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Stephan Schmidt

Chinese Philosophy and the Problem of Perspective

On Bo Mou (ed.): Comparative Approaches to Chinese Philosophy

Approaches from where?

Bo Mou (ed.):
Comparative Approaches to Chinese Philosophy.
Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003.
332 pages
ISBN 0-7546-0508-6
book cover
Ashgate Publishing:
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1 Sixteen essays, either unpublished pieces or revised versions of recent publications, were put together by editor Bo Mou to point out ways of mutual understanding and constructive cooperation between Western and Chinese philosophy. Divided into five parts, they offer a rich sample of different approaches to Chinese thought. As the editor underlines in his introduction, they should not be regarded as mutually exclusive, but rather as »somehow complementary« (xv). The three main parts of the volume are devoted to the philosophy of the Yi Jing (Book of Changes), Confucianism and Daoism. Part I consists only of one informative essay by A.C. Cua, "Emergence of the History of Chinese Philosophy", while Part V brings in two essays on logic-related concerns, one of them being Yiu-ming Fung's "The Thesis of Antilogic in Buddhism", the only essay in the volume dealing with Buddhist thought.
2 The editor's introduction does not inform us why Buddhism is so largely ignored – despite the fact that Chinese Buddhism is not only an important feature of China's philosophical tradition, but is already in itself a matter of comparative and intercultural philosophy. Yet neglecting Buddhism fits into the general orientation of the volume; despite the diversity of the approaches, the main focus throughout is directed towards the classic period of pre-Qin China (i.e. before unification under Qin Shihuang in 221 B.C.), during which the most eminent figures of Confucianism and Daoism laid the foundations of their respective schools, while Buddhism reached China only during Han-Dynasty. With its focus more on philosophical foundations than on their historical development, the volume is deeply rooted in the modern tradition of Western research on Chinese thought – one feels tempted to ask ironically whether perhaps Western scholars are secretly seeking to confirm Hegel's frequently rejected claim of the unhistorical nature of the Chinese spirit.

Understanding or solving problems?

»The primary purpose of the volume is not historical and descriptive, but critical and constructive.«

Bo Mou
(xv)
3 The common concern of all essays in the volume besides their different subjects is the problem of intercultural comparison. All contributors seem to share the editor's belief that different philosophical traditions »could learn from each other and jointly and constructively contribute to a common philosophical enterprise« (xv). The process of learning from the West already began in China in the late 19th century; since to this day in the West philosophers rather tend to belittle the significance of Chinese thought for their own purposes, many of the essays try to show just that: Chinese philosophy in general – and Confucian ethics in particular – has the capacity not only to enrich our established philosophical discourse but also to offer solutions for some urgent social problems in the West (i.e. in the U.S., where most contributors were educated).
4 This latter claim strikes the European reader as giving testimony to a somewhat surprising understanding of what philosophical traditions actually are: it seems that history in the course of centuries was so kind as to supply a philosophical first-aid kit with all kinds of theories and concepts providing the appropriate Band-Aid for whatever problem we may be confronted with. R.C. Neville in his essay on "The Project of Boston Confucianism" discovers a lack of »social forms and styles that properly humanize people« (189) in the present Boston community that serves as an example for his astonishing thought experiment. Luckily Neville has the solution ready at hand: »Portable Confucianism« – and he starts packing right away, putting together a canon of those Confucian classics that would supply Boston with the necessary input of »ritual propriety« (Li) and »humanity« (Ren).
5 Not all essays, of course, match this remarkable degree of philosophical naivety (or is it just optimism?), but some actually even exceed it: R.E. Allinson's essay "Hegelian, Yi Jing and Buddhist Transformational Models for Comparative Philosophy" provides a striking example of the damage that comparative philosophy can do to itself when equipped with the right amount of ignorance. Here, the word ›tradition‹ has lost all meaning, or as the author puts it: »Philosophy thus freed one from the prison of historical order.« (68) Keep in mind that this is being said with reference to Hegel! Such thought could be mercifully overlooked if one had no reason to fear that something about it might be rather typical for the theoretical status quo of comparative philosophy in general: a lack of awareness of its conditions and its being conditioned, a tendency to underestimate how philosophical points of view are being influenced and shaped by various historical and cultural factors, how they belong to an environment without which they become – in the original Greek sense of the word – utopian, »placeless«. Philosophy thus freed from its own roots will hardly bear the potential to foster intercultural understanding.

Making sense of differences

»…it is only on the basis of difference that a contribution to a totalizing or integrative theory could be fruitfully made…«

Chung-ying Cheng
(35)
6 Not all authors, of course, get lost in this kind of philosophical no-man's land: B.W. Van Norden ("Virtue Ethics and Confucianism") does not simply take for granted that different philosophical traditions can learn from each other, but instead tries to furnish proof of such possibilities by carefully examining some relevant sources. Ruiping Fan ("Social Justice: Rawlsian or Confucian?") through analyzing the cultural context of both approaches comes to a rather skeptical conclusion regarding ways of transferring them from one context to another. C. Hansen ("The Metaphysics of Dao") is very reluctant to apply culturally biased concepts – such as Metaphysics – in contexts other than their own.
7 Still, the overall tendency of the volume is to take the validity of certain basic concepts of Western philosophy for granted and thus to approach Chinese philosophy through Western eyes without really being aware of it – a tendency no less apparent in the contributions by Chinese authors. What seems to be a puzzling contradiction at first glance is actually an important but often overlooked feature of modern Chinese philosophy in general: We can trace it back to Feng Youlan's attempt of telling the story of Chinese thought in Western terms; his achievement opened the door for Chinese philosophy to enter the arena of Western discourse, but by doing so he dressed (or rather disguised) it in a terminology which, to borrow Nietzsche's expression, »equalized the unequal«. Furthermore mainstream Sino-Western philosophy has followed in Feng's footsteps, one prominent example being the Sourcebook of Chinese Philosophy by Wing-tsit Chan, whose translations are still considered to be the standard ones by many scholars. Yet, in a terminology that equalizes the unequal, it's next to impossible to make differences and nuances visible at all. Comparative philosophy thus becomes a lofty name for a patchwork of disconnected pieces from different traditions.
8 The volume Comparative Approaches to Chinese Philosophy does offer an informative survey on current studies in the broad field of Sino-Western thought, and thereby it reveals two things: The enormous potential of and the need for comparative philosophy and the equally enormous methodological obstacles in the way of making this potential bear fruit.
9 One last word on the edition itself: Only two out of sixteen essays are equipped with Chinese characters, another two offer a Chinese glossary, while all others rely on the Pinyin transcription alone. There are no quotations in Chinese. The hermeneutic problem involved in the process of translating – indeed a key problem for comparative philosophy – is thus kept in the background. Facing the tension between being philosophically precise or being easy to understand, most authors go for the latter.
polylog: Forum for Intercultural Philosophy 4 (2003).
Online: http://lit.polylog.org/4/rss-en.htm
ISSN 1616-2943
Author: Stephan Schmidt, Berlin (Germany)
© 2003 Author & polylog e.V.
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