『순자』 도덕기원론의 확장과 한계

Abstract

Xun Zi argued that the former kings created morality to prevent the phenomenon that human beings became evil in nature due to the desire of being loyal to their innate physiological instincts and thus confused the society. He maintained that all people could turn from evil to good through education based on acquired morality, grow into such moral personalities as men of virtue and saints, and further build a moral society where courtesy was respected. However, he made a logical error of jumping innate physiological instincts into acquired moral values when explaining the origin of morality and also failed to give an account for correlations between individual wickedness and confusion across the entire society based on valid grounds. Even so, his theory of the origin of morality played an important role in personal character cultivation and promotion of social well-being because there was no man that developed as fundamental and persuasive logic about the origin of morality as him. Thanks to his theory of the origin of morality, people could at last establish a set of behavioral guidelines, and individuals and society got to have theoretical grounds to restrict their acts. However, a moral ideology should secure its acquired and innate nature in order to have its own authority and value, in which sense his theory of the origin of morality seems to place importance only on the acquired nature and neglect the innate nature. In addition, acquired moral education emphasized by him can have people develop moral concepts actively, but it is no enough to each an ideal state of morality, which requires voluntary moral cultivation, as well. Moral cultivation can be fulfilled much more efficiently when it is based on innate moral concepts. Thus there is a limitation found that Xun Zi's theory of the origin of acquired morality and its educational ideology can become complete only when being supplemented by the theory of the origin of innate morality and its educational ideology.