I once said, “The sublime are often rational; their decisions or choices should be guided more by reason than by mere whim, or by blind obedience to habit—a person of limited intelligence can also be trained into a selfless sacrificer, and a fanatical cultist may likewise completely abandon his own interests, but they cannot be called sublime, because behind their consistent behavior we see more irrationality. Only someone who has freely reflected upon his own life and can autonomously and rationally control his behavior is possibly capable of becoming sublime.”
Later I added: “Actually, there is also a matter of level here. When the sublime reach a certain level, their conduct may in turn transcend reason. When doing good becomes a habit, there is no longer any need to monitor oneself constantly with reason; this is the realm of ‘following what the heart desires without overstepping the bounds’ (从心所欲不逾矩). But this can only be reached through many years of tempering. It is like the progression from seeing mountains as mountains, to seeing mountains as not mountains, and finally returning to seeing mountains as mountains. The first and the last of these realms are different; only after passing through the intermediate stage of reflection can one transcend the self. Therefore, those who reach this higher level are generally only the elderly, who, after a lifetime of thought and refinement, can attain a state in which they no longer hesitate and let everything follow its natural course.”
On reason and virtue, I wrote two lines a long time ago:
— “What makes human beings human is precisely that only humans can use reason to restrain beastliness, thereby sublimating humanity into sensibility.”
— “When one has not yet encountered confusion, it is enough to act according to instinct and sensibility; when one encounters bewilderment, one must appeal to reason; when one encounters confusion that reason still cannot resolve, one is left once again to appeal to instinct and sensibility.”
In fact, these two lines are not very clearly put. Let me take this opportunity to explain them anew as well: the “reason” and “sensibility” I used above (especially the latter) are of course not meant in Kant’s sense, but as ordinary-language terms, and may roughly be replaced by “intellect” and “emotion.” Rational action means making a choice after sufficient thought, careful deliberation, weighing, and comparison; emotional action, by contrast, means making a choice more according to aesthetic impulse and inward feeling. And my reason for using terms ending in “-ness” or “-ity” is that I wanted to hint at the underlying unity behind these words—beastliness, rationality, sensibility, and virtue are all, without exception, part of human nature. They are merely different aspects of human nature.
Perhaps here it would be more appropriate to replace “sensibility” with “bloodiness” or “blood-impulse” (血性). If “sensibility” easily evokes feminine temperament, then “bloodiness” obviously leans more toward describing the masculine. But in this context the two words are equivalent in meaning. When we say someone is “cold-blooded,” we mean that he is emotionally cold; when we say a character in a novel is “fleshed out” or “full-blooded” (有血有肉), we mean that he is rich in genuine feeling and has human warmth. Moreover, the term bloodiness itself is distinguished from mere irrational impulse. In ordinary dictionaries, bloodiness also carries the meanings of loyalty and sincerity—what is called loyalty and righteousness does not necessarily mean being loyal to some master or showing fraternity toward some friends: loyalty means being faithful to one’s own convictions, righteousness means upholding justice, and sincerity means being honest with one’s own heart (for example, honest with one’s moral intuition). These are roughly what I mean by sensibility sublimated through reason.
A person whose behavior is entirely controlled by reason is still not a person of sound virtue. Here we come to an important criticism that virtue ethics levels against normative ethics:
In normative ethics, ethicists attempt to provide a set of norms about “what I should do.” That is to say, when I arbitrarily given a specific situation, the normative ethicist hopes to be able to use rational inference to objectively determine what choice ought to be made. In their view, a moral person is a rule-following person, someone who in any situation can act according to the best choice yielded by ethical reasoning. If a person’s behavior runs contrary to the correct solution arrived at by reasoning, then he can be accused of doing wrong and committing evil.
In some of my earlier articles on ethics, I have already mentioned many times the criticism of the possibility of this desire in normative ethics—for example, because the language used to describe a situation is always vague and incomplete, it is impossible to make a fully objective analysis of any concrete situation.
But more importantly, the desire of normative ethics is not only impossible to realize; the direction of its efforts is fundamentally undesirable! Even if we take a step back and say that we really could formulate such a complete and perfect system of ethical norms, and really could “objectively” infer in any situation which choice is right and which is wrong, so what? We will see that such ethics in fact causes us to overlook what truly matters:
For example (see Lin Huowang, Introduction to Ethics), suppose my friend runs into difficulty, I help him, and he is thanking me. At this moment I say, “This is what I had to do,” “No need to thank me; I was merely doing what ethical norms require of me in such a situation. However, you should also thank me, and I should also say no need to thank me, because these are all what ethical norms require!” My friend would probably feel baffled. Of course, according to that kind of ethical norm, perhaps I should not utter this truthful remark at that moment, but if every action of mine is in fact derived from ethical norms and rational inference, then that is indeed what it is. But obviously, we do not want to hear such strange words; the matter is plainly this—“because we are friends!” When a friend is in difficulty and I go to help, that should be something natural and spontaneous, and there is no need to invoke moral norms and reason it through at length!
Another example, which I mentioned in an earlier article, is this: when facing a moral dilemma, if, for the sake of some more important thing that I cannot avoid doing, I must cause harm to the interests of some innocent people. At such a time, if I were merely making a definite and necessary choice in accordance with some objective ethical norm, then what reason would I have to bear any moral responsibility for the innocent? I could also say to the innocent: “This is what I had to do.” Then that innocent person would not merely feel baffled; he would probably feel anger as well, wouldn’t he?
A person who completely follows some objective, fixed set of ethical rules and makes decisions in any situation entirely through rational inference is not so much a morally lofty person as a cold-blooded monster, a bloodless robot without flesh or feeling!
Therefore, virtue must not only transcend beastliness (physical desire) and sensibility (mere impulse); it must also transcend reason! The significance of rational thought for virtue does not lie in using reason to formulate or regulate morality, but in using reason to reflect upon morality. In a sense, reason is the discoverer rather than the inventor of right and wrong, good and evil. Only through reflection, inference, and the organization of concepts can we “know” knowledge about good and evil and examine our own conduct; but compassion, shame, aversion, and the sense of right and wrong are inherent in human nature and are not the result of reasoning. Reason can guide and develop our innate moral feelings, but it certainly must not stand above them, commanding people instead to obey reason alone. A person of sublime virtue can by no means lack bloodiness.
May 3, 2007, 21:34
Latest comments
- Yiwu
2007-05-04 00:47:01
Transcending reason, mm, I very much agree.
This point runs through many questions. Whether they are so-called small matters or big matters…
Keep thinking. - Yiwu
2007-05-04 00:50:23
So we must learn, and we must also practice.
We must think, and we must also live.
Life is lived out. It is lived out in this way.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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