How big our heart is?

Tiny, when it is in the grip of jealousy.

Huge, when you believe in it you can find the heaven.

It is interesting that Peter Kingsley claims that the whole universe resides in our hearts. Mencius said that “The entire universe, and everything in the world, resides within one self; and returning to yourself is the highest good”. (My poor translation might be pardoned ,for according to a famous Japanese schloar(よしかわこうじろう), “Poem is what has been lost in the transtaltion.”) Other major Confucianists in Song and Ming Dynasty also claimed that “the universe is my mind, and my mind is the universe”. (such as Lu Xiang-shan, and Wang Yang-ming.)

The ancient Chinese believed the first principle of the entire universe is the interaction of the five basic elements: Metal, Wood, Water, Fire, and Earth. The five elements are not only in charge of the physical world, but also our bodies. Our body is a micro universe, while the external world is the macro universe. Up till now the theory of Chinese medicine still believe so. The heart is fire, the kidney is water, the liver is wood, the lung is metal, and the spleen is earth. The five elements are functioning according to the Ying(female,tender,negative,soft,etc.) and Yang(male,strong,positive,many,etc) principle. Take the kidney for example, it is harmful for our health if the kidney is either too “wet” or too “dry”. The “humidity” of our kidney is influenced by our diet and temper.Aslo, there is an saying that great ingidnation hurts one’s kidney. Therefore, according to the traditional Chinese philosphy, not only the ethical truth is within in our hearts, but the phisical world is also in our heart, because they are both consitituted by the five elements.

However, after the western framework of science was brought into China, the understanding of the universe changed. In the modern history of China, radical critiques of Chinese medicine, together with its cosmological grounding, emerged on a large scale. We started to go the hospital to accept surgery and transplantation of organs, which was totally unimaginable under the context of traditional Chinese medicine. Besides, in the process of modernization, especially in the May Fourth Movement, many schloars standed up to take a critical view toward the traditional Chinese culture, some of which even suggested Chinese students not read traditional Chinese books, but only read foreign books. In them there are many influential schloars and writers such as Lu Xun, who was compared to Nietzsche, in the sense that they are both “trapped in the construction of a modernity which is fundamentally problematic.” [1]

But broadly speaking the faith in the proposition that the entire universe is in everyone’s heart is still very popular among ordinary Chinese people, so is the theory the balance of Ying and Yang

---

[1]. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lu_Xun#cite_note-Davies-7

Some thoughts on morality and god

In his book, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Bernard Williams wrote that “the development of the ethical consciousness means the collapse of relgion”, (p33) which seems disquieting to some of my classmates in the course of the contemporary ethics. Some of them said there is a namelist which could serve as a good counterexample of his contention. In the list there are philosophers such as Aquina and Kierkegard who are not only highly reflective but religious as well. Virtues in terms of divine command can still have their essential place within ethical theories and moral considerations. I think it is a quite interesting question.

A stringent version of Christian standpoint may like this: God creates everything including both the world and the values of the world, therefore the truth of moral life comes from God which is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. However, then comes the meta-ethical question that could be raised by Williams: what is the grounding of morality? To make the question clearer, is it that God decides moral truth, or that moral truth decides God’s decision? I think it is this question, in its form of “dialectical reasoning” which asks for the grounding of ehtics, that might undermines the foundation of religion.

(1) If moral truth is decided by God, why is “no killing” morally good rather then “killing”? If God chooses “no killing” as morally good because “It is good not to kill”, then the truth value of “it is good not to kill” is independent of God’s will. Thus God does not decide the moral truth, but only conforms to certain pre - existing truth. Thus God is not omnipotent.

(2) Or one might come up with the other answer that God considers “no killing” to be good not because “no killing is good anyway”, but just because God creates the truth value of “no killing is good”. Since moral truth is created by God’s will, you cannot ask why it is P to be morally good rather than Q without making reference to God’s will. However there remains the problem that God’s decision is random, because, if deciding “killing is good”, God is still omnibenevolent.

(3) One might move on to argue that one cannot – and should not—conjecture God’s will from his own perspective, since human intelligence is inferior to God and you never fully understand God’s plan. If this is the case, then it will turn out to be unreasonable for us to ask such a question: Can God disobey logical rules to create a round square? The fact that, according to human intelligence, there is no round square in the world, is by no means a promising way to show that God’s power is limited. But I don't think such response a good strategy.

Therefore I believe in the question of where does moral truth come from, theological answers are not that convincing. Of course it is a difficult task to seek the grounding of morality. Just as what Socrates asked in Euthyphro regarding the relationship between piety and gods, “Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious? Or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?”