Response to Frisina’s Response

Abstract

I thank Warren Frisina for his careful responses to my paper. I cannot agree more with him that we do not dispute on several key issues on WANG Yangming’s doctrine of unity of knowledge and action, and I also regret that I did not discuss in my paper ZHU Xi’s view on learning and investigating things in contrast with WANG’s view. But there are some important differences between our understandings of Wang’s notion of liangzhi 良知 and Wang’s doctrine of unity of knowledge and action. I will focus in this response on where we disagree and will respond to Frisina’s responses along the general disagreements and some specific questions clearly articulated by him. The first main disagreement between us regards the notion of liangzhi (innate knowledge). Frisina argues that I assume that liangzhi is merely cognitive and purely mental in some respect. But, he argues, liangzhi is a primordial mode of experience which is both aesthetic and moral and is not merely cognitive or purely mental according to Wang: “He sees it rooted in a pre (or non)-cognitive, immediate response to the world which is both aesthetic and in important ways moral.” This immediate response is more like the response anyone would have in the Mencius’s case of seeing a child about to fall into a well. I do not object to the idea that experience can be rooted in a pre (or non)-cognitive immediate response. It seems to me that the disagreement between us is not about whether experience is merely cognitive and purely mental but whether liangzhi is such an experience and whether an immediate response to a situation can be cognitive. It is not clear whether Frisina means, by “pre-cognitive experience,” an instinctive and non-reflective experience. If liangzhi is not an instinctive and non-reflective experience, the question is in what sense liangzhi is a pre (non)-cognitive experience. My understanding is that liangzhi is both affective and cognitive or reflective rather than instinctive or non-reflective, and an immediate response can be either instinctive/non-reflective, much like the response in Mencius’s example, or a non-instinctive and reflective response. Wang’s liangzhi or innate knowledge is perfect and ideal and differs from Mencius’ innate moral inclinations. For Mencius, the immediate response in the example is instinctive, spontaneous, and Dao (2009) 8:333–336 DOI 10.1007/s11712-009-9118-9