4. Constitutive Mind and Constitutive Nature
Authors: Stanchina Gabriella 
Published: January 2025

The fourth chapter is devoted to uncovering Mou’s idea of “authentic subjectivity.” According to Mou, this new paradigm of subjectivity was inaugurated by Confucius and Mengzi and reached its zenith in specific currents of Song-Ming Neo-Confucian thought. Through an original reformulation and systematization of this inheritance, Mou develops his “moral metaphysics,” in the framework of which his conception of subjectivity finds its definitive foundation. The “authentic subject” should not be confused with one of the poles of the dyad subject/object operating in Western, horizontal and knowledge-based mainstream philosophy. By contrast, it represents the culminating point of the vertical reorientation of the idea of the self.

The previous chapters identify some distinguishing characteristics of the vertical self: dynamism, performativity, and self-transcendence. Moral metaphysics aims to bring any of these characteristics to full completion. Regarding dynamism, the moral self or authentic subject manifests itself as a process of uninterrupted liquefaction of any concretion and attachment. Mou distinguishes between a “little self” and a “great self.” The little self is the mind of habit, an inner domain constituted by psychological states, and it is constantly construed through a narrative interweaving of our memories. This inner domain is the province of qualia. In contemporary philosophy of mind, qualia are the subjective and qualitative aspects of our mental lives, the inner side of phenomenal experiences. They are echoes and traces passively produced by sensorial contact with the external world and are directly accessible only to privately experiencing subjects. In Critique of the Cognitive Mind, Mou called them “psychological states,” contrasting them with perception, that is, the ever-present ability of the mind to emancipate itself from any passive reverberation and affirm itself as pure dynamical act and ever-resurgent new beginning. Translated in a performative and practical dimension, Mou understands the little self or the unauthentic subject as a conglomerate of attachments and habits residually left behind in our attempt to dominate and control the objective world. The great self attainable in our moral deeds is a higher spiritual state that overcomes the distinction between the inner and outer worlds. The dynamism of self-transcendence actualized in my moral agency is a constant awakening from selfish slumber to the infinitude of my being one with all things. As Mengzi expresses it, “All things are already complete in us.”

The unparalleled contribution of the Confucian tradition lies in the primacy of morals. It is critical to highlight that in Mou’s thought “morals” has a more comprehensive semantic spectrum than in Western philosophy because it is not a specific branch of knowledge dealing with ethical virtues and freedom of will, as epitomized in Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason. Morals and the moral self possess a performative and metaphysical dimension, including the ability to decipher the meaning embedded in reality, the action of conferring value to things, respecting them as end-in-itself, and avoiding the reduction of the world to a mere instrument, and finally the intuition of the universe as one with myself. The Western horizontal paradigm, in which ethical principles are deduced from the knowledge of being, is unable to explain phenomena such as moral failure and objectively justify the freedom of will. Therefore, Mou suggests that we begin our philosophical inquiry with the moral experience of value, rather than the relation between the mind and external objects. Confucian tradition offers a prime example of moral experience in Mengzi’s apologue of the “child by the well.” When I see my child about to fall into a well, Mengzi argues that my feelings of compassion are immediately awakened. What I perceive in my emotional intelligence is a sense of urgency and concern that results in the spontaneous and immediate action of grabbing the child. In this archetypal experience, the self emerges as a vital vibration of urgency and agency, witnessing my being-one-body with the child. The infinitely irreducible value of the world possesses a force of self-manifestation and actualizes itself in my all-embracing responsiveness. According to Mou, I become retrospectively aware of my moral mind as a universal, active interconnectedness of all that exists, preceding any separation between subject and object.

With respect to the Daoist subject analyzed in Chapter 3, the conception of the performative subject that aims for self-realization is reconfirmed, as is the idea of jingjie. However, Mou’s assertion that the full meaning of the subject is inaugurated by Confucianism reveals that the characteristics of the self (i.e., dynamism and reflexivity) can be fully appreciated only when the moral self comes to the forefront. According to Mou, the merit of orthodox Confucian teaching is to have placed something maximally positive and attainable through human freedom, that is, the moral self and the supreme spiritual level attainable through my effort of self-cultivation. Daoism’s diaphanous subject maintains structural passivity. The jingjie of the Daoist saint, reached through a systematic withdrawal from any purpose or concrete engagement with reality, is a mental landscape in which the self and nothingness, that is, the inchoate origin of the cosmos, merge into one. From this point, the Daoist self can only contemplate the exuberant gushing out of myriad things from the origin, being careful to constantly efface itself to avoid obstacles to the endless metamorphosis of things. In Mou’s moral metaphysics, the moral mind replaces nothingness as a creative inception. The self is required to actively participate, embodying and actualizing the moral principles in minute objective circumstances, without letting anything out of the sphere of concern and responsibility.

In addition to dynamism and performativity, reflexivity and self-awareness are the third characteristic of the self. The Daoist diaphanous subject, in attending to the multifarious manifestation of beings, can look back at itself and become aware of the unity between the universe and the transparency of the self, which is the condition for this manifestation. However, because of the necessity of avoiding attachment to the self and constantly restoring the transparency of the mind, it is nothing more than an ephemeral gleam. In contrast, Mou’s moral self, in performing ethical deeds, realizes and actualizes the principle that it embodies every single thing. The specific circumstances are not given through a visually based detached contemplation but are concretely actualized in their value and meaning through active participation and concern. In “bringing things to realization without any of them being lost” (ti wu er bu ke yi 體物而不可遺), the “mind of benevolence” concretizes the moral principle by penetrating into the infinite particularity of situations. Through my moral activity, I come to realize myself as one with the moral mind, which is the highest spiritual state. Here, I operate at the ontological level that Mou identifies with the Confucian idea of inherent nature (xing 性). Nature is brought to perfect manifestation through creative efforts to reach the spiritual state of the moral mind. Nature is not a static substance but a living principle that possesses the ability to self-actualize. Mou valorizes the idea, stemming from the very beginning of Chinese thought—the Yijing (Classic of Change)—that reality is a living, dynamic flux of transformation and an interacting web of mutual responsiveness. As Mou declared in Critique of the Cognitive Mind, reality in itself is holistic, interconnected, and pervaded with meaning. However, in the absence of a manifesting mind, this organic order of things, which is their principle and value-in-itself, remains only a latent ontological property. Only in self-perfected human beings are the mind and nature, manifestation and content, inseparable. The manifestation proper to the moral mind is not merely a symbolic expression, but is the concretization of the moral principle into the infinite particularity of situations. The distinctive power of my human self is the ability to embody the moral principle of my specific nature so that the principle of my action is not outside me but comes from the heart of my being. In this way, I acquire autonomy and freedom and am able to preserve and nurture them by extending the horizon of moral care to the entire universe. Saying that “All things are already complete in me,” Mengzi endows the finite human mind with an infinite capacity for moral extension and elevation. Building on the Confucian teaching of ren and Mengzi’s theory of mind and nature, the Song-Ming era of Neo-Confucianism gradually brought to fruition the unification of the metaphysical plane of moral practice and the creative energy of the universe. Realizing my moral mind, I awaken myself to be one with the cosmos. Everything is in me, because by expanding the field of my concern and vigilance to the universe, I do not consider nothing external to myself. The authentic self redefines the idea of interiority as autonomy, that is, the capacity to embody the principle of being and acting and having nothing outside that can dictate or obstruct actions.

Though posing moral practice as the culminating point of human endeavor, Mou recognizes the necessity and value of any epistemological effort, particularly scientific knowledge. The reason lies just in the fact that moral activity is spontaneously actualizing in the specificity of phenomena and circumstances. If even the smallest thing must not be forgotten or left out of the sphere of meaning, then cognitive activities are embedded in the circular movement of the moral mind. Facts and events that occur in the performative field have an objective aspect at their core. When moral action encounters difficulty in its scrupulous accomplishment, the mind should stop and analyze this obstacle as a thing contraposed to a knowing subject. The final aim is to restore the ever-flowing circular dynamism of the absolute mind. Eliminating any obstruction through apprehension of the objective thing is subordinated to the unavoidable task of the self. This temporary arrest and entrenchment in the horizontal multiplicity of things is called by Mou ziwo kanxian 自我坎陷that is, self-limitation of the moral self.