The Possibility of Returning to Experience: The Essence of Philosophical History in Chinese Philosophy and Its Reflection

Abstract

The Chinese construction of the science of philosophy takes as its basic form the narrative of the history of philosophy. The introduction into Chinese philosophy of the normative character of philosophy and its problem framework via the narrative of the history of philosophy has to some extent enabled the practice of philosophy to remain separate from the norms and methods of traditional Chinese thought. Philosophical norms and problem frameworks from the West have changed the happenings of the historical world towards the eternal Dao of the classical world into intellectual texts, and have transformed the situationbased expressive strategy that develops the principles of things in the world of concrete experience into concepts and categories. As a consequence of these two positions, the ground of Chinese philosophy, based as it is on the history of philosophy, may not only be separated from the everlasting world of experience of the classics, but may also be divorced from the present experience of the modernization process. If we start from an analysis of the historicity of the Chinese intellectual tradition and its classical character, Chinese philosophy has obtained the possibility of returning to experience by means of parsing jishi yanli, a way of thinking that uses the investigation of things to fathom principles. The pathway of integrating philosophical thinking and experience will enhance and stimulate the contemporary value of the classics. More importantly, regarding the unique methods and strategies of expression in traditional Chinese thought as a general philosophical approach can facilitate the promotion of the construction of a world philosophy oriented toward current experience.

Keywords:

• history of philosophy
• historicity
• jishi yanli
• experiential world

Notes

1 As Feng Youlan stresses, the history of Chinese philosophy involved extracting the parts of traditional Chinese thought that met philosophical normativity and restating them through philosophical categories, concepts, and propositional demonstrations. It can be said that the philosophical content in the narrating of the history of philosophy is determined by the unique understanding of philosophical norms. Moreover, the constantly detailed textual analysis and interpretation of thought made under the established framework of the history of philosophy are simply made to further strengthen the extraction of thought and general narrative based on the understanding of norms, so in a certain sense intensify the “sense of heterogeneity” between the “history of philosophy” and the tradition of thought brought about by philosophical norms.

2 Chinese academia has made some observations about the orientation towards the history of philosophy and the history of thought in the study of Chinese philosophy. For instance, “The study of philosophy merely taking it as the history of thought not only distorts the nature of philosophy, but makes it difficult for those who are not expert at Chinese philosophy to research it, and this is thus an adverse condition for Chinese philosophy to become a world philosophy.” (See Li Chenyang, “Chinese Philosophy Stepping Towards the World.”)

3 Ernst Cassirer, The Logic of the Humanities, p. 17.

4 Zhao Tingyang, “The Suspicious Identity of Chinese Philosophy.”

5 Chen Shaoming, People, Events and Objects in the World of Classics, p. 21.

6 Zhao Tingyang, “China as a Methodology.”

7 Roger T. Ames, Harmony with Independence: Comparative Philosophy and East-West Understanding, p. 12.