Logic Of Zuoren:Self-realization In Acquaintances Community

This study aims to answer the question:how Chinese farmers realize their significance as a human being in the village acquaintances community? This is the psychology of self-realization, in the Chinese cultural context, it means chengren, and its practice process is zuoren. This study will construct a set of understanding framework to explain the logic of zuoren of farmers and its regional differences, and to analyze the deep transformation of the rural social and the logic of zuoren of farmers.The village acquaintances community is a "social-cultural field" of self-fulfilling of farmers, its long-term and non-selectivity determines the ontology association between the individual and society. The internal mechanism of ontology association between the individual and society is self-enlargement. Self-enlargement is the operation of renxin, and the border of renxin is also the border of self-enlargement, and the communication of renxin makes each other became zijiren. In the traditional society, the most important relationship of zijiren was in the blood of their own people, and it cured structural zijiren units, forming a value system of norms with the core of respecting public and disgusting private. The zijiren units and local consensus constitute a "structure-cultural networks" of acquaintance community-The different degree of match between the zijiren units and local consensus constitutes three ideal types of village acquaintances community, including clan type, xiaoqinzu type and atomic type. The three ideal types show the regional distribution in the field experience, including the clan village-the southern region, the xiaoqinzu villages-the northern region, and the atomic village-the central region.The ontology association between the individual and society means the significance as a human being for farmers is social defined and obtained. The ultimate goal of zuoren is to get a positive evaluation in acquaintances community, and determine their position in the blood stretches of their zijiren structure and village collective memory ("double positioning"), achieving the transcendent signification of the limited life. Different from redemptive religious tradition in which social and transcendence are fragmented, self-realization in acquaintances community achieves the fusion of the two, that the transcendence is embedded and realized in the social. This is the "Secular as Sacred" of Chinese farmers’ self-realization.In practice, the specific objectives of zuoren point to the three levels. First, guorizi is the base layer goal, it solves the material basis of zuoren, which dealing the relationship between people and wealth. Secondly, renyuan is the social layer goal, it solves the problem of human social support and ontological significance. Guorizi and renyuan are essentially private, but the third goal of zuoren——the public layer goal——is beyond the private. As a public layer goal, respecting public and disgusting private guide the individual to be subordinate to the zijiren structure and the public interest of the villages to achieve the mutually beneficial and win-win between the individual, others, and society.The "structure-cultural networks" in acquaintance community affect the practice logic of zuoren. From the intrinsic relationship between the three goals of zuoren, the southern rural shows the logic that public layer leading the social layer and the base layer, the central rural shows the logic that the base layer is leading and the public layer is lack, and the northern rural shows the logic that the social layer is leading and the public layer is weak.Rural social is turning to a "half acquaintances community", and its essence is that the ontological association between farmers and village are collapsing, the zijiren structure is non-ontological and instrumentalist, local consensus is losing the value orientation and behavior binding, the self-enlargement of farmers is shrinking rapidly, and individualistic logic is dominating the zuoren practice of the farmers. All these changes result in a reorganization of the three zuoren goals: the base layer weight expands, the social level is increasingly private and the public layer is in a sharp decline. As a result, the transcendence significance is lost, the social significance becomes alienation, the original stable social evaluation system turns into confusion and the new system had not yet to build a consensus recognition. Renxin becomes confused and zuoren is tough.