PDF《RELATIONS”》

1 THE CONFUCIAN ETHOS: A CULTURE OF ROLES AND RELATIONS ROGER T.

AMES UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI'

I [email protected] THE ZHONGYONG 中庸: FOCUSING THE FAMILIAR I. Interpreting Chinese Culture: What China is NOT. 1. Recent archaeological finds 2. Europe'

s Christianized interpretation of China: tian天 Heaven, yi 义 righteousness, dao 道 the Way, li 礼 ritual, ren 仁 benevolence, li 理 principle 3. Orientalism as a corrective: despotic, mystical, backward, occult, collective, pagan 4. Barnes and Noble, Borders: Eastern Religions 5. Western academy: Chinese philosophy is not philosophy ―taught in religion/Asian studies departments 6. Two conflicting terms: (1) aestheticism (holism) (2) transcendence 7. Marcel Granet: Chinese wisdom has no need for the idea of God. 8. Tang Junyi 唐君毅:

2 中国民族无含超绝意义的天的观念.中国人对天有个普 遍的观点:就是天与地是分不开的. The Chinese as a people have not embraced a concept of Heaven (tian) that has transcendent meaning. The pervasive idea that Chinese have with respect to tian is that it is inseparable from the world. 9. A.C. Graham: In the Chinese cosmos all things are interdependent, without transcendent principles by which to explain them or a transcendent origin from which they derive. . . . A novelty in this position which greatly impresses me is that it exposes a preconception of Western interpreters that such concepts as Tian Heaven and Dao Way must have the transcendence of our own ultimate principles;

it is hard for us to grasp that even the Way is interdependent with man. 10. Joseph Needham: Chinese ideals involved neither God nor Law. . . .Thus the mechanical and the quantitative, the forced and the externally imposed, were all absent. The notion of Order excluded the notion of Law. 11. What is God? Single-source, cosmotic thinking. An independent, foundational, permanent, and determinative element in religion (God), Newtonian mechanical science (natural laws), morality (irrecusable moral principles), philosophy (the logic of the

3 changeless): apodictic knowledge, person (soul, human nature, human beings ). 12. 唐君毅: 中国文化之根本精神即 [将部分与全体交融 互摄] 之精神;

自认识上言之,即不自全体中划出部分之 精神 (此自中国人之宇宙观中最可见之);

自情意上言 之,即努力以部分实现全体之精神 (此自中国人之人生 态度中可见之). Tang Junyi: The basic spirit of Chinese culture is the spirit of symbiosis and mutuality between particulars and totality. From the perspective of understanding this means the spirit of being unwilling to isolate the particular from the totality (this is most evident in the cosmology of the Chinese people), and from the perspective of ties of feeling and affection, it means the spirit of the particular in doing its best to realize the totality (this is most evident in the attitude of the Chinese people toward daily life). 13. William James: The low thermometer to-day, for instance, is supposed to come from something called the '

climate.'

Climate is really only the name for a certain group of days, but it is treated as if it lay behind the day, and in general we place the name, as if it were a being, behind the facts it is the name of. But the phenomenal properties of things . . . do not inhere in anything. They adhere, or cohere, rather, with each other, and the notion of a substance inaccessible to us, which we think accounts for such cohesion by supporting it, as cement might support pieces of a mosaic, must be abandoned. The fact of the bare cohesion itself is all the notion of the substance signifies. Behind that fact is nothing.