With a focus on Confucian descriptions, this book carefully examines feeling, value and virtue and reveals the order of the heart by a phenomenological clarification of our personal and interpersonal experience.

"Critically developing the Contemporary New Confucianism, this book opens a new horizon for the study of emotions and philosophy of heart-mind and [human] nature by focusing on the communication between phenomenology, particularly Schelerian phenomenology, and Chinese philosophy, especially Mencius and Wang Yangming. Such communication demonstrates how ethics based on factual experience is possible, revealing the original spirit and fresh meaning of Confucian learning of the heart-mind. In clarifying crucial feelings and values, this work undertakes a detailed description of the heart's concrete activities for the idea that "the heart has its own order," allowing us to see the order of the heart and its deviated form clearly and comprehensively"--

To introduce this collection of research studies, which stem from the pro grams conducted by The World Phenomenology Institute, we need say a few words about our aims and work. This will bring to light the significance of the present volume. The phenomenological philosophy is an unprejudiced study of experience in its entire range: experience being understood as yielding objects. Experi ence, moreover, is approached in a specific way, such a way that it legitima tizes itself naturally in immediate evidence. As such it offers a unique ground for philosophical inquiry. Its basic condition, however, is to legitimize its validity. In this way it allows a dialogue to unfold among various philosophies of different methodologies and persuasions, so that their basic assumptions and conceptions may be investigated in an objective fashion. That is, instead of comparing concepts, we may go below their differences to seek together what they are meant to grasp. We may in this way come to the things them selves, which are the common objective of all philosophy, or what the great Chinese philosopher Wang Yang Ming called "the investigation of things". It is in this spirit that the Institute's programs include a "cross-cultural" dialogue meant to bring about a profound communication among philosophers in their deepest concerns. Rising above artificial cultural confinements, such dialogues bring scholars, thinkers and human beings together toward a truly human community of minds. Our Institute unfolds one consistent academic program.

Life itself has long gone unnoticed in Confucian texts since the Qin and Han dynasties, which is similar to the forgetting of Being, per se, in the Western philosophy after the Axial Period, according to Heidegger. Today, there is a philosophical mission to return life to Confucianism, restoring and reconstructing Confucianism in the perspective of a comparison between Confucianism and Husserl's Phenomenology. The author reduces the features of life to the essence of a thing but returns to life as the essence of Being. The author rejects the idea of post-philosophy in order to reconstruct the metaphysical and the post-metaphysical gradations of Confucianism. These gradations are made along three strata in the life of human beings-no-being of anything (a life comprehension), metaphysical thinghood (the absolute Being), and post-metaphysical things (the relative beings). In this way we have a full understanding of the idea of Confucianism.

This dissertation proposes a phenomenological investigation into value and feeling in classical and "neo-" Confucianism, particularly in the works of Mencius and Wang Yangming, in light of the German phenomenologist Max Scheler's clarification of human experience and theory of value. The phenomenological method and attitude, which seek essence by resorting to concrete personal and interpersonal experience rather than relying on the presuppositions of conceptual systems, offers a fresh and insightful perspective from which to examine the experiential pattern of morals in Confucian tradition. In order to illustrate how moral feelings and values establish each other, I examine the feeling-value correlations of love, sympathy and ren, shame and righteousness, respect and ritual propriety, and approval and wisdom, developed from Mencius' discussion on four initial moral emotions. This work not only clarifies the optimal experience of moral feelings, but also points out the concrete contents of what Wang Yangming calls the pure knowing of Heavenly principle. This phenomenological presentation of Confucian values, especially as mediated by Wang with some clarification through Scheler's thought, opposes both the dogmatic and relativist conceptions of principle (li) and the abstract interpretations of "pure knowing" (liang zhi) as having no concrete content, and thus it is relevantly applicable in directing our moral lives. The clarification of experience in different traditions is significant for research in both phenomenology and Chinese philosophy, and the experiential analysis made possible by this approach offers greater possibilities for mutual understanding among various cultures in the world.

This book approaches the topic of intercultural understanding in philosophy from a phenomenological perspective. It provides a bridge between Western and Eastern philosophy through in-depth discussion of concepts and doctrines of phenomenology and ancient and contemporary Chinese philosophy. Phenomenological readings of Daoist and Buddhist philosophies are provided: the reader will find a study of theoretical and methodological issues and innovative readings of traditional Chinese and Indian philosophies from the phenomenological perspective. The author uses a descriptive rigor to avoid cultural prejudices and provides a non-Eurocentric conception and practice of philosophy. Through this East-West comparative study, a compelling criticism of a Eurocentric conception of philosophy emerges. New concepts and methods in intercultural philosophy are proposed through these chapters. Researchers, teachers, post-graduates and students of philosophy will all find this work intriguing, and those with an interest in non-Western philosophy or phenomenology will find it particularly engaging.

Yang Guorong is one of the most prominent Chinese philosophers working today and is best known for using the full range of Chinese philosophical resources in connection with the thought of Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Heidegger. In The Mutual Cultivation of Self and Things, Yang grapples with the philosophical problem of how the complexly interwoven nature of things and being relates to human nature, values, affairs, and facts, and ultimately creates a world of meaning. Yang outlines how humans might live more fully integrated lives on philosophical, religious, cultural, aesthetic, and material planes. This first English translation introduces current, influential work from China to readers worldwide.