Is There Such a Thing as Chinese Philosophy? Arguments of an Implicit Debate

Abstract

is the showpiece of our university: every freshman student is required to follow a general course on philosophy. But regardless of the ways in which this course may be considered general, the fact is that attention to non-Western cultures is absent throughout. The course is not titled "General Western Philosophy," and yet philosophy is, quite simply, a Western matter. This demands no further explanation; it is taken for granted. It should come as no surprise that China starts from an entirely different presupposition. Several philosophy departments have a branch dealing with Chinese philosophy, analogous to those offering Western and often even Indian philosophy. But not one Chinese university teaches exclusively Chinese philosophy, let alone under the title "General Philosophy."'In the light of such an imposing state of affairs, the question inevitably comes to the fore: is there indeed such a thing as "Chinese philosophy"? However, the degree of certainty with which the conflicting positions are held is not the result of thorough research, painstaking debate, or well-founded reasoning. For these have hardly even begun. In both the West and China, the answer to this question consists mostly of implicit presuppositions. It belongs less to the domain of explicit opinion than to the implicit frame within which we function: the organization of universities, bookshops, journals, and conferences all confirm a vision that, in fact, they have seldom explicitly discussed. The topic is therefore rather sensitive: any explicit rejection of the existence of Chinese philosophy implies not only a painful break with the raison d'etre of more than a thousand Chinese academics but also a blow to China's national pride. On the other hand, the insistence that general introductory courses to philosophy ought to include philosophical traditions laid claim to by other cultures would certainly disturb Western colleagues in the field.From this one might be inclined to conclude that such strong emotions and exaggerated sensitivities-a Western chauvinism on the one hand and an overly sensitive Chinese self-insistence on the other-are obstacles to a mature discussion of this nevertheless fundamental question. The arguments presented here, on the contrary, shall endeavor to show that this conclusion is not entirely correct. Several concrete arguments have been forwarded in this debate, and insofar as this conclusion is correct, I will argue that this very sensitivity is an interesting phenomenon, one that is unjustly being neglected.The following analysis of the implicit debate has a relevance beyond the field of "Chinese philosophy" since a similar problematic forwards itself not only in

There is No Need forZhongguo Zhexueto be Philosophy

“…It is worthwhile to note that Defoort (2001) uses Wittgenstein's idea of family resemblance to suggest a possible descriptive analysis of this, as she claims, unsolvable 'Chinese philosophy' debate (Defoort, 2006, p. 652, n. 91)--to count 'Chinese philosophy' as an adopted child of the family of philosophy, for 'the members of a family may not all share a common essence, but there is something else that binds them: a family name' (Defoort, 2001, p. 408). This is a completely comprehensible suggestion from a European mind, but I believe that this is an unnecessary suggestion and an inappropriate description as well.…”

“…However, Hu (1919) did not address the question of the justification of the neologism Zhongguo zhexue as referring to the corpus of traditional Chinese thought as some sinologists might have expected (see Defoort, 2001Defoort, , p. 397, 2006. 3 Rather, he presupposed that part of the Chinese intellectual tradition was essentially the same thing as Western philosophy, only with different origins.…”

“…In the Ming Dynasty, books were published such as ( ) Xi Xue Fan (1623), ( ) Xiou Shen Xi Xue (1630), and ( ) Ming Li Tan (1631), in which philosophia is transliterated as feilusuofeiya, feiluosuofeiya, or feilufeiya, being a subject taught in Europe (Zhong, 1992, p. 162). As Defoort and Standaert indicate, in the seventeenth century, the missionaries seemed to have no doubt that Confucius was a philosopher and considered the Yi Jing as a philosophical book, while the definition of philosophy in modern times has become narrower (Defoort, 2001(Defoort, , p. 401, 2006Standaert, 2000, p. 315). However, the missionaries' religious motives should not be neglected when evaluating their 'assessment' of Confucius and others, but it is true that their communications to European scholars convinced some of them (e.g.…”

Worlding Oneness

“…15 With Daoism mired in the debates over its religious and/or philosophical identity, "oneness" as an analytical framework in anthropological and other critical cultural analyses has become most often associated with Heidegger. Expressed through his ontology of worlding, oneness signals that knowing the world is at once being in the world.…”

Instruction Dialogues in the Zhuangzi: An “Anthropological” Reading

“…On this larger debate, see e.g. Defoort 2001 andDefoort 2006. 4 For a strong statement of this view, see Eno 1990: 1-15.…”