In the pre-Qin period, if the Mohists were specifically criticizing Confucianism, then the Taoist Yang Zhu was specifically criticizing Mohists.
The Mohists want to promote benefits and eliminate harm, so Yang Zhu's "Don't pluck out a hair, don't lose a hair" is the most bitter irony.
Let alone the time, by the Ming Dynasty, few people probably understood what the Mohists and Yang Zhu were arguing about. Those who didn't know better thought it was two slanderous writers having a quarrel.
Probably because Yang Zhu's stance was too high, coupled with the lack of preaching, it was difficult for others to understand him and he was only treated as a madman.
The dispute between the Mohist giants Qin Huali and Yang Zhu is rooted in the dispute over epistemology. That is, whether people can independently promote advantages and eliminate disadvantages. If we believe that people can independently promote advantages and eliminate disadvantages, then implementing this path to the end should be Yang Zhu's "don't pluck a hair, don't lose a hair."
Obviously, the two are arguing about how to love each other.
Mozi believed that an emperor was needed to love people and lead the scholar-bureaucrats and the people step by step to achieve "love and mutual benefit". To put it simply, everyone loves others, but emperors and scholar-bureaucrats love others first. Love first, love later, and then everyone loves each other.
Yang Zhu believes that every normal person will naturally love universally. Universal love does not need an emperor or a group of scholar-bureaucrats to lead it. It only needs to achieve "not plucking a hair, not damaging a hair" for a long time. If the game continues peacefully, everyone will naturally be able to "love each other and benefit each other."
So fundamentally speaking, Yang Zhu was the person who implemented Mozi's thought and theory to the end. Yang Zhucai was a true believer in Mozi's thought. Most Mohist disciples are not as good at understanding Mozi as Yang Zhu.
On the two-dimensional four-grid diagram of world view and epistemology, Yang Zhu is naturally the top right scholar. It can even be said to be the top right among all the theories from the pre-Qin Dynasty to the Ming Dynasty. His belief in microscopic people is incompetent. Beyond Yang Zhu.
Is the microscopic individual's cognitive ability worthy of trust?
I have to make some conceptual explanations in the book in advance to avoid falling into endless quarrels in future generations.
The cognitive ability of epistemology mainly refers to the ability to evaluate whether something in the world is good or bad for oneself through learning from oneself or others or from books.
It does not require the person to have advanced knowledge of agriculture, astronomy, engineering, or arithmetic. It only requires evaluating whether the thing is beneficial to oneself.
With this ability, by gathering sand into a tower, human beings can naturally build their own knowledge system and choose their own path, even if this choice is sometimes just voting with their feet, or this ability may face challenges There are some exceptions for people who have been sold and paid for others, but as long as they can finally understand.
In short, Yang Zhu’s theory relies on a peaceful long-term game process. How long is this period? It needs to be long enough for almost everyone to form a unanimous evaluation of social and public affairs.
Any separation and isolation measures for organizing information dissemination, and any use of emotional systems to distort the evaluation of interests will lag behind Yang Zhu's process.
So, if Yang Zhu's ideal can be realized, at least it will be in units of thousands of years, and this will still have to be accumulated gradually. If there are intervening dynasties, such as the Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties, the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms, and the late Song and Yuan dynasties, the accumulation of national consensus in the previous hundreds of years can almost be wiped out overnight.
Yang Zhuzhi School needs a strong court to bring a stable social environment, at least not to fall into war. But it is obvious that almost no monarch likes Yang Zhu's studies. Because according to Yang Zhu’s teaching, the logic of serving the world and supporting a family does not exist. Whoever believes that Yang Zhu seems to be opposing himself.
If successful new doctrines must be nurtured in the old system, it means that the new doctrines should at least not be so incompatible with the existing forces. Yang Zhu's future development must find a way to alleviate the resentment of the aristocratic bureaucrats. Otherwise, it can only be strangled in the cradle.
So is there an improvement that can make Yang Zhuzhi's studies look harmless to some old aristocratic bureaucrats, so that Yang Zhuzhi's studies have some upper-level support? The topic at the end of this chapter will also be discussed The end of the world knows the attic. Please remember to collect it, the latest and fastest website is free to read without anti-theft