Despite the inherent complexities and difficulties, it has never ceased to be an intriguing and tantalizing task to reflect on the academic achievements of the great Confucian minds which emerged in the second half of the twentieth century, among whom Mou Zongsan (1909–95) is indisputably among the outstanding figures who perpetuate Confucian tradition in the radically turbulent social context of modern China. The questions he has raised both to the Confucian tradition and to its relevance to modernity continue to inspire scholars and students in Confucian studies and beyond. Although numerous books on him have been published over the last few decades in various languages, this newly released monograph by Sebastien Billioud, with a particular focus on Mou's moral metaphysics, has brought fresh impetus to this field and signified new scholarship in the study of Mou Zongsan, skilfully revealing the author's own thinking and research on Confucian modernity.
Given the all-embracing nature of Mou's system as well as his abundant intellectual output (32 volumes in total), a discerning eye is necessary to find the crux of the matter. Billioud's preference for the subject of “moral metaphysics” has undoubtedly provided the reader with a clear entrance to the innermost part of Mou's system – philosophical speculation and conceptual construction – and enabled us to glimpse Mou's massive project as a whole.
The question of moral metaphysics constitutes the core of Mou's philosophical thinking and, to a large extent, exemplifies his method and writing style. Based on his understanding of both Mou Zongsan and Kant, Billioud demonstrates that the term “moral metaphysics” in Mou's context has an origin in Kant's “metaphysics of morals” but evidently forms a sharp contrast to the latter. Thus an insightful thesis is put forward in this book, which can be summarized as follows: Inspired by Kant, Mou intends to anchor his thinking in the realm of the noumenal; but unlike Kant who aims to seek the metaphysical principles or non-empirical conditions for morals, Mou assigns to his “moral metaphysics” a rather different task, namely to formulate within Confucian tradition a practical approach to self-accomplishment that is simultaneously performing in the dimension of metaphysical, cosmological or ontological reality.
Unsurprisingly philosophical discussion dominates this book, and in-depth philosophical analysis is what the author intends. Instead of delineating an overall account of Mou's moral metaphysics, Billioud confines his research to the pivotal concepts that have constituted and also characterized Mou's thought on this issue, namely, “autonomy of the moral subject”, “intellectual intuition” and “thing in itself”. These three topics are dealt with respectively in chapters 1, 2 and 3. Mou obviously falls back on Kant when it comes to philosophical speculation. However, he is merely “borrowing” Kantian conceptions to serve his own theoretical purposes, which is to reconstruct or even rewrite the intellectual history of Confucian tradition. Put more bluntly, Mou is, intentionally or otherwise, using Kantian conceptions to undermine Zhu Xi's orthodox status, and he may never have meant to conceptualize his own thinking in the vein of Kant. Such a stance explains Mou's failure in many respects from the perspective of Kantian philosophy and his somehow ambiguous position in speculating on a new philosophical system. As revealed in this book, Mou's adoption of Kantian concepts is overly problematic and his knowledge of Kant is far from complete. This cannot of course be regarded as a new discovery, but Billioud does much more than simply disclose the defects of Mou Zongsan's philosophy. The unique contribution of this book lies in making use of large quantities of primary and secondary resources. In addition, Billioud examines in detail the excerpts from Mou's comments, in the context of the excerpts from Kant's original text and of the most up-to-date research on particular topics. The latter, often given in footnotes, covers a wide range of new studies carried out by scholars of diverse backgrounds, Chinese, English, French and German.
From chapter 4 onwards the focus shifts to Mou's reconstruction of Confucian tradition. Chapter 4 presents an overall analysis of Mou's so-called fundamental ontology, which serves as a transitional phase to close Mou's dialogue with the Western tradition and to open up his reinterpretation of his own tradition. Billioud then examines Mou's insights concerning two typical Confucian conceptions, namely, moral emotion and self-cultivation, which make up chapters 5 and 6. Being equipped with the Western philosophical concepts and rooted in the Confucian tradition, Mou's exegeses of these conceptions involve a mixture of the Western and Confucian terms; for instance, “intellectual intuition” is blended with “retrospective verification” (逆覺體證)(p. 205). That, however, is not a problem for Mou and his enterprise, because to him philosophical speculation serves to illuminate or elucidate the perfect Confucian teaching, whose authenticity lies in moral practice and whose aim is beyond the scope of any type of intellectual operation.
Mou's moral metaphysics is splendidly unfolded in this book. If there is one weakness, it is its lack of awareness of the same mentality that underlies Mou's dialogue with Western philosophies and with Confucian traditions. Mou not only maintained a “deliberate silence” (p. 82) on intellectual development in the West which is highly relevant to his thinking, but was also “deliberately oblivious” to the similar sources in the Confucian intellectual tradition, which is particularly obvious in his treatment of Zhu Xi. Further, the book does not elaborate on Mou's anti-intellectualism, which is closely associated with the aforementioned mentality, in Yu Yingshi's phrase, “arrogance of the inner knowledge” (良知的傲慢) in contrast to “arrogance of intellectual knowledge” (知性的傲慢). There are a number of typos in the Chinese language, for example, p. 48 這會(回)事; p. 53 真是(實); 放(妨)礙; p. 72 人隨(雖)有限; p. 80 見問(聞)之知; p. 141 隨(雖)是; p. 215 險組(阻); p. 228 聖竟(境).
