Chung-Ying Cheng

There are two aspects of the hermeneutic: the receptive and the creative. The receptive of the hermeneutic consists in coming to know and acknowledge what has happened, observing what there is as historically effected, foretelling what will happen as a matter of projection of future possibilities, and disclosing / discovering transcendental conditions, fore-structures or horizons of human understanding and interpretation; the creative of the hermeneutic, on the other hand, consists in realizing and demonstrating human sensibilities and human capabilities and needs, conceptualizing what is factual and real based on human cognitive and volitional faculties and experiences, developing values and pursuing regulative ideals of actions, and searching for best possible ways or methods to reach for individual and communal end-goals which will enhance human beings as autonomous entities and moral agents in the world. The receptive is represented by the phenomenological approach to Being and reality whereas the creative is conveyed by an ontology of reflection of human being for self-definition and self-cultivation of human faculties. This amounts to bringing out an existing distinction between ming (what is imparted) and li (the presupposed ground) on the one hand and xing ( human potentiality for being in oneself) and xin (human understanding and interpretation toward action) on the other in the tradition of Confucian metaphysics.Next, I shall focus on Heidegger and Gadamer as taking ontological receptivity (as a matter of fore-structures of Being or Language of human understanding) as the source of meaning of existence and meaningfulness of texts. Th ere are of course creative elements to be identifi ed with forming investigative projects of the Dasein for disclosing truth of the Being, but the main tone is to realize the Being or Language as base structures of our hermeneutic consciousness or hermeneutic space of understanding. Because of spacelimitation, however, I shall leave to another occasion the discussion of the creative formation and positive projection of a transformative cosmological philosophy in the Yijing tradition as represented in my onto-hermeneutics which takes experiences of ≫comprehensive observation≪ (guan) and ≫feeling- refl ection≪ (gan) as two avenues toward human understanding and hermeneutic enterprise of interpretation.

There are two aspects of the hermeneutic: the receptive and the creative. The receptive of the hermeneutic consists in coming to know and acknowledge what has happened, observing what there is as historically effected, foretelling what will happen as a matter of projection of future possibilities, and disclosing / discovering transcendental conditions, fore-structures or horizons of human understanding and interpretation; the creative of the hermeneutic, on the other hand, consists in realizing and demonstrating human sensibilities and human capabilities and needs, conceptualizing what is factual and real based on human cognitive and volitional faculties and experiences, developing values and pursuing regulative ideals of actions, and searching for best possible ways or methods to reach for individual and communal end-goals which will enhance human beings as autonomous entities and moral agents in the world. The receptive is represented by the phenomenological approach to Being and reality whereas the creative is conveyed by an ontology of reflection of human being for self-definition and self-cultivation of human faculties. This amounts to bringing out an existing distinction between ming (what is imparted) and li (the presupposed ground) on the one hand and xing ( human potentiality for being in oneself) and xin (human understanding and interpretation toward action) on the other in the tradition of Confucian metaphysics.Next, I shall focus on Heidegger and Gadamer as taking ontological receptivity (as a matter of fore-structures of Being or Language of human understanding) as the source of meaning of existence and meaningfulness of texts. Th ere are of course creative elements to be identifi ed with forming investigative projects of the Dasein for disclosing truth of the Being, but the main tone is to realize the Being or Language as base structures of our hermeneutic consciousness or hermeneutic space of understanding. Because of spacelimitation, however, I shall leave to another occasion the discussion of the creative formation and positive projection of a transformative cosmological philosophy in the Yijing tradition as represented in my onto-hermeneutics which takes experiences of ≫comprehensive observation≪ (guan) and ≫feeling- refl ection≪ (gan) as two avenues toward human understanding and hermeneutic enterprise of interpretation.

In Chinese tradition Confucianism has been always both a philosophy of moral self-cultivation for the human individual and an ideological guide for political institutional policy and governmental action. After the May 4th Movement of 1919 (WusiYundong ), Confucianism lost much of its moral appeal and political authority and entered a kind of limbo, bearing blame for the backwardness and weakening of China. Now that China has asserted its political rights among world nations, it seems natural to ask whether Confucianism as a philosophy has a modern or even postmodern role to play for building modern China and for enlightening the world. This question is even more meaningful in light of the fact that there is a genuine need felt in China for a return to its Confucian heritage and vision for purposes of sustaining societal harmonization and reconstructing cultural identity in the modern world.

There are two crucial problems with which the philosophical circle in Mainland China grappled on the eve of the Great Cultural Revolution. First, there is the problem of evaluation of methodology for the study of Chinese philosophy and its history. Second, there is the problem of to what extent and in what way the ethical and moral tradition of the Chinese past should be inherited by the modern Chinese Marxists. We have published many articles in these two areas in previous issues. In this double issue a comprehensive report on these two problems is presented. The general pattern of such discussions, in retrospect, seems to be some sort of combination of suggestion and criticism in the name or in the light of Marxist ideology. The critical position in most cases overwhelms the suggestive position. Fung Yu-lan's view on "abstract inheritance" and Liu Chieh's view on "trans-class analysis" of Confucian morality are most severely criticized. The winning side therefore provided a great impetus and momentum for the onset of the sweeping Cultural Revolution.

This issue is selected from T'ien Ch'ang-wu's Wang Ch'ung: An Ancient Chinese Militant Materialist, published in Shanghai in 1973. Wang Ch'ung (A.D. 27-c. 100) was a naturalistic thinker who boldly criticized the taboos and superstitions of the miscellaneous Yin-Yang structures in the Han period. The present study elaborates Wang Ch'ung's critical spirit and naturalism in accordance with T'ien's concluding remark: "Our duty is not to show that Wang Ch'ung has given us Marxism but to apply Marxism in making a scientific recapitulation of his work in order to enrich the treasury of our socialist culture and expedite our great socialist revolution."

Recurrent discussion of Marxism per se in philosophical writings of mainland China—its origin, its merits, its differences from its predecessors and their demerits and causes for decline—serves several important functions: (1) it preserves the distinctive identity of Scientific Marxism as a working ideology for social reconstruction; (2) it warns and criticizes the idealistic, the Utopian, the dogmatic or the scientific-mechanistic revisions of Marxism as a current Party platform; (3) it reminds the followers of Marxism of the importance and the significance of the historical development from early forms of socialism to the socialist philosophy of Marxism and the appropriateness and necessity of the application of Marxist principles to the Chinese revolution and Chinese history. These discussions also make it possible for Chinese ideologists to claim authenticity and orthodoxy of the Marxist heritage in their struggle with contemporary Soviet Russian political and ideological authorities. Finally, one can also see that the discussions of Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen, Mach and their doctrines, besides being a source of justification for philosophy workers in China, provide us with a clue to an understanding of the attack on and purge of some of the political and cultural views of Confucianism (notably the theory of government by virtuous ruler, the theory of universal human nature, and the theory of love or benevolence) before, during, and after the period of the Great Cultural Revolution in China.

Kuan Feng and Lin Lü-shih's long article "On Kuan Chung's System of Thought" is a thorough and serious study of the well-known ancient philosopher-statesman Kuan Chung in the light of the Marxist philosophy of history and society. Kuan Chung is identified as a materialist, a dialectician, and a philosopher for the people. This sympathetic perspective marks another attempt in Communist China to reevaluate the past and to assimilate, if possible, what is valuable in the past into the current ideological system.

In this issue we are presenting the first installment of an "Outline of Lectures on the History of Chinese Philosophy," compiled by the History of Chinese Philosophy Teaching and Research Group of the Department of Philosophy at Peking University. The complete Outline was first published from February 1957 to April 1958 in the Chinese periodical Hsin chien-she (New Construction) on the Chinese Mainland. It was re-issued in book form in Hong Kong in 1975. This Outline presents an example of how Chinese mainland scholars interpreted the history of Chinese philosophy under the pressure of the Marxist ideology.

Kuan Feng and Lin Lü-shih's work on reinterpreting pre-Confucian thought in the Yin-Chou period in the light of social class interests and conflicts shows a highly sophisticated use of Marxist methodology. It also uncovers many interesting problems, such as the basic modes of thinking in the Chou-i, the "Hung-fan," Yin Chi-fu, and Shih Po. By presenting the ancient thought in a reasoned manner, the Marxist methodology loses its forbidding dogmatic aspect and assumes a reasoned appearance open to argumentation. Kuan and Lin's work thus becomes a testing ground not only for an adequate understanding of ancient Chinese thought and its background, but for the adequacy of Marxism as a tool of understanding.

Although the controversy over the question of whether or not there is identity between erroneous thinking and existence is ten years in the past, the philosophical pertinency of the issue and the variety of ways in which it has been argued have much to say about the methodology, the metaphysics, and the political philosophy of Marxist thinking in Mainland China. There are two opposite and mutually criticizing sides in this controversy. On the one side it is argued that there is no actual identity between erroneous thinking and existence because genuine reflection of existence must be correct thinking and cannot be erroneous thinking. On the other side it is argued that, even though erroneous thinking contradicts existence, it can be identified with existence because their identity can be understood as a dialectical process of change and conflict. The latter view seems to receive much more support than the former, which is severely criticized by it. The development of events in the last ten years in the People's Republic of China seems to bear out the latter view. This view in effect provides a guiding principle for understanding and evaluating the constant tensions among people, society, government, party, and history in Mainland China. As a final note, it might also be pointed out that the very controversy itself underlies some basic problems of a Marxist interpretation of history and the role of thinking or consciousness in history-making.

In this and some succeeding issues of Chinese Studies in Philosophy we are concentrating on articles from mainland China that deal with anti-Confucianism from the so-called Legalist point of view and the Legalist reinterpretation of some unorthodox thinkers in Chinese intellectual history. Often such discussions are based on some superimposed dichotomization of Confucian and Legalist points of view. For the Western reader, the political contexts for such efforts are probably more telling than their contents.

Kuan Feng's article "A Study of Sun Tzu's Philosophical Thought on the Military" won him an influential position in ideological circles in the Chinese Communist Party. It has been circulated for study in the Chinese Red Army. Again studying an ancient thinker from a materialist and dialectical point of view, Kuan Feng has made a clear and penetrating analysis of Sun Tzu's military philosophy and its relation to other schools of thought such as Lao Tzu's. Thus a subsequent discussion on Lao Tzu in this issue will help to locate fundamental ideas which Kuan and other Marxist-oriented philosophers in China hold to be valuable.

Chinese naturalism has been explored, extolled, and extended in the circle of philosophy workers in Mainland China from the beginning in 1950 to the present. The reason is very simple: Chinese naturalism provides a native basis for accepting a materialist as well as a dialectical interpretation of the world and of man and man's history. It might be said that before the introduction of Marxism into China, Chinese naturalism had already evolved an outlook on nature and man very closely linked to that held by present-day Chinese intellectuals under Chinese Marxism, even though it must be acknowledged that it is only in the light of Chinese Marxism that some distinctive features of Chinese naturalism, including its weaknesses in social, economic and political consciousness, become manifest and explicit.

Throughout 1977 critics of the "gang of four" referred to Mao's works as providing a theoretical basis for their attacks on the theoretical underpinnings of the "gang-of-four" line. Specifically, Mao's essay "On the Ten Major Relationships" was frequently cited to serve this purpose. This issue is comprised mainly of articles which reflect the historical transformation in China from the radicalized Maoism of the "gang of four" to the revisionistic philosophy of nation-building which the current regime advocates in Mao's name.

The most significant article in this issue is the one in criticism of Chang Tai-nien's reflections on some characteristics of classical Chinese philosophy. The four younger Marxist philosophy workers in Commuist China, Hsiao Chieh-fu, Chu Po-kung, T'ang I-chieh, and Lu Yü-san, have sharply denounced Chang's interpretation of Chinese philosophy, which attempts to present some universal elements in Chinese classical thinking. The rejection is made in the name of orthodox Marxism-Leninism, and what is rejected is called anti-Marxist revisionism. This radical attitude ominously points to the Red Guard Movement in the sixties. But, curiously and ironically, what Chang has emphasized in classical Chinese philosophy regarding the Taoist dialectics of reversal (fan-yan) has gradually reversed the Red Guard Movement from successful power concentration to unsuccessful power diffusion. In a sense Chang has achieved a kind of vindication.

Since the beginning of 1963 the Chinese Communist Party has started to reinvigorate itself in a large-scale criticism of capitalistic ideology and social science on the one hand and of what is regarded as the Russian revisionism of Marxism-Leninism on the other. Whereas capitalism is criticized for its intentional misrepresentation and disguising of class struggles in order to defend its own interests, the Russian revisionism is criticized even more vehemently for its imperialist neocolonialism, which is essentially more capitalist than capitalism. The correct line of thought is Mao Tse-tung's genuine Marxism, which can be translated into reality through action and education and which meets the challenges of history and of society.