Dai Zhen
modernQing Confucianism / Kaozheng (Evidential Scholarship)1724 – 1777
Dai Zhen (戴震, 1724–1777) was a Qing dynasty Chinese philosopher, philologist, and mathematician, widely regarded as the most rigorous critic of Song-Ming Neo-Confucianism. Working within the kaozheng (evidential scholarship) tradition, he argued that Neo-Confucian li (principle) had been weaponized to suppress natural human desires and emotions, which he held to be morally legitimate expressions of human nature. His Mengzi ziyi shuzheng subjected the Mencian text to systematic philological analysis to recover what he saw as authentic Confucian ethics against later metaphysical distortions.
Notable Achievements
1
Wrote Mengzi ziyi shuzheng, a landmark philological and philosophical commentary rehabilitating Mencian ethics
2
Mounted systematic critique of Song-Ming Neo-Confucianism's subordination of human desire (yu) to abstract principle (li)
3
Argued that li is discovered through careful investigation of human experience and text, not intuited by the mind
4
Advanced naturalistic moral psychology in which desire and feeling are essential to ethical life, not obstacles to it
5
Led the kaozheng movement's application of evidential methods to classical philosophical interpretation