天人合一 The Continuity and Interdependence Between Tian and the Human Being (tianren heyi)

伏羲、神农所实践的是一种“域境化”做法，即有效地实现、将人类经验与自然运行过程视作同一域境，且使其相合，努力将宇宙的可用性创造潜能，利用到最好程度——伏羲、神农在对《易经》一套深邃卦象的建构之中，耕种出一种“文化”与“自然”之间厚重的不分性。这是一种被体悟到的人的经验与自然促使文化间相互对接的和谐性，这种和谐状态显明地表达于对这一关系特点的描述性用语中，如“天人合一”（宗教性、自然、文化的域境与人经验的不分性）、“天人相应”或“天人感应”（精神领域与人经验的相互照应--不分）。值得注意，这种用语所表示的，是人类经验方面延续不分的共生相互性，而不是世界中两个原本分立不连的方面后有的结合性。人类的修养不是把世界与人类经验作为两件分立的事物而使它们结合在一起，而是让同属经验的两个本身不可分的部分，由于生态连续性（也即“我与我的世界”）而更深度、紧密地相合。

（《儒家角色伦理学：一套特色伦理学词汇》，第64页）

By their efforts at ars contextualis—the art of effectively contextualizing and coordinating the experience of the human being within the processes of nature in an effort to optimize the creative possibilities of the cosmos— Fu Xi and Shen Nong cultivated a thick continuity between“nurture” and “nature” expressed in the evocative images that constitute the Yijing . This perceived resonance between the human experience and the natural and cultural forum in which it occurs is made explicit in expressions that have come to characterize the relationship, such as “the continuity between the religious, natural, and cultural context, and the human experience”(tianren heyi天人合一), and the “mutual responsiveness of the numinous context and the human experience” (tianren xiangying 天人相應or tianren ganying天人感應). It is important to note that such expressions report on the continuing symbiotic mutuality of these dimensions of experience rather than on the reconciliation of two originally separate aspects of the world after the fact. Personal cultivation is not the bringing together and the “uniting”of the world and human experience, but is rather the deepening and intensifying of the productive continuities that conjoin two inseparable aspects of experience, that is, oneself and one's world.

( Confucian Role Ethics: A Vocabulary. pp. 53-54)

其实，在这样的儒家传统之中，有一种从“为仁”向着一种以人为中心“宗教感”的直接通道，可作为对人格修养最高的表述。儒家“宗教感”，也即获得价值感和人格归属感的那种强烈意义，在充满意义的人与人关系交融成长之中，油然而生；当家庭与社会成员都诚心诚意渴望在其与他人关系之上奉献自己之时，它是那种“精神”，是人们为一种被激发的灵感而活着。这种“宗教感”本身，是家庭兴旺、社会繁荣的源泉，也是它的效果。具有这样“宗教感”的生活也是社会生活品质的直接效果。换句话说，人倾向聚群的“宗教性”不仅是社会幸福生活之“本”和幸福社会发达成长的“种子”，而且最重要的，它是成熟果实、光彩四射的花朵。人的修身与人的精神性，二者的共生协同，生动地蕴含在常用语言之中。这种语言也常是研究“中国宗教感”的学者，将儒家传统的家国忠孝，与亚布拉罕传统的崇拜上帝，进行区分而启用的。也就是说，“天人合一”即儒家传统的“宗教感”的特质。

（《儒家角色伦理学：一套特色伦理学词汇》，第104-105页）

Indeed, in this Confucian tradition, there is a direct corridor from the achieved consummate life to a human-centered religiousness as the highest expression of personal cultivation. Confucian religiousness—the powerful sense of achieved worth and personal belonging that arises from the concerted growth of meaningful relations—is the spirituality achieved when members of family and community aspire to contribute themselves utterly in their relations with others, and thus live inspired lives. Such religiousness is itself the source and product of the flourishing family and community, and the quality of this religious life is a direct consequence of the quality of communal living. Said another way, religiosity is not only the root of the flourishing community and the seed from which it grows, but is most importantly its mature fruit, its radiant flower. The synergy between personal cultivation and the numinous is captured in the familiar mantra that is often appealed to by students of Chinese religiousness in distinguishing Confucian familial and communal reverence from Abrahamic God-inspired worship: That is, Confucian religiousness is characterized by “the symbiotic continuity between the natural and cultural context and the human experience” (tianren heyi天人合一).

(Confucian Role Ethics: A Vocabulary, p. 92)

“天人合一”（自然与文化域境，同人的经验之间互系不分）——这个流行成语的基本意义是阐述儒家宗教感的意识，讲的也是与“潜能”同一的道理。人是受文化的陶冶才成仁的，成仁的生活才可成为文化资源，才能使人成仁具有可能。“潜能”是在这样孜孜追求的人与富于灵感的世界协同合力中萌发的。

（《儒家角色伦理学：一套特色伦理学词汇》，第174页）

The basic significance of the mantra, “the continuity between the natural and cultural context, and the human experience” (tianren heyi天人合一) that is invoked to describe the Confucian religious sensibility is making this same point about potential. It is the person nourished by culture who becomes consummately human, and it is the life of the consummate human who contributes to the cultural resources that make a consummate humanity possible. Potentiality emerges in these collaborations between aspiring persons and an inspired world.

(Confucian Role Ethics: A Vocabulary, p. 156)

简而言之，自古至今的中国哲学家只认可一种人类经验与自然文化环境之间的不断融合，即所谓“天人合一”。不过，这种融合经常被误解为对自然学科的削弱。它不是被理解为多少主观性东西与客观性东西的相互融合，因而尊重人类社会集体对其所在环境进行有效改造的能力“以及”自然世界对这种人类改造的抵制，而是受到一种信仰的支配，道德的主观性对一个可无限塑造的自然世界具有几乎绝对的改造力量。这样的信仰阻碍我们正确对待一种潜能——自然科学坚持改善人类条件。正是这个原因，“唯意志论”变成了一种简单主观主义，它对需求科学和技术集体努力的真正原因打了折扣，认为是对自然进行“人化”，以建立主观与客观之间的生产力关系。李泽厚认为，这种关系是人类自由的先决条件。

（《儒家角色伦理学：一套特色伦理学词汇》，第293页）

The argument, simply put, is that Confucian philosophers from classical times have recognized a continuity between the human experience and their natural and cultural context that is captured in the mantra tianren heyi天人合一．The nature of this continuity, however, has often been misunderstood. Instead of being a continuity between what is more or less subjective and more or less objective, respecting both the ability of the collective human community to transform its environment productively and the resistance of the natural world to this human transformation, it has been dominated by the belief that the moral subject holds almost absolute transformative powers over an infinitely malleable natural world. Such a belief has retarded an appreciation of the potential that the natural sciences hold to improve the human condition. As such, this voluntarism has become a kind of raw subjectivism that discounts the real need for collective efforts in science and technology to “humanize” nature in order to establish a productive relationship between subject and object, a relationship that Li Zehou takes to be a precondition for human freedom.

(Confucian Role Ethics: A Vocabulary, p. 264)

儒家的宗教性产生于这样一个基本假定：即天人一体，相互依赖。天与特殊的个人之间的关联，经常用“天人合一”的术语加以表达，这一术语被用来概括这一时期的宗教感悟方式。因此，孟子说：

尽其心者，知其性也。知其性，则知天矣。（《孟子·尽心上》）

在儒家经典中，天与道即使不被用以相互替代，也是经常相互联系的。孔子始终认为：“人能弘道，非道弘人。”

Confucian religiousness begins from the assumption that there is a continuity and interdependence between tian 天，conventionally translated as “Heaven,” and the human being (ren人). This correlativity between tian and the particular person is often captured in the claim that tianren heyi天人合一(literally, “tian and human beings are continuous”)used to summarize religious sensibilities during this period. Hence, the Mencius observes:

For a person to realize fully one's heart-and-mind is to realize fully one's nature and character, and in so doing, one realizes tian .

Tian and “the way” ( dao 道 ) are often associated if not used interchangeably in the classical Confucian corpus. And Confucius insists that “it is the human being who broadens the way, not the way that broadens the human being.”

天人一体、相互依赖表现于源于孟子的、人们熟悉的哲学路线：“万物皆备于我。”我们可以对这一主张作以下解释。人作为环境中人（persons-in-context）总是完全处于一定的境况之中，在一个由特定的社会、文化和自然的条件所规定的世界中继承了传统。个人既形成了又形成于他所处的区域，这区域是由事情和事件构成的。在一个特定的情境中，他或她总是开放的，按照母亲、姐妹等等身份以许多不同的方式，被重新规定，从这个意义上说，一个人是易变的，是多值的（multivalent）。通过任何一个这类身份，个人被置于整体、系统中，并成为诸关系的核心，他既是从扩大了的关系区域内的焦点角度，又是从这种区域内的局部角度，来体现社群。

The continuity and interdependence between tian and the human being is reflected in the familiar line from the Mencius : “All of the myriad things are here in me.” We can explain this claim in the following way. Persons are radically situated as personsin-context, inhering as they do in a world defined by specific social, cultural, and natural conditions. Persons shape and are shaped by the field of things and events in which they reside. A person is fluid and multivalent in the sense that, in any particular situation, he or she is open to redefinition in many different ways by appeal to the roles of mother, sister, and so on. Articulated and brought into focus in any one of these roles, a person expresses the community from both a focal and a local perspective within the extended field of relationships.

在这里讲一个类似情况可能是有用的。一部音乐作品中任何一个音符的全部价值，只有通过了解此音符在这个被演奏的整个作品中的地位，才能加以确定。这样，任何一个音符在它当中蕴涵了整个乐谱。这个音符可以说是对种种关系的整个区域的聚焦，这些关系是由诸音乐成分构成的。这里重要的是种种关系的区域不受限制，相反，它是特殊细节的无限的蓄积，并且是始终开放的，能够更多地包容。与此特殊的音符相关的细节的区域可以扩展到包括同一作曲家另一部作品的一个乐章，或他的所有作品，或一个时代的音乐作品，等等。

An analogy might help here. The full value of any one note in a musical composition can only be assayed by understanding its place in the entire piece of music as performed. Any one note thus has implicate within it the entire score. That note may be said to focus the entire field of relationships constituted by the compositions. Important here is that the field of relationships is not circumscribed, but an unbounded reservoir of particular detail that remains open and available for further inclusion. The field of relevant detail for the particular note can be extended to include a movement in another piece by the same composer, or his entire corpus, or the musical product of a particular era, and so on.

“环境中的人”像音乐演奏中的特殊音符，是多值的，他从其特殊的角度对人的社会及其自然环境加以聚焦。因此，他们或多或少是重要的，或多或少与整体相联接，或多或少地代表了他们的社群的价值和在文化上的重要性。

“Persons-in-context,” like the particular note in the musical performance, are multivalent, bringing the human community and its natural surrounds into focus from their particular perspective. As such, they are more or less distinguished, more or less articulated, more or less representative of the values and cultural importances of their communities.

这种焦点与区域的用语给我们提供了一种方法，据以论述中国人的世界观所规定的天人一体、相互依赖的关系。天是区域，是社会的、文化的和自然的环境，因而从某种意义上说，大于特殊的个人（“天生德于予”），同时又蕴涵和聚焦于特殊的个人（“万物皆备于我”）。正像我们在前面指出的，天经常以拟人的方法被加以描绘。但是这种关系是双向的，反之亦然。人也是似神的。这就是说，当一个人成功地以榜样的方式将文化及其制度聚集于己，当他作为一个他的社群及效法他的后代的典范出现之时，他就通过他们仿效的模式而扩展了自己，从而成为尊崇的对象。因此，按照儒家的语汇，修身扩大了一个人（“大人”），他因而是名副其实地“超尘拔俗”。

（《汉哲学思维的文化探源》，第271—272页）

This language of focus and field provides us with a way of talking about the continuity and interdependence of the human being and tian presupposed in the Confucian worldview. Tian is the field, the social, cultural, and natural context, and is in some sense greater than the particular person (“ Tian has given life to and nourished excellence in me”), as well as being implicate within and brought into focus by the particular person (“all of the myriad things are here in me”). As we have noted above, tian is frequently described in anthropomorphic terms. But the relationship is bidirectional, and works the other way as well. The human being is also theomorphic. That is, when a person is successful in focusing culture and its institutions in a manner that is exemplary, and emerges as a model for his community and future generations to which they defer, he has extended himself through their patterns of deference, and has become the object of reverence. Hence, in the Confucian vocabulary, cultivation enlarges one's person ( da ren大人), so that one becomes literally“larger than life.”

( Thinking from the Han, pp. 263-265)