宋明儒的內聖境界與船山詩學理想

The Realm of Internal Sagehood of Neo-Confucianism and Wang Fuzhi's Ideal of Poetics

蕭馳(Xiao Chi)

《中國文化研究所學報》 41期 (2001/01) Pp. 377-403

https://doi.org/10.29708/JCS.CUHK.200101_(41).0015

並列摘要

This essay traces Wang Fuzhi's (1619-1692) ideal of poetry to the Neo-Confucian thought about the spiritual realm of the internal sagehood and regards Wang's poetics as the completion of a tradition of the latter. It argues that, beneath the surface of the Song Neo-Confucian ists' emphasis on Dao and seemingly deemphasis on wen, paradoxically in their line of thinking there had been a continuous and increasingly strong pursuit of the ultimate moral stage identical with aesthetic experience. This transcendent realm consists of two aspects. On the one hand, it asserts that an individual should feel free and easy while his moral intention reaches the stage of total spontaneity; on the other, it suggests that is possible to derive intuitively or aesthetically the Neo-Confucian moral-metaphysic truth from natural phenomena. In Ming Neo-Confucian thought, these two aspects fused with each other into an idea for accomplishing an individual's moral education through aesthetic experience. The thought of Wu Rubi (1391-1469), Chen Xianzhang (1428-1500) and Zhuang Chang (1437-1499) who concentrated more on the immanent process of experiencing than transcendent moral being and treated poetry as a way of moral education, particularly heralds the poetics of Wang Fuzhi. For Wang, poetry suggests a moment of coming and going between the heavenly ordained and the human nature and ought to be in the process towards the transcendental stage of internal sagehood. Therefore, the two aspects in the Song Neo-Confucian philosophy about internal sagehood combined to produce a theory of ＂the correlation of affection and natural scene＂ in Wang's poetics to reveal that human being is the embodiment of the great virtues of the heaven and earth＂ and that human mind-heart interflows with cosmic life, the ontological being. The life mood based upon the internal sagehood philosophy was thus eventually recaptured as a poetic mood. To put it in another way, the internal sagehood became the ultimate philosophical basis of Wang's poetics which achieves an aesthetic status that goes beyond both the beautiful and the sublime realms in Western thought. The debate about the relationship between wen and Dao in Song Neo-Confucianism was finally resolved by Wang Fuzhi's poetics in which the two are supposed to be identical.