Reading Zhongyong as a gongfu instruction: Comments on Focusing the familiar

摘要

As the Zbongyong is the most philosophical work among the Confucian classics,rninterpretation of the work is crucial for our appropriation of traditionalrnChinese philosophical wisdom. Professors Ames and Hall's new book onrnthe Zhongyong shows their continuing effort in resisting the mainstream tendencyrnof using dominant Western philosophical locutions to interpret Chinesernthought, and in extending their interpretation of Chinese thought as arndistinct philosophical tradition, which is, in their view, predominantly processrnoriented rather than substance oriented, immanent rather than transcendent,rnperson-making rather than rule-following, and aesthetic ratherrnthan mediated by abstraction. Their new interpretation makes it clear thatrnthe metaphysics entailed in the Zhongyong is nonsubstantialistic, and thusrnshould not be translated in substance-oriented language, as it was done inrnthe old translations. Instead, it should be translated in the language of process,rnor as they call it, "the language of focus and field." This is a languagernthat "presumes a world constituted by an interactive field of processes andrnevents in which there are no final elements, only shifting 'loci' in the phenomenalrnfield, each of which focuses the entire field from its finite perspective"rn(Ames and Hall 2001: 7). Through the application of this language,rnAmes and Hall display a woddview fundamentally different from the onernsubstance language offers. While the latter conceives the world as one ofrndiscrete entities with fixed essences, which affect each other from without,rnthe former takes the world to be of interconnected states, constantly inrntheir self-transformation and mutual transformation.