'Desire' viewed through ethical optics: A comparative study of Dai Zhen and Levinas.

摘要

This research project investigates Confucian thinker Dai Zhen (1724-1777) and Jewish thinker Emmanuel Levinas's (1906-1995) philosophical discourses on desire from a comparative perspective. First, I look at Dai Zhen and Levinas individually each in their own philosophical contexts, while framing my readings with parallel structure that pivots on a hermeneutic strategy to examine their ideas of desire within the larger prospect of the human relation with transcendence. Then, my inquiry leads to a critical analysis of several interesting issues yielded in my interpretive readings of the two thinkers as regards transcendence and immanence and the self-other relationship. Methodologically, my study combines careful textual analysis, philosophical reflection, and historical sensitivity.;We might want to say that there is in fact no correlative of the Levinasian desire in Dai Zhen's philosophy. Dai Zhen's notion of desire perhaps comes closer to Levinas's concept of need. However, the disparity of their conceptual formulations does not keep us from discerning their shared ethical concern for the other, the weak, marginalized, and underprivileged group of society, which provides me the very ground for a dialogical comparison between the two thinkers. Henceforth, my writing is hinged on a comprehension of their conception of desire as an articulation of human striving for what is lying beyond themselves, as a redefinition of the being or essence of humankind in relation to the transcendent which in both philosophers' ethical thinking is translated into a sympathetic understanding of and care for the other, particularly the stranger, the widow, the orphan, the young, the weak and the like. Through the comparative study of the two thinkers' ideas of desire, I want to argue that "desire," which is most readily directed to human egoism and instinctive propensity in both Confucian and Western philosophical traditions, can be at once the very driving force to open us to the other beyond ourselves and an actual moral creativity to produce ethical being out of material existence.