The Ivory Tower and the Marble Citadel: Essays on Political Philosophy in Our Modern Era of Interacting Cultures

5. Interpreting the Hermeneutic Turn: A “Neo-Hegelian” Critique of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Hermeneutic Philosophy and of Liu Xiao-gan’s Critique of It

Chapter V h Interpreting the Hermeneutic Turn: A “Neo-Hegelian” Critique of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Hermeneutic Philosophy and of Liu Xiao-gan’s Critique of It 1. Four Versions of the Hermeneutic Turn: The Overarching Philosophical Problem of Freedom and Utility Writing this essay about Liu Xiao-gan’s 2009 book on Chinese and hermeneutical philosophy1 has been an extraordinarily timeconsuming and rewarding task, because this erudite, formidable, brilliant, and provocative study advances exploration of an exceedingly complex problem: how philosophy can help Chinese form a pattern of “inner” values (what Mou Zong-san called wenhua jiao-yang [culture and moral cultivation] and Werner Jaeger, paideia [socialization, education, and propaganda]) meeting the “outer” needs of a technologically and institutionally modern society. This problem is urgent given a widespread consensus east and west about the current predicament of political philosophy. On the one hand, despite endless controversies regarding domestic and foreign policies and the major unsolved problem of how to conceptualize the balance between the “horizontal” and “vertical” aspects of political structure (see ch. I, sec. 9), many around the world, though not all and not necessarily most, agree that government should pursue “utilitarian” goals (see ch. I, sec. 2). They are determined that political life, though not necessarily all human activity, should give these goals primacy over religious 348 The Ivory Tower and the Marble Citadel or other goals. These utilitarian goals center on the use of modern science and technology to pursue prosperity and on the effort maximally to practice democracy as rule by the governed. There is also considerable agreement that these “outer” aspects of a good political life cannot be realized without an “inner” pattern of paideia dealing convincingly with “matters of ultimate concern” (zhong-ji guan-huai) and producing citizens able to think intelligently about how to put the public good above private gratification, long-term over short-term interests. On the other hand, there is a drastic lack of consensus east and west about what ideas can form such a pattern of paideia. Thus in China sharp controversy continues between those like Liu Xiaogan who recommend using philosophy to channel ancient Chinese values into China’s modern pattern of paideia, and those like Gao Rui-quan, who in his 1999 book favored a “modern culturalspiritual tradition” (xian-dai jing-shen chuan-tong) largely discarding these ancient values (see ch. I). Indeed this “culture war” between traditionalistic and iconoclastic approaches to the formation of paideia is still more bitter in the U.S.A. today.2 Moreover, whether the favored values are traditionalistic or iconoclastic, there also is lack of consensus about how “philosophy” can or cannot be used to define this “inner” intellectual-moralspiritual basis of paideia. Indeed there is even endless disagreement about how to describe the disagreements between philosophers in this regard. As discussed in chapter I, this book tries to deal with these disagreements by defining philosophy in a way partly implied by Tang Jun-yi’s 1961 philosophy textbook (Zhe-xue gai-lun) as a linguistically unavoidable aspect of political life positing that the legitimization of government is derived from the most enlightened understanding of a sensorially unobservable and thus metaphysical object, the nature or condition of human life in general or as a whole. I also inferred from Tang’s book that the three central questions in the discussion of this object are: what exists, has existed, or will exist (cun-zai, ontology); how to know what exists (ren-shi, epistemology); and what to do about what exists (jiazhi , shi-jian, ethics and political philosophy), the latter, third topic, revolving around the twin concerns of inner freedom and the pursuit of utility in the outer world. It follows that political 5. Gadamer, Liu Xiao-gan, and “Neo-Hegelianism” 349 philosophy is a topic absolutely central not only to the semantic nature of political life but also to the very agenda of philosophy itself, contrary to the apolitical direction of much contemporary academic philosophy, especially in the West. This apolitical direction has been partly due to the impact of science, since much attention has been and continues to be paid to the question of whether philosophy has anything to add to what physics has been revealing about the nature of the universe. That it has nothing to add has recently been argued again by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow in their famous The Grand Design. Interest in this...