming. London: The Open Court Publishing Co.
Li, Z. (2003). Five essays in the year of Jimao. Beijing: Sanlian Shudian.
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Zhang, X. (2017). Ecological Consciousness and the Conscience in the Writings of Wang Yangming. In: Yao, X. (eds) Reconceptualizing Confucian Philosophy in the 21st Century. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-4000-9_25
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-4000-9_25
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