Clower, Jason: Late Works of Mou Zongsan – Selected Essays on Chinese Philosophy

Abstract

Twenty years after "the Confucian among philosophers, the philosopher among Confucians" 1 passed away in 1995, Jason Clower presents a selection of English translations of texts by Mou Zongsan (1909-1995). "If twentieth-century China produced a philosopher of the first rank," Clower opens his introduction, "it was Mou Zongsan" (p. 1). On the one hand, there can be no doubt about Mou's deeply ingrained Confucianism, and his work bespeaks his familiarity with much of the philosophical heritage of both China and the occidentespecially its Ango-American, but also Graeco-Roman and German compartments. However, people like Yu Yingshi 余英時, Lin Anwu 林安梧, 2 but also mainlandbased scholars like Jiang Qing 蔣慶 have criticised Mou for exiling Confucianism into the ivory tower of philosophical speculation, largely disregarding its societal and institutional aspects and their potential relevance for present day China. Likewise, Mou's exceptional status as a philosopher, suggested by Clower and claimed by many of his students and convinced readers, remains controversial. 3 What is beyond contention, however, is that Mou was not only an erudite and polymath, but also an extremely prolific writer. His studies penetrate the remotest confines of Chinese intellectual history and his collected works comprise several thousand pages in 32 volumes. 4 In the course of the last two decades, Mou 1 This is how Cai Renhou, one of Mou's most prominent students and professor emeritus at Tunghai University in Taichung, has characterised Mou in his obituary (Lehmann 1998: 197). 2 For a short overview in English see Makeham 2008: 176-180. 3 Lee Ming-Huei, another of Mou's students, at one point praises his teacher's "philosophical genius" (Lee 2001: 65). This enthusiasm is not restricted to Mou's immediate students: In a recent study based on her PhD thesis, N. Serina Chan at least twice asserts Mou's theoretical "genius" (Chan 2011: 116, 186). On the other extreme of the scale, there are people like Stephan Schmidt who with respect to Mou's claim that his moral metaphysics has sublated (aufgehoben) "the vastly different dualisms" discussed by Mou states that "this is unpersuasive to the point of caricature" (Schmidt 2011: 272).