도덕 당위와 생명 당위-성명(性命)에서 생명(生命)으로

Abstract

Humanism, both in the Eastern and in the Western history of thought, was to build the subjectivity of human being in terms of leading life and not being led. Such project led to struggling with one's natural instinct, in other words, winning against oneself. Transcendent God was turned into transcendental moral law inside the human mind and the self-transcendence has become the real task to accomplish. That's what the great philosophers like Mencius and Kant show by emphasizing the moral decision all over the corporal tendency. Mencius stressed that human moral nature(性) is not born by nature(生).But there is another basic commandment, which we call the commandment of life. Living one has to live. Putting the unconscious life obligation to the conscious level, we mean to go down to the dimension of being in contrast to the well-being, not only the ordinary sense but also humanistic one. Neo-confucianism is very meaningful for our project. Will to live is in the beginning and at the end of morality there. Such a vision might reduce the properties and the consumptive products on the whole. But we think the ecological crisis of contemporary civilization based on the western capitalism left no choice but to break up with the western imagination of freedom according to the possession.