The Similarities and Dissimilarities between Chien and Mou -A Comparative Study on Chien Mu’s and Mou Zongsan’s Hermeneutics of Thought of Zhu Xi
Date Issued
2016
Date
2016
Author(s)
Ouyang, Ting-chieh
Abstract
Joseph Levenson (1920-1969), in his famous work, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate, claimed that traditional Confucianism had been “museumified” in modern China and Chinese society, serving only as a storehouse of values and inspiration, without any practical social application or use. Although many scholars have questioned this Levensonian argument, this thesis takes Levenson’s main proposition as a point of department. This thesis does not maintain that there simply was a total departure from Confucianism in regards to modern Chinese society, nor does it hold a naïve attitude which often claims there to be a mysteriously self-evident continuum between the “essence” of Confucian culture and modern Chinese society. While I do not thoroughly deny the two premises above, this work calls for a more nuanced consideration of the problem at hand. Therefore, this thesis adopts two case studies, Chien Mu and Mou Zongsan’s hermeneutical interpretations of Zhu Xi’s though. The aim of this thesis is not only to reveal the uniqueness of their interpretations and their contributions to the hermeneutic history of Zhu Xi’s thought, but it is also to inquire into the deep relationship between their new interpretations and the time in which they lived. In Chapter 1, I test the application of “hermeneutics” to Chinese intellectual and philosophical inquiry, further demonstrating the lack of attention paid to the hermeneutical dimensions of these fields. Subsequently, I outline Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutic philosophy, before incorporating his main principles into my research methodology and argument structure. In Chapter 2, which gives an overview of the long-term development of interpretative scholarship on Zhu Xi, I illustrate the hermeneutical foundations on which Chien Mu’s《朱子新學案》and Mou Zongsan’s《心體與性體》were written in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In Chapter 3, I shift to a different time and place in which Chien Mu and Mou Zongsan formulated their interpretations, focusing on the postwar era in Hong Kong and Taiwan respectively. It was this overseas climate in specific that allowed both scholars to confront the two crucial transformations which formed the new base of reinterpretations of Zhu Xi’s thought. In Chapter 4, based on the assertions and arguments in the former three chapters, I investigate the interpretative work of《朱子新學案》and《心體與性體》. I maintain that these two new interpretations and their subsequent effects not only stem from more precise readings and analysis of classical texts, but also originate from how these two modern scholars conceived of the world they lived in.
Subjects
Chien Mu
Mou Zongsang
Zhu Xi
Interpretations of Zhu Xi’s Thought
Hermeneutics
Modern Confucianism
Type
thesis
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