Philosophy
1472 to 1529, Yuyao, Zhejiang, China
The unity of knowledge and action, the mind as principle, and the innate knowing (liangzhi) that makes a sage of anyone who clears the self and acts.
Start learning Wang →Wang Yangming’s most famous doctrine, zhi xing he yi : that genuine knowing and doing are not two separate stages but one thing. To know the good and not act on it, he insisted, is not really to know it yet - a di…
Wang’s foundational break with Zhu Xi: xin ji li , ‘the mind is principle.’ Moral principle is not a structure waiting to be found in external things and studied; it is constituted in the responses of…
Wang’s mature teaching: liangzhi , the innate moral knowing present in every person - the immediate sense of right and wrong that needs no deliberation. Borrowed from Mencius and vivid in the instinctive alarm at…
Wang’s radical reinterpretation of gewu : not the ‘investigation of things’ Zhu Xi taught, but the rectification of affairs - correcting the mind’s own engagements. Cultivation happens not in wit…
Wang’s culminating vision: the great man forms ‘one body’ with Heaven, Earth, and the ten thousand things. Innate knowing, fully extended, expands moral sensitivity outward - alarm for a child, pity fo…
More in Philosophy
AristotlePlatoImmanuel KantFriedrich NietzscheConfuciusSenecaEpictetusMarcus Aureliusepoché — a humanities education that remembers you.