A Study Of Wang Anshi’s Thought On Human Nature

Wang Anshi has been familiar to the world as a famous politician and literary scholar in the Northern Song Dynasty.However,his identity as a thinker and philosopher has received little attention.As the first advocate of moral life in the Northern Song Dynasty,Wang Anshi played a major role in promoting the revival of Confucianism in the middle of the Northern Song Dynasty,and his thought on human nature initiated the study of mental nature in the Northern Song Dynasty.This paper takes Wang Anshi’s humanistic thought as the object of study,and focuses on the background,stages,contents,theoretical contributions and shortcomings of his humanism,as well as its influence on the development of Song Confucian theory of mind.The article argues that Wang Anshi’s thought on human nature was influenced by Confucianism,Taoism and Buddhism,as well as by his contemporaries’ theory of nature,and underwent three stages of transmutation,from goodness of nature to goodness and evil of nature to the fact that nature cannot be said to be good or evil.He always insisted that "nature and emotion are one",opposed to talking about nature apart from emotion,and believed that human nature is beyond good and evil,so he took "nature cannot be said to good or evil" as his final conclusion,and believed that "nature" only has the potential to be good or evil,but "habit" is the external basis for the establishment of good and evil in human nature.Therefore,people can achieved the transformation from a natural person to a moral person through both realizing human natuer and cultivating emotion,which provides a realizable path for people to transform from good to evil and from mortal to saint.In general,on the one hand,Wang Anshi’s thought on human nature clearly positioned "moral life" as the core of Confucian thought,and his view that good and evil are determined by habit broke the shackles of the traditional human nature theory of talking about human nature in terms of good and evil,making up for the defects in the development of Confucian mentalism since Han Confucianism.On the other hand,it deviated from the main purpose of constructing Confucian moral ontology,leaving room for the intellectual maturity of the rationalists and providing the theoretical premise and necessary preparation for the construction of a new teleological model by the Confucians in the Song dynasty.