Wang Chong
27-100 · Neo-Confucianism · Little-known
Wang Chong wrote in the Eastern Han, in a culture that read portents as messages from Heaven about the conduct of men. Heaven has no purposes, he answered, sends no omens and is not watching you. His Lunheng, early China's most sustained work of doubt, takes apart ghosts, prodigies and the point of sacrifice. Things come about of themselves, out of qi, the vital stuff of the world, interacting with nothing in mind.
Signature
The position Chong is most identified with in the Profiler:
- Natural Processes
- strongly leans Mechanistic
- Theology
- Atheism
Positions on the 7 axes the sources answer
- Natural Processes
- strongly leans Mechanistic (4 on a 0–100 scale from Mechanistic to Purposeful)
- Mind
- strongly leans Brain Only (0 on a 0–100 scale from Brain Only to Beyond Brain)
- Meaning
- strongly leans Constructed (7 on a 0–100 scale from Constructed to Inherent)
- Ground of Being
- strongly leans Immanence (8 on a 0–100 scale from Immanence to Transcendence)
- Truth
- leans Objective (88 on a 0–100 scale from Subjective to Objective)
- Ignorance
- leans Bondage (12 on a 0–100 scale from Bondage to Bliss)
- Conviction
- leans Uncertain (25 on a 0–100 scale from Uncertain to Certain)
13 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or Chong refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Theology
- Atheism
What is your position on the existence and nature of God or gods? - Highest Good
- Knowledge
What is the highest good? - Good and Evil
- Natural Emergence
What is the fundamental nature of good and evil? - Knowledge
- Sense Experience
What is the ultimate foundation of knowledge? - Agency
- Hard Determinism
What is the nature of human agency and freedom? - Beginning of Things
- Eternal Cosmos
What is the origin of reality? - Authority
- Rational Expertise
What is the legitimate source of authority? - Death
- Annihilation
What happens at death? - Human Nature
- Other
What is human nature?