Thinking Through Confucius (Suny Series in Systematic Philosophy)

Rating:
Summary: Very important, but with yawning problems
Review: I fell in love with this book when I first read it, but now, a year later and much better read, I find I have little patience with it. The basic approach of this book is as follows: team up a philosopher with a sinologist whose main expertise seems to be philology. Marriage of disciplines, right? The philosopher is an expert in American Pragmatism (Dewey, Whitehead, Mead, etc.) and he and the sinologist think they have found a stunning match between that line of thinking and the early Chinese. The sinologist's role, then, is to support a pragmatic reading of the original texts by recourse to extended philological reflections based on sources from centuries later. The result? Ames and Hall have been putting out books, translations, and articles since the early 80s, and the bottom line is always the same. All early mainstream Chinese thinkers (e.g. Confucius, Mencius, the Daoists) "live in a universe" where there is no such thing as "transcendence". Now, this seems a very interesting claim, and I think in a moderate form it is tenable. But the authors err on several counts. Firstly, Hall's treatment of the western tradition radically oversimplifies and even cretinizes nuanced issues that have been the focus of debate for centuries, reducing them all almost literally to an 'error' that says A can exist ("be truly understood", whatever) independently of B but not vice versa. The truth--that neither A nor B can exist independently of the other--can of course be found in the Pragmatist writings. Now I study Chinese philosophy, not Pragmatism, so a critique of Hall's views might be seen as internal to the Western tradition and so outside my proper scope. Nonetheless, the second point of error Ames and Hall make is clear. They very uncritically apply a radically simplified "transcendance/immanence" model to Chinese thought, which results in patently absurd conclusions. Many of these may be found in their later publications: the claim that 'xing' or 'nature' is an achievement concept, that 'completing' something really means 'creating it', that 'rightness' actually means 'making significant for oneself'. I won't even mention the blatantly untenable claims that they share with Chad Hansen: that the Chinese thinkers had no notion of 'truth', that their language does not 'abstract', etc. This is confused philosophizing on their part, as well as bad sinology. Heiner Roetz has offered perhaps the best critique of the entire movement in sinology featuring writers like Hansen, Ames/Hall, Fingarette, and Eno and tracing its roots to Granet, Weber, and Hegel. He calls it 'pragmatic', broadly speaking, and identifies the key locus of its claims: that Chinese thinkers lack, or ignore, or prefer not to engage in certain forms of mentation we in the Greek tradition think of as 'rational'. This makes the Chinese radically Other, and one's pursuant assessment of them depends largely on one's opinions of the Western tradition to which they are opposed. Ames and Hall think there has been a 'crisis' in the West "ever since Parmenides", so they go all-out for "non-transcendence".

I've run out of energy for this review, and I realize I am 'stopping' rather than 'ending'. I hope what I have said gives the reader some sense of what to expect in this book. I think everyone interested in Chinese thought should read it, but with their defcon setting on yellow.

Rating:
Summary: A philosophical Confucius
Review: Perhaps the best study of Confucius' thought available. There is a very detailed study of all the key terms in the Analects, with an emphasis on the capacity of the individual Confucian to use his better judgment in specific situations. In other words Confucius does not recommend blind obedience to the rules of etiquette (Li). The book also includes an in-depth comparison with Western philosophy, even post-modern. One of the authors, Roger Ames, has also recently written a splendid translation of the Analects together with Henry Rosemont. Both of these books are musts for a deeper understanding of the Analects.