Moral Psychology and Cultivating the Self

This chapter offers a selection of writings concerning Zhu Xi’s account of the psychological workings of human beings that explains how their nature (xing性‎), heart-mind (xin心‎), and the feelings (qing情‎) are integrated with one another. It also includes material that addresses Zhu’s naturalistic explanation of moral capacity of humans and the proper course and method of self-cultivation. Zhu’s moral psychology presents a “synthesis” of the various cosmological and ethical ideas forwarded by his Northern Song neo-Confucian predecessors. He argued that by conceptualizing and embodying the all-pervading pattern-principle of things in the world one achieved integrity and unity in one’s own person, thereby fully realizing one’s humanity.