2. Mou Zongsan and the Critique of the Cognitive Mind
Authors: Stanchina Gabriella 
Published: January 2025

The second chapter analyzes in depth Mou’s Critique of the Cognitive Mind. As the most mature work characterizing his earlier fifteen years of endeavor in logic and epistemology, it embraces the works of Russell, Wittgenstein, and Whitehead as reference points. Furthermore, even the title itself implies a close commitment to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. The work serves as a bridge between Mou’s early interest in logic and language and the subsequent moral metaphysical development of his thought. In describing the inner life of the human mind, Mou skillfully interweaves Chinese and Western thought, which is a feature of the rest of his philosophical writings. In Critique of the Cognitive Mind, Mou shifts his attention toward the internal and subjective processes of the mind, maintaining the search for an objective and universally valid foundation as a tension that runs through the entire process of ego formation. The method Mou adopted to forge his original philosophy of mind distances itself from the multilayered architecture of Kant’s first Critique. Rather, it recalls a phenomenological quest, starting in medias res from the interdependence of perception and reality and accompanying the living autopoietic evolution of the mind.

Given this mutual connection between mind and the world, Mou affirms that, even at the most basic level of cognitive interaction, reality is not scattered as autonomous fragments waiting to be set in order by the mind through the law of causation. On the contrary, it reveals itself as a unified whole, with a cohesive structure and an inherent meaning. According to Mou, the most basic expression of the mind is perception, that is, a self-aware dynamism of manifestation, structurally intertwined with the flux of the universe. We can perceive the originality of Mou’s approach here, reminding us that the majority of previously discussed Western theories of mind share an unformulated assumption—knowledge is the primary modality of our relationship with reality. According to this assumption, we learn about the world through basic mental operations of grasping, defining, and exploring its nature. Therefore, the primeval approach to reality is a disengaged inquiry into an object that appears in its otherness and externality. Mou challenges the elementariness of this experience by arguing that the human mind is always practically engaged in reality. Active participation and interest in the world imply that cognitive endeavors are only complete when guided by a moral, practical, and holistic approach to reality. Through this lens, the mind reveals itself as an unceasingly active dynamism. The prominence conferred on activity, dynamicity, and creativity is the cornerstone of Mou’s investigation of the mind and subjectivity.

According to Mou, the mind is not an objective entity that we can examine and locate inside our brain, but a self-transcending movement of manifestation. The strict interrelation between the flux of the phenomenal world and the mind, as the creative locus of its manifestation, defines the task and responsibility of the mind. Its lively function is to preserve the integrity of this manifestative event and provide an ultimate place for its object to settle and disclose itself as an objective and universal totality of meaning. To provide an objective foundation for the perceived phenomenal word, the mind is able to spontaneously emanate structuring frames, such as space and time at the level of imagination, and finally the logical self, which synthesizes and produces all categories. The self-reflection of the logical self through which the mind, returning to itself, possesses and guarantees its own objectivity, is the supreme achievement of a cognitive mind. For Mou, the dynamism of the mind is a rhythmic succession of self-limitation and transcendence over those very limits. In the search for objectivation, the mind molds and fixes content through spatio-temporal and logical frames. This graspable, solidified content, which is the product of the self-limitation of the mind, should be liquefied. This is because the mind transcends and dissolves its partial cognitive products to restore its structural dynamicity and creativity. This capacity of mind to continuously emerge from its self-limitation is termed “intuition” by Mou.

However, from his previous studies on logics, Mou derives that “the cognitive mind, both in self-limitation and in springing out, cannot obtain a final principle through which the system of knowledge can be completely verified.”[ Mou Zongsan (牟宗三), Renshi xin zhi pipan. 認識心之批判 (Critique of the Cognitive Mind), 2 vols, II, 560, in Mou Zongsan xiansheng quanji. 牟宗三先生全集 (Complete Works of Mou Zongsan), vols XVIII–XIX, Taipei: Lianhe baoxi wenhua jijin hui, 2003.] The faculty of understanding, through the emanation of forms a priori, becomes progressively wider but cannot achieve full verification without exception, that is, a concrete universality. Only intuition, in the very instant of eliminating any boundary, accomplishes full verification in a flash, leaving us with a glimpse of the infinite completeness of the universe. Depending on the self-limitations from which it emerges, intuition is transient and elusive. This is the final and unsurpassable boundary of the cognitive mind. However, the possibility of infinite self-realization adumbrated in intuition allows us to hypothesize the existence of a higher level of the mind. This mind should have a trans-cognitive, ontological character, being simultaneously both subjective and substantive. It will be able to unfold itself in everything and its self-knowing will be the same as that of its infinite being. The conclusion of Mou’s cognitive research is, therefore, that epistemology is ultimately incomplete and unsatisfying because it cannot find in itself the universal principle and motive of the mind and universe. In the rest of his works, Mou searches in Chinese tradition for another way to pursue truth. The exploration of this vertical, moral-metaphysical approach represents Mou’s greatest and most original contribution to philosophy of the mind.

The mind cannot be reduced to an object of knowledge because it is an ever-flowing process of manifestation. What is manifested through one’s mental process is the world as a meaningful and interrelated totality. The mind can evolve through the rhythmic processes of self-limitation and self-transcendence. The ultimate aim of our inner life—realizing the full synthesis of mind and reality, subject, and object—is unattainable at the mere cognitive level.