良知와 지성적인 덕: 牟宗三 철학의 덕 인식론적 전망

This article is intended to elucidate the philosophical significance of Mou Zongsan’s (牟宗三: 1909-1995) moral metaphysics. He inherited the topics of Confucian Modernity and metaphysics of virtue from his teacher Xiong Sili (熊十力: 1885-1968). In the beginning he devoted himself to the epistemological investigation in order to resolve the problem of Confucian Modernity. Mou’s dialogue with Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) originated in this motive. However, in his hermeneutic working related to panjiao 判敎 (classification of teachings) of Sung-Ming Neo-Confucianism, the ontological mode of thinking internalized in his consciousness led him to his own conception of autonomy that was different from Kant’s. This made him criticize Zhu Xi (朱熹: 1130-1200) and Kant for the same reason. In the end, he failed to discover the sprout of Confucian Modernity. His "two-tired ontology" (兩層存有論) influenced by Martin Heidegger’s (1889-1976) ontological interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was basically not harmonized with the ethics of autonomy that he sought after. Therefore, the philosophical significance of his thought can be found in the early phase of “theory of liangzhi’s self-negation” (良知坎陷說) as the epistemic approach to virtue. From the beginning, he wanted to open the door of science and democracy in China on the basis of Wang Yang-ming’s (王陽明: 1472-1529) concept of liangzhi. However, as his conception worked exclusively within practical level, Mou had to adopt the concept of "self-negation" which implied the mediated and twisted (曲折) method to apply liangzhi to theoretical level. Notwithstanding, because moral mind is basically unified with cognitive mind, and all the processes of self-negation are accomplished by its self-sufficiency, liangzhi is a form of intellectual virtue implying both moral and epistemic. In this sense, Mou’s earlier theory of liangzhi’s self-negation is foreseeing the recent trend of virtue epistemology. Given that he tried to explain the acquisition and definition of knowledge in terms of liangzhi as intellectual virtue and that he found out the unity or parallelism between ethics and epistemology, his theory deserves to be highly appraised as the pioneering achievement of virtue epistemology.