Between Knowledge And Value

As philosophy categories, knowledge and value are important issues which exist in people's ideas of theory about the world, and they are interlocking. However, the tension between knowledge and value always exist during the development of people's thought. It's hard for them to be combined with throughout the philosophy history although this kind of relationship should not be perpetual. And it is also exists in Song-Ming LiXue in which metaphysics of morality is the main feature. This is probing value through probing knowledge, or attaching importance to value and neglecting knowledge.GeWu was kernel category in Song-Ming LiXue; and the tension between knowledge and value was much more striking around this word.However, explanation to GeWu was made in the field of scholium and mainly from the perspective of ethics and morality. ZhengXuan, Kong-YingDa and other people have made great achievements on it. LiAo in Tang dynasty laid stress on GeWu. The tension between knowledge and value has appeared in his explanation although he explained it mainly from the perspective of ethics. In Bei-Song dynasty. SiMa-guang, ZhangZai and other thinkers strengthened the separation of knowledge and value, which become fierce in the period of great prosperity of LiXue.Conflict between knowledge and value of the understanding of GeWu embodied not only in theory predicament of philosophers themselves, but also among different LiXue groups. Cheng Yi and ZhuXi explained GeWu as QiongLi and prefer knowledge in their explanation on object, scope, way, process and other aspects of GeWu. However, GeWu belongs to ethics according its final objection and intention which explained by ChengYi and ZhuXi. They tried to pursue the consummation of ethical relations through GeWu. The question is that it is in vainto realize value through knowledge because the ways are different between pursuing knowledge and realizing value. It still strengthened tension although Cheng and Zhu inclined to knowledge.Another group in LiXue, Lu and Wang criticized Cheng and Zhu' theory of Ge Wu and tried to reform it as they saw the tension in it. Lu-JiuYuan interpreted GeWu as GeXin. Furthermore, Wang-YangMing defined GeWu with some explanations which had significance of value such as ZhengXin and fulfillment of Yi. Lu and Wang thought it was rectifying deviation and they tried their best to belittle the significance of Zhu's theory and return to ethical tradition of Confucian. Although Lu and Wang' theory overcomed the predicament to some extent, it would fail and strengthen the conflict between knowledge and value by prefering value than knowledge. Luo-QinShun, a thinker in the same era with Wang, debated with him and defended the exocentric way to explain GeWu. However, inheritors of Wang' theory followed his theory on GeWu, such as WangJi, WangGen. They enlarged the division continuously. Liu-ZongZhou,the last key figure of Wang' theory in Ming Dynasty, didn't deviate from ethics although he has some different ideas.GeWu has gradually going out of philosopher' field of vision as Chinese traditional philosophy going out of LiXue. However, tension between knowledge and value hasn't been released yet. There still exist difficult problems in choosing the orientation between knowledge and value, which makes the debate stemmed from GeWu in philosophy history still have its realistic significance nowadays.