ABSTRACT
For those who take moralism as a preconception and for a long time have been used to look at Confucianism through the lens of moralism, it is a more significant choice to explain Confucius’ doctrine of benevolence as a moralistic doctrine, in order to bring the fundamental spiritual aim of Confucianism back to moralism. Benevolence is either interpreted as an innate moral emotion, like sympathy and pity, on the basis of the theory of compassion or explained through resonating and universal love not reaching the principle of Heaven and further regarded as the cosmological essence pervading all things on Earth and Heaven. As for Confucius and Confucianism during the classical age, the importance of human relations initially originates from the experience of real life, for man has always placed himself within interpersonal human relations. One essential point of Confucianism is that "man is by nature an ethical animal".
