Wang Yangming’s Reductionist Account of Practical Necessity: General and Particular

Abstract

In this article, I argue that we can have a plausible account of the experience of practical necessity, namely, the experience that some action is necessitated for someone, by referring to the philosophy of Wang Yangming (1472–1529), a Neo-Confucian philosopher in Ming Dynasty China. The experience of practical necessity, according to Wang, can be of two kinds: general (to be a human) and particular (to be a particular person), both having their bases on human nature and related to the fulfillment of the self. I argue that this account fares better than the non-reductionist account and other reductionist accounts, including Christine Korsgaard’s, which explains the experience in terms of the constitution of the self.