Reply to Discussion of Origins of Moral-Political Philosophy in Early China: Contestation of Humaneness, Justice, and Personal Freedom
- Reply to Discussion of Origins of Moral-Political Philosophy in Early China:Contestation of Humaneness, Justice, and Personal Freedom
I am grateful to all six commentators for their careful reading of and thoughtful engagements with my book, especially to Sungmoon Kim for spearheading this group effort. In the book, Origins of Moral-Political Philosophy in Early China: Contestation of Humaneness, Justice, and Personal Freedom, I try to tell a new story about the foundational period of Chinese philosophy, with a focus on the deliberations of normative values in the respective texts. I make three key points. First, the central intellectual challenge during the Chinese classical period was how to negotiate the relationships between the personal, the familial, and the political domains (sometimes also characterized as the relationship between the private and the public) when philosophers were re-imagining and re-conceptualizing a new moral-political order. Philosophers offered a dazzling array of competing visions for that newly imagined order. Second, the competing visions can be characterized as a contestation between partialist humaneness and impartialist justice as the guiding norms of the newly imagined order, with the Confucians, the Mohists, the Laoists, and the so-called fajia thinkers being the major participants. This was the mainstream intellectual project that dominated the classical debate and set the terms and the parameters of that debate. Third, Zhuangzi and the Zhuangists were the outliers of the mainstream moral-political discourse during this period. They rejected the very parameters of humaneness versus justice in the mainstream debate and instead represented a lone voice advocating personal freedom. For the Zhuangists, the mainstream debate was intellectually banal, morally misguided, and politically dangerous. One critical overall context for these [End Page 475] philosophical endeavors is that they took place within an evolving understanding of Heaven and its relationship with humans.
Loy Hui-chieh
Let me begin with Loy Hui-chieh's comment on the book's methodology, laid out in the Introduction to my book, as it pertains to the broader norms of practices in contemporary analytic philosophy and Chinese philosophy. The purpose of the methodological reflection in the Introduction is to provide some tools in dealing with the challenges to Chinese philosophy from Sinology (historical and philological approaches to classical Chinese texts) and Western philosophy within Western academia. I argue that scholars of Chinese philosophy, situated between Sinology and Western philosophy in the West, need to be mindful of the constructed nature of the scholarly objects shaped by disciplinary norms and practices. Specifically, scholars of Chinese philosophy, in their philosophical endeavors, construct their scholarly objects based on the operative but often implicit ideas of inherited text, textual author, and textual intent, as opposed to Sinologists who are more motivated by their scholarly objects of original text, historical author, and authorial intent.
Loy's comment frames my methodological reflections primarily through the lens of history of philosophy. There is another critical element in this endeavor, namely the philosophical lineage upon which the study of philosophy in the West has been built, conceptually and institutionally. With respect to history of philosophy, Loy's questions concern the presentist orientation in analytic philosophy and its relationship with history of philosophy. As he aptly points out, analytic philosophers are ultimately uninterested in the correct interpretation of who said what in the history of philosophy. Rather their interest lies in philosophical issues and problems themselves, irrespective of how/when/by whom those issues are formulated. Scholars in history of philosophy seek to convince analytic philosophers that the texts and the ideas they study should be recognized as good philosophy by contemporary standards, not just their historical values. The presentist bias is clear. Of course, we do not have to subscribe to such a norm since the present is not necessarily the be-all and end-all of everything philosophers are concerned with, or at least it should not be. Otherwise, our philosophical reflections, even those with the presentist concerns, would be significantly impoverished. As a profession, contemporary philosophers regularly draw upon history of ideas, especially from the Hellenistic and early modern European traditions, to frame their arguments and to seek new inspirations. Such a practice is heavily dependent on the...
