A Study of Mencius' Humanism and Morality in the Context of Big Data

Confucius mentioned the view of human nature in the Analects of Confucius - Yangshou that "nature is similar, and habits are far apart", but the good and evil of human nature were not explicitly pointed out, and Mencius put forward the theory of the inherent goodness of human nature in the process of inheriting and developing the human nature thought of Confucius.

Mencius believes that if people do not have this good nature is no different from the beasts, and can not be called human, this unique human goodness is the basic characteristics of human beings, and only to continuously expand the goodness of this human being, in order to remain a human being [22]. Meanwhile beasts do not have this goodness, and the nature of dogs and pigs is different from the nature of people. If people lose their goodness and do not cultivate their human nature with care, it is just as if they used sharp axes to cut down dense forests and let cattle and sheep eat up the tender grass on the mountains, leaving them bare, i.e., there is no difference between the natures of human beings and that of beasts.

Human nature is inherently good, i.e., everyone has his or her intolerant heart is the main characteristic of human beings different from animals. On the basis of the theory of sexual goodness, Mencius further elaborated his view of human nature by saying that there are four ends of goodness. The four ends of goodness in human nature, namely, benevolence, righteousness, propriety, and wisdom, are as innate as the limbs of a human being. The heart of sympathy is the beginning of benevolence, the heart of shame is the beginning of righteousness, the heart of modesty is the beginning of propriety, and the heart of right and wrong is the beginning of wisdom. The four ends of human nature correspond to the four hearts of human beings. The four ends of benevolence, righteousness, propriety, and wisdom exist naturally in human nature; they are capable of knowing without learning or thinking, and they exist in the heart of human beings and are good.

Human nature is good is the theory of human nature put forward by Mencius, he pointed out that all people have the heart of goodness, and the differences in moral qualities between people are due to the fact that people have lost their own heart later in life [23]. In Mencius, it is believed that people's goodness is easily confused by external material desires and thus lost, such as scholars say: in the process of people's social life and social interaction, people's heart will be tempted to corrode by the temptation of emotional desires from the eyes, ears, nose, body, and other sound and color. People's hearts are the same, but some people eventually become moral "adults", and some just become immoral "small people", the difference between large and small people is due to their own moral cultivation caused by different. Those who do not know the heart of benevolence and righteousness but only care about the pursuit of the desire to eat and drink are the ones who cultivate their "small bodies" and eventually become "small people", while those who cultivate their heart of benevolence and righteousness "big bodies" eventually become "big people". As people choose different paths in society, they end up with high and low moral qualities.

In Mencius' view, the difference between human beings and beasts lies in the fact that human beings have goodness and conscience, but if human beings lose their human nature, i.e., goodness, which is characteristic of human beings, they are just the same as beasts and there is no difference between them. Therefore, he proposed that people in the process of moral cultivation must always guard against the loss of their own heart, from their own internal aspects to seek their own goodness, and will continue to expand this goodness, to raise its big and ultimately to achieve the realm of "adults". Mencius said, "To seek is to gain, and to give up is to lose; it is to seek that which is beneficial to gain, and to seek that which is in me. To seek is to have a way, and to gain is to have a destiny; it is to seek that which is not beneficial to gain, and to seek that which is outside of me." The "seeking gain and giving up loss" mentioned here refers to the goodness inherent in human nature that will be gained if one seeks it, and lost if one does not seek it.

What Mencius calls qi is not an inner state; Mencius declares that "qi is the fullness of the body," opposing qi to the will, and by qi he basically means what constitutes the body. Mencius believed that maintaining one's own heart and improving one's own moral cultivation required not only seeking one's own self and standing up for one's own greatness, but also cultivating one's own righteous qi. Mencius mentioned in "Gongsun Chou Shang": "It is difficult to say, it is qi, it is the greatest and the strongest, and it is harmless to be directly raised, and it is stuffed between heaven and earth." It is also qi, with righteousness and Tao, nothing is, and it is also discouraged. It is born of righteousness, and it is taken from the unrighteousness. If you are not careful, you will be discouraged. "Mencius believes that it is difficult to explain in words, it is a set of righteousness and the unity of the Tao and generated, filled with all things in heaven and earth, is the greatest and strongest of a spiritual temperament, people should seriously cultivate this vast and righteous and can not be allowed to be damaged, it will be filled with the four bodies of the human being, everywhere, and can be expanded to carry forward the good end of its heart.

In view of the far-reaching influence of Mencius' humanism and morality, it is particularly important to comprehensively examine the research results of the literature in the field of humanism and morality in China, and to summarize the inherent development pattern of the research results in the field of humanism and morality in China and Mencius. This paper summarizes the current research situation, research hotspots, and evolution of this field, identifies its research characteristics, strengths, and weaknesses, and makes an outlook, in an effort to provide references and lessons for the research in this field.

The literature data in this article comes from CNKI. In order to improve the accuracy of the data and consider the closeness and authority of the correlation, this paper searches the target documents in the database from the following three aspects: (1) Set the search time range before January 1, 2023. (2) The search criteria were "Excerpts = Mencius". (3) Select "Peking University Core" and "CSSCI" as the source category of academic journals. A total of 3,915 records were retrieved according to the conditions, and then 53 documents such as books, book news, publication information, character profiles, journal content introductions, and conference proceedings that did not meet the requirements were manually screened out, and 3,862 literature data related to Mencius were obtained, which were exported in Refworks format.

CiteSpace software is able to present a panoramic view of the scientific knowledge domain in an intuitive way, identifying key literature, hot research topics and cutting-edge trends. The study used CiteSpace 6.2.R2 to statistically analyze the acquired literature data and visualize and draw the knowledge graph. Firstly, the data in Refworks format downloaded from China Knowledge was converted into a format that can be directly processed by CiteSpace, and the de-duplication operation was carried out to eliminate three duplicate records, and finally 3859 literature data were obtained. Then a new project was created to construct a knowledge map of research in fields related to Mencius in CiteSpace software to analyze the data, including the cooperation of authors and journals, keyword co-occurrence, and so on. Based on the analysis results, the hotspots and trends of research in fields related to Mencius are explored from different perspectives.

As a key medium for human beings to accumulate practical experience, create new knowledge and promote the progress of civilization, the literature can provide us with the development and evolution of the research field. In academic research, the number of papers published not only reveals the degree of scholars' attention to a certain subject area, but also becomes an important quantitative indicator to assess the research activity and development trend of the field in a specific period of time. In this paper, by combing the amount of literature published on research related to Mencius' humanism and morality and statistically analyzing the research data, we can get the amount of literature published on research related to Mencius' humanism and morality every year, and draw a line graph of the amount of literature published in the past years according to the 3,859 pieces of literature related to Mencius indexed in CNKI, as shown in Fig. 1. From the year of publication, it can be seen that the research literature related to Mencius' humanism and morality in China began in 1992, and the number of research literature is relatively large, which is enough to show that Chinese scholars have paid great attention to Mencius' humanism and moral thought. In terms of the number of published literatures, the average number of research literatures per year from 1992-2022 is about 120, especially in 2017 when it peaked with 209 related literatures published. From the perspective of the whole trend of published literature, 1992-2005 is in the initial stage, during which Chinese scholars' research related to Mencius has already been of a considerable scale, and except for a trough in 1997, it is overall in a relatively stable state, with an average of 66.92 articles per year, and the number of related papers in this field began to increase considerably after 2004, especially the rising momentum in 2008-2009 and 2016-2017, and a considerable number of related research papers have been published every year since then. Starting from 2019, the number of published papers has a continuous downward trend, and the heat of research has slightly cooled down.

Figure 1.

The annual trend map

When the frequency of certain keywords suddenly increases during a certain time period, it means that the relevant research topic is hot during that time period. A total of 28 mutation words related to Mencius's theory of human nature and morality were retrieved in CiteSpace from 1992 to 2022, and Figure 2 shows the keyword mutation map, indicating that the research hotspots related to Mencius's theory of human nature and morality are very different in different time periods. According to the keyword mutation map, 2006 is an obvious time node, before which the research topics were more concentrated, the cycle length was more average, and the subsequent research topics were more scattered, which was also in line with the division of the trend of the number of publications and the trend in the timeline chart, and the time period of keyword duration was quite different, the "Zhu Xi" cycle was as long as 9 years, and the keyword intensity was 14.698. And the cycle of "Confucius" and "morality" is only two years. Combined with the analysis of mutation intensity, it can be seen that the two keywords of "Zhu Xi" and "Theory of Sexual Goodness" are hot topics and research frontiers related to Mencius's theory of human nature and morality, and "benevolence", "Xinxue", "Xinxue", "Confucianism" and "Xunzi" are the research frontiers in recent years.

Figure 2.

Keyword mutation map

In this paper, we use perplexity to measure the number of topics extracted by an optimization model, and perplexity can be used to measure how well a probability distribution or probabilistic model predicts samples. The smaller the perplexity, the better the language model is, and the probability distribution model or probability model with low perplexity can better predict the foreign samples, which is a measure of the strength of the language model. Its calculation formula is shown in equation 1. Where p(ω) is the probability of occurrence of each word in the test set and the formula is P(ω) = p(z|d)* p(ω|z), p(z|d) is the probability of occurrence of each topic in a document and is the probability of occurrence of each word in the dictionary under a certain topic: 1perplexity(D)=exp(−∑ logp(ω)∑d=1MNd)perplexity(D) = \exp \left( { - {{\sum {\log } p(\omega )} \over {\sum\nolimits_{d = 1}^M {{N_d}} }}} \right)

The range of the value of the number of topics is set to [3,25], the number of iterations is set to 1000, and the step size is 1 for the three canonical books to carry out the numerical calculation of the degree of perplexity, and the results are shown in Fig. 3.

Figure 3.

Perplexity of each canonical text at different K values

As can be seen from Fig. 3, the confusion curve of the three canonical books fluctuates and shows a decreasing and then increasing trend, among which the confusion of Xunzi is the most obvious, and in the Analects of Confucius, when the number of topics K=7, there is a very small value of 57.57919 in the confusion curve, in the Mencius, the number of topics K=8, and there is a very small value of 13.5181 in the confusion curve, and in the Xunzi, the number of topics K=7, and there is a very small value of 114.25181 in the confusion curve. There is a very small value of 114.25339, the confusion value of LDA topic model reaches the minimum, according to the confusion value to choose the optimal number of topics K of the three canonical books are 7, 8, 7, respectively [24].

In this paper, the pre-Qin Confucian texts related to the study of Mencius' humanistic morality are textually integrated according to the order of "Analects", "Mencius" and "Xunzi", in order to cover the main themes in the above three texts and at the same time to keep in line with the number of themes in the LDA model, the optimal number of themes is obtained as 13 after the calculation of perplexity, the number of keywords is set to 80, and the first 18 theme words are selected to be sorted out, and the results are shown in Table 1.

The pre-Qin Confucian texts "The Analects of Confucius", "Mencius" and "Xunzi" were written in the early Warring States period, the middle of the Warring States period and the late Warring States period respectively, and they can also represent the evolution of Confucianism in different periods. Therefore, this paper takes the order of appearance of the three Confucian texts as the basis for dividing the time series into the pre-war period, the middle and the late period, and the final results of the dynamic evolution of the themes obtained are shown in Fig. 4, in which the color shades are directly proportional to the size of the theme weights.

Figure 4.

The trend of the subject weight evolution of the pre-qin Confucianism

It can be observed from Figure 4 that the weight of most of the topics in the time series does not change significantly, mainly because the time window of the LDA model is artificially divided and mechanical, and the correlation between the corpus within and between windows cannot be fully considered, and the weight of topic 2 in Figure 4 has weakened to a certain extent from the middle of the Warring States period, from 0.5735 to 0.5206, and after analyzing the keywords in topic 2, it is found that the theme is mainly the "human nature consciousness" emphasized in ConfucianismIt is reflected in the "Theory of Sexual Goodness" advocated by Mencius and the "Theory of Sexual Evil" advocated by Xunzi. Taking the significant weight change of the topic and the change of the evolution trend in the field as the statistical criterion, 1 of the 13 topics met the requirements, so the accuracy of revealing the topic evolution trend of the model was 7.69%.

The integrated text obtained in Section 3.2.2 is continued as the research object, the optimal number of topics is 13, the number of keywords is set to 80, the topics are extracted based on the LDA model, and the first 18 keywords are selected to be organized, and the results are shown in Table 2.

Combined with the linear combination method introduced in this section to calculate the semantic relevance of 13 topics, Figure 5 is the theme semantic relevance matrix, and it is found that topic4 and topic10, topic2 and topic3, topic9 and topic11, topic10 and topic13 have strong correlations, and the correlation degrees are 0.6515, 0.6315, 0.6345, and 0.632, respectively. In topic 2, the core of keywords such as "country", "people" and "thief" is "state affairs", and the core of keywords such as "gentleman", "righteousness" and "pro" is "personnel", that is, there are two secondary topics, and the core of keywords such as "filial piety", "righteousness" and "family" in topic 3 is "family affairs". Similarly, the core of keywords such as "scholar", "goodness" and "country" in topic 9 is "governing concept", and the core of keywords such as "king", "music" and "ceremony" in topic L1 is "hierarchy", and the two topics only constitute a related relationship. The core of keywords such as "state", "state" and "government" in topic 10 is "governance", and the core of keywords such as "desire", "heart" and "knowledge" in topic 13 is "conduct", which is a kind of constraint on people required by "governance". The keywords of topic4 and topic10 are related to political words such as "politics, ruler, king, state", so these two topics are only treated as the same topic "politics" summary, and the future research can be combined with the context of the era to do the evolution of the relationship between the two. The evolution of the relationship between the two can be further discussed in the context of the times in future studies.

Figure 5.

Topic semantic correlation matrix

According to Mencius, people are born with the goodness of benevolence, righteousness, propriety and wisdom, and therefore "all people can be Yao and Shun". Morally, all people are born equal, and regardless of their birth, rich or poor, or their status of being powerful or weak, they all have the possibilities to become a gentleman or a saint. By taking this as a starting point, the modern citizen will be able to deal with at least two aspects of the relationship: first, to believe in his own good nature and in the equality of all human beings, and thus not to be subjected to the influence of authority or to sycophancy, flattery, or compromise with anyone in matters of moral dimension. In the face of difficulties and choices, one does not look at life itself with the attitude of denying everything and believing oneself to be worthless. Secondly, Mencius believes that people do not deliberately do evil, and when facing others and things, they can have more understanding and understanding, not only to give dignity to themselves, but also to give dignity to others, to understand with compassion, and to tolerate with the heart of resignation, perhaps such an attitude can pull many people who have "evil thoughts" back from the edge of the devil, save more people's lives, and push them to the sunny side.

It is also human nature that human beings live and necessarily demand dignity. The practice of morality can give people the dignity of being a human being, and everyone has an equal opportunity, including those who have made mistakes, in which it is open to all and most inclusive.

Modern life is too fast-paced, too many temptations, too little reading, too much thinking, no distinction between right and wrong, the interests of the first, the word "righteousness" has long been out of people's lives. In this era of "rapid" development, people regard "effectiveness" as the first priority, for the immediate needs, profit first is definitely the only way, but Mr. Lu Xun once said: tricksters have skills, but also effective, but limited. The purpose of human existence as a human being is to seek the ultimate value of life, if the profit first, may be able to achieve short-term benefits and sense of satisfaction, but from the meaning of life in the long term is not worth the loss, in order to obtain long-term development and the fulfillment of life, is not a limited, effective "profit" can be measured. Those high officials who developed because of their high official pay and then were investigated for corruption and accumulation of wealth, struggled all their lives for the so-called "benefits", and finally paid the price due to the "benefits", which in the end was all for naught. Those who hurt their loved ones and sell out their friends for their own selfish interests will also end up losing among their own evils, in exchange for nothing more than a miserable second half of life, what is the point. The reason why they have become slaves to "profit" is that they have "profit" and "benefit", but they have neglected to measure the long-term gains and losses with the perspective of sustainable development. They are blinded by the momentary interests, and do not see the significance of the "righteousness" for the orientation of life that Mencius had already seen a thousand years ago.

Marx said, "Man in his reality it is the sum of all relations." To summarize, there are at least two kinds of relationships that must be dealt with in human social existence: between human beings and themselves, and between human beings and other things. Mencius suggests that the most important thing in dealing with the first kind of relationship is to be strict with oneself, in his words: to seek the opposite of oneself. "He who loves others, others will love. He who honors others, others will always honor." "People must insult themselves, and then others will insult them. The family will destroy itself, and then people will destroy it." All the results that people experience originate from their own thoughts and actions, and when others treat us with disrespect, we should reflect on ourselves, and the reason must lie in ourselves, and it must be that I have not done my due courtesy to others, and I have not fulfilled my due obligations. As long as we always have the heart of "love and respect for others", always "seek the opposite", to cultivate ourselves, self-restraint, not to attribute the cause to the objective factors external to oneself, only self-restraint, so as to seek benevolence, in order to obtain benevolence, which is as a personal This is a necessary process for an individual to cultivate himself by "seeking the opposite of himself", and it is inevitable that he must continue to cultivate himself and restrain himself in order to seek benevolence, to be benevolent.

The two of us are "benevolence", benevolence is also known as conscience, which is unique to human beings, and the conscience of heaven and earth is embodied in the way we treat people and deal with the world. People have a conscience means not only respect for themselves, but also respect for others, reflecting a person's consciousness of morality, and get along with people to learn to think differently, push themselves to others, with a heart of love to love people. First of all, we should do our best, wholeheartedly for the sake of others, in the process of getting along with others to give others all their love and the ability to serve others. Secondly, we should be present in the situation, and be in a position to envision for others. The paradigm of benevolence is to do what "one wants to establish oneself and establish others, and what one wants to reach and reach others", and at the same time, we should also take into consideration that "what you do not want done to you, do not do to others", or at least to do that what one does not consider to be good is not to be forced on others, and what one is not sure is good is to be shared with others in a selective and discriminating way. At the very least, we should never impose on others what we do not consider to be good, and we should be selective and discriminating in sharing with others what we are not sure is good. Such a norm is acceptable to all nations and peoples of the world. On the other hand, it is necessary to avoid "imposing on others what we want", which requires us to clearly understand that the standard of self-promotion and others' behavior should not only be based on one's own personal interests and likes and dislikes, but this standard must be morality, which is the common nature of human beings, not any other arbitrary and variable standard, but the subject's inner "conscience", which is whether the subject itself can perceive and grasp his own inherent benevolence, so as to expand his conscience and conscience, love others with virtue, and love others with virtue.