Abstract
In this essay, I try to summarize what I understand to be my father’s core message. I concentrate on his last book, published in 1984, which was his last systematic philosophical utterance and final advice to humankind. It urges humanity to work toward self-understanding.
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Notes
- 1.
All quotations above are from He Bingsong, A History of Pre-Modern Europe.
- 2.
Editors note: The statue reads only that “the offender or offenders therein shall suffer the pains of death, and lose and forfeit all his and their goods, lands, and tenements as in cases of felony” and does not mention death by fire. Adams and Stephens (1901).
- 3.
Quotations from He Bingsong, A History of Pre-Modern Europe
- 4.
The author is using this term “reason” (lixing) in the sense that his father used it, which may confuse some readers. “Reason” refers not to the modern English or Chinese senses of the word, but rather to the “moral sense.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the famous British poet and philosopher, used the word “reason” in this sense, setting it apart from “rationality,” by which he meant the usual meaning of “reason.” In the English-speaking world, the writer Cardinal Henry Newman used the term “illative sense” for the same meaning of “moral sense.”
Reference
Adams, George Burton, and Stephens, Henry Morse, eds. Select documents of English Constitutional History, New York: The Macmillan Co.,1901. P. 59.
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© 2015 Foreign Language Teaching and Research Publishing Co., Ltd and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Liang, P. (2015). Humankind Must Know Itself. In: Alitto, G. (eds) Contemporary Confucianism in Thought and Action. China Academic Library. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-47750-2_10
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