Let Confucian Philosophy Speak on Its Own Terms

A SOURCEBOOK IN CLASSICAL CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY. By Roger T. Ames. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2023. Pp. 798, $99.00 (hardcover). How to let the Confucian Philosophy speak on its own terms? The approach of comparative cultural hermeneutics and the translation method of contextualization needed to answer this question are explained and practiced in A Sourcebook in Classical Confucian Philosophy (hereafter called The Sourcebook), a book written by Roger T. Ames, the famous American Sinologist and the leading figure in the comparative study of Chinese and Western philosophy. The Sourcebook distinguishes itself from its scholarly peers by combining Confucian research with the translation of Confucian philosophical literature and is written to restore Chinese philosophical ideas to their original appearance. Ames attempts to rectify the distortion of Chinese philosophy caused by the current basic vocabulary and basic conceptual framework. As author and translator, Ames explains and highlights that using the lexical system established by missionaries who first introduced the Confucian classics and reading Chinese philosophy through Western conceptual patterns has created a fundamental barrier to understanding the true meaning of Confucianism as the popularization of humanistic values. Hence, the value and the significance of The Sourcebook. The Sourcebook is composed of two sections. The first section deals with three essential issues, including the methodology in the comparison between the Chinese and Western philosophical ways of thinking, the differences between Confucian cosmology and Greek Transcendentalism, and the core thoughts in Chinese cosmology. The second section selects and complies with the nine representative articles of Confucian philosophical literature in the pre-Qin period, and both the original text and the translated text are arranged in parallel for both the expert and generalist alike as a basis for making comparisons with and evaluations of. Entitled “Confucian Natural Cosmology: An Interpretive Context,” the first section begins on the methodological level and explains the approach of comparative cultural hermeneutics to compare the Chinese and Western philosophical ways of thinking. Ames draws on John Dewey's postulate of immediate empiricism and emphasizes practice so as to avoid the traditional dichotomy between theory and practice. Unlike the traditional way of entering abstract philosophical concepts and theories, Dewey has pointed out the necessity to experience and observe what form things are experienced. Every term must be understood in a particular experiential sense. Take the term “exemplary persons” (junzi 君子) cited in this section, for example. Sometimes, “the same Chinese term in a different context is better served by a different English translation” (ix). In alternative contexts, “exemplary persons” (junzi 君子) should quite properly be translated as “lord,” “prince,” or “ruler” rather than as “exemplary persons” (ix). Such translations and interpretations are undoubtedly significant for the reader. Under such context, the approach of comparative cultural hermeneutics proposed in this section calls for critical attention to the assumptions and purposes, the analogical associations and contrasts that arise in the process of interpreting and generating meaning. Ames also points out that using comparative cultural hermeneutics connects and contrasts the different presuppositions in Chinese and Western philosophical narrations and, thus, helps to better understand Chinese philosophical thinking, which is different from that of the West. Applying comparative cultural hermeneutics to the study of ancient Greek and Chinese philosophy, Ames reveals some interesting contrasts between Greek transcendentalism and Confucian cosmology. The ontological way of thinking of ancient Greece rests on the assumption that human experience is immutable, which historically has become the belief that there is a perfect and unchanging God. Aristotle's method of knowing is analysis, which is to grasp the real, permanent, and unchanging essence behind the contingent and accidental. So Aristotle is about de-contextualizing and isolating so as to know. However, this is in sharp contrast to China's process-oriented worldview, which rejects fixed starting and ending points and rejects any strict formal identity, as explicitly stated in the Book of Changes (Yijing易經). Ames argues that in the Chinese narrative, life and ceaseless procreation within a process cosmology (shengsheng buxi 生生不息) and elaborates that the Confucian way of thinking of life begins not with a transcendent God but with the continuing context of ordinary human's life experience and the need to transform that experience into something elegant and wise. The Confucian method of knowing is the idea of “knowing the way” (zhi dao知道), which is to know its narrative, its history, and its story, so Chinese cosmology is about contextualizing and mapping its association in order to “knowing something” (zhi dao 知道), to “unravel” (lijie 理解), to “see clearly” (liaojie了解), and “penetrate through” (datong 达通). As Ames explains, the fallacy of simple location is not appropriate for understanding Chinese culture. Comparing the difference between Greek ontology and Confucian process cosmology will deepen the understanding of the two traditions. Ames continues to explain the core thoughts in Chinese cosmology, and this is also the last issue in this section. Ames introduces his “Human-becoming study of Confucian Cosmology,” whose theoretical core lies in affirming the “relationship” in life. It holds that the world is a “relational aggregation” with “qi”(氣) as the fundamental category, connecting nature (本性) and activity, individual, and relationship, in which every human being plays different social roles in various situations. Ames points out that each human life can be both one and many, one of the continuous and consistent activities of its own life and many roles created by various social relations nodes and various interrelationships. This is what Ames and his teacher Tang Junyi mean by “the inseparability of the one and the many” (yi duo bu fen 一多不分) as a fundamental postulate of Confucian cosmology. Therefore, to understand any “one thing” (yi 一) in Confucian tradition, it is necessary to understand the “many things” (duo 多) that give it context. This section of The Sourcebook is a basic statement of Chinese Confucian philosophy that lays the theoretical foundation for the translation and interpretation of different Confucian classics and paves the way for a better presentation of accurate and comprehensive Confucian philosophy to Western readers. The second section selects and compiles nine representative articles of Confucian philosophical classics in the pre-Qin period, respective namely the Book of Changes (Yijing易經), the Analects (Lunyu 論語), the Mencius (Mengzi 孟子), the Focusing the Familiar (Zhongyong中庸), the Classic of Family Reverence (Xiaojing孝經), the Five Modes of Virtuosic Conduct (Wuxingpian五行篇), the Mozi (墨子), and the Xunzi (荀子). In this section, the book starts with a detailed review of the background, core concepts, and ideas of each representative classic article, which helps readers to have a deep and comprehensive understanding of Confucian philosophy. After the research context and illustration of core concepts, both the original text and the English translation are presented in parallel order for readers' understanding, comparison, and contrast. As Ames has explained earlier, his purpose in applying comparative cultural hermeneutics is to display the difference between the Ancient Greek ontology and the Confucian process cosmology explicitly, and therefore, given this difference in the two philosophical ways of thinking, the specific context and the situation are really important in the translation of Chinese classics. That is why Ames asserts that contextualization is the overall translation strategy in the whole translation practice. Take the translation of “Cultivating One's Person” (xiushen 修身) in the Analects (Lunyu 論語) for example, Ames begins with the traditional Chinese assumption of self and focuses on explaining the Chinese correlative way of thinking. He points out that “[i]n Confucian China, the traditional assumption has been that there is a symbiosis between personal order and the order of community and state, with the broader configuration always emerging out of what is more immediate and concrete” (137). To be specific, in the Confucian context, a person is always located within a set of relational contexts, and a person is constituted by his relationships. A person is one and many at the same time (yi duo bu fen 一多不分). The Confucian tradition has been largely persuaded by a relational and, hence social definition of persons rather than by any notion of discrete individuality . . . Confucian model is one of persons embedded within a social ecology . . . becoming a Confucian person involves benefiting and being benefited by membership in a world of reciprocal loyalties and obligations which surround and stimulate one, and which define one's own worth. (140) That is to say, to cultivate one's person (xiushen 修身) is to cultivate personal relationships. Evidently, the advantage of Ames' emphasis on contextualization in his philosophical interpretation of Chinese ethical concepts clearly reveals the essential differences between Chinese and Western thought. The Chinese concept of “self” and “to cultivate one's person” is very different from Western individualism. In the Western model, a person begins as an individual, and the individual self is autonomous, free, rational, and self-choosing. Obviously, the translation of “cultivating one's person (xiushen 修身)” in The Sourcebook is simply not a literal translation but a result of careful analogy and comparison in the process of interpreting. This is how Ames translates all vocabulary and every single term in the nine representative Confucian philosophical classics. As Ames states, it is in this effort to take Chinese philosophy on its own terms that The Sourcebook addresses the challenge of trying to provide a translation of Chinese texts that would respect their own implicit worldviews and make explicit the Confucian tradition's own indigenous presuppositions (viii-ix). The Sourcebook is of great significance to the translation and cross-cultural communication of Chinese philosophy. The emphasis on contextualization presents a detailed analysis and explanation along with the translated text, which serves to reveal the essential meaning of the original thought, represent the linguistic and cultural characteristics of the Chinese classics, and unveil the connotation of Chinese philosophical terms. Generally speaking, Ames applies three ways to contextualize Confucius' discourse: to translate the non-subject sentence of the original text into an imperative sentence, to add the subject “I” to the translated sentence, thus contextualizing Confucius' discourse into a conversation about personal life experience and to add some possessive pronouns to concertize the translated sentence into a targeted conversation. The overall effect is to emphasize the event and specificity of the discourse to eliminate the universality of the discourse in the process of translation. In this way, Ames interprets Confucian classics as philosophy of action, philosophy of life, philosophy of practice and philosophy of process. The ethical concepts of cultivating one's person (xiushen 修身), setting the family right (qijia 齊家), bringing proper order to the state (zhiguo 治國), effecting peace in the world (pingtianxia 平天下), maintaining Tian's mandate (tianming 天命), and effecting order through family reverence (xiao 孝), which originally existed in the Analects of Confucius, are all interpreted as various conducts and become the code of rule for people's behaviors. In this book, Ames reconfigures Confucian discourse as an “event” narration of “non-essentialism” in a specific context, interprets Confucian ethics into the philosophy of life, philosophy of action, philosophy of practice, and philosophy of process, and thus smooths out the abstractness and universality of Confucian ethical thoughts. As Ames states himself, the ultimate goal of re-translation is to reconfigure the Analects (Lunyu 論語) and to draw on Confucianism to cure the disease of contemporary American cultural modernity. This way of thinking is not only closely related to the reflection on the crisis of cultural modernity in the West but also related to the human predicament at present—global warming, environmental degradation, and so on (Ames 2006). In the world today, if Confucianism has an important contribution to make, it is this alternative conception of person. Individualism is a fiction and has become a pernicious idea. Individualism gives us a model of self-interested choices, and winners-and-losers. But the Confucian tradition, grounded in the pervasive cultural metaphor of family, is win-win or lose-lose alternative. (137–142) As stated above, The Sourcebook is very significant to “integrate the fragile liberal democracy with the deeper sense of community advocated by Confucianism” (Ames 2006) and promote the cross-cultural communication of Chinese classics. To sum up, The Sourcebook has the following outstanding features: First, it offers a unique perspective on research and translation. Ames did not adopt a single perspective on the interpretation of Confucian classics but rather from the perspective of comparative philosophy between China and the West. At the same time, the pre-translation has laid the foundation for clearly translating the Confucian classics; the original text and the translated text are arranged in parallel, and after the translation, some related research about the text is done. All these are unique and conducive for the readers to deeply and accurately understand the philosophy of Confucianism and to contribute to the exchange and development of the philosophy of the Chinese and Western and the Chinese and Western cultures. Second, The Sourcebook covers a wide range of nine Confucian texts. The Sourcebook gets rid of translations that focus only on one particular Confucian classic. It is a more comprehensive translation and commentary on the Confucian classics involving The Book of Changes (Yijing 易經), The Analects (Lunyu論語), The Mencius (Mengzi 孟子), and so on. The wider coverage allows readers to have a more comprehensive and more in-depth understanding of Confucian philosophy. At the same time, the translated contents are all Confucian classics, which also provide information for learners of Confucian philosophy in the English-speaking world and enrich the learners' knowledge. Lastly, it is worth mentioning Ames' expertise and authority as well as his remarkable contributions to the field of Chinese philosophy. Apart from The Sourcebook, he has published two other books, A Conceptual Lexicon for Classical Confucian Philosophy (2021) and Zoetology: Chinese Philosophy (2021). A Conceptual Lexicon for Classical Confucian Philosophy is recommended by Ames as a companion volume for The Sourcebook because it provides the context and the explanation for the translation of central vocabulary and terms. Zoetology: Chinese Philosophy, which contains 23 academic papers on Ames's comparative study of Chinese and Western philosophy, opens up the detailed illustration of the approach of comparative cultural hermeneutics and the “Human-becoming study of Confucian Cosmology.” Not only can all of his recent three books show his expertise in Chinese philosophy and contributions to the development of Chinese philosophy, but they can also be seen as the witness of his meditation on the era of great changes in human philosophy, which centers on that human beings can no longer be attached to the ideology of individualism. The dialogue between Chinese and Western philosophy has entered a new era of great change, and Chinese philosophy will become a significant theoretical resource for the development of world philosophy and culture. Despite being an authoritative and rich study, The Sourcebook inevitably has flaws. Among the translations of nine representative articles of Confucian philosophical literature, The Analects (Lunyu論語) occupies a dominant proportion, accounting for 33% of the whole translation texts. However, the Mozi (墨子) occupies only a small percentage, accounting for just 1.8%. This arrangement might be due to the limitation of space, but it will lead to some Confucian classics being abridged, which fail to present the whole picture of Chinese classic literature and Confucian philosophy. To sum up, adopting the approach of comparative cultural hermeneutics, A Sourcebook in Classical Confucian Philosophy analyzes the historical background and the ideas and core concepts in the representative articles of Confucian philosophical literature, which is of high value for both the academic study of the Confucian philosophy and the study of translation between Chinese and English. The text of Confucian philosophical literature is presented in a bilingual format, which can meet the needs of interpretation and can also be appreciated as a classic work of Chinese literature translated into English. The important Confucian philosophical vocabulary and conceptual frameworks are placed in its distinctive cultural semantic environments for a comparative interpretation of the differences between Chinese and Western philosophical narration. This approach helps express Chinese Confucianism more accurately, thereby completing the task of letting the Confucian philosophy speak on its own terms. All in all, the book provides an easy-to-read and useful reference book, and it is of great value to both scholars and students of Confucian philosophy and Chinese-English translation studies

Epistemology · Linguistics · Chinese history and philosophy · History · Philosophy