Chinese Thought as Global Theory

Description

With a particular focus on Chinese thought, this volume explores how, and under what conditions, so-called "non-Western" traditions of thought can structure generally applicable social and political theory. Reversing the usual comparison between "local" Chinese application and "universal" theory, the work demonstrates how Chinese experiences and ideas offer systematic insight into shared social and political dilemmas. Contributors discuss how medieval Chinese understandings of causal heterogeneity can relieve impasses within contemporary historiography, how current economic and social conditions in China respond proactively to the future configuration of world markets, and how hybrid modes of cross-cultural engagement offer new foundations for the enterprise of learning from cultural others. Each chapter works from Chinese perspectives to theorize the location of knowledge, its conditions of production, and the modes through which its content or adequacy is legitimated, challenged, and sustained. Rather than reproducing Eurocentric knowledge production in Chinese form, the mobilization of Chinese thought as a generally applicable body of theory actually breaks down clear boundaries between Chinese and non-Chinese thought.
Acknowledgments

Foreword
Wang Gungwu

Introduction: On the Possibility of Chinese Thought as Global Theory
Leigh Jenco

Part I. Chinese Theory and the Conditions of Knowledge

1. Knowing How to Be: The Dangers of Putting (Chinese) Thought into Action
Gloria Davies

2. Grounding Normativity in Ritual: A Rereading of Confucian Texts
Takahiro Nakajima

3. Attitudes in Action: Maoism as Emotional Political Theory
Timothy Cheek

4. A (Psycho)Analysis of China’s New Nationalism
Guanjun Wu

Part II. Chinese Theories across Time and Space

5. New Communities for New Knowledge: Theorizing the Movement of Ideas across Space
Leigh Jenco

6. The Evolution and Identity of Confucianism: The Precedence Principle in Reforming Tradition
Chenyang Li

7. Being in Time: What Medieval Chinese Theorists Can Teach Us about Causation
Ignacio Villagran and Miranda Brown

8. China’s Present as the World’s Future: China and “Rule of Law” in a Post-Fordist World
Michael W. Dowdle

Appendix: Character List
List of Contributors
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Épistémologie
• Epistémologie
• Epistémologie
• Epistémologie
• Historiography
• International relations

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 12 mai 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438460468
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 11 Mo

Extrait

Chinese Thought as Global Theory
SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture

Roger T. Ames, editor
Chinese Thought as Global Theory
Diversifying Knowledge Production in the Social Sciences and Humanities
Edited by
Leigh Jenco
Cover Art: Atomic Wall Painting , near Wusi Dajie in Beijing, March 2013. Photograph by Lois Conner.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2016 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Emily Keneston
Marketing, Kate R. Seburyamo
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Chinese thought as global theory : diversifying knowledge production in the social sciences and humanities / edited by Leigh Jenco.
pages cm. — (SUNY series in Chinese philosophy and culture)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-6045-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-6046-8 (e-book)
1. Philosophy, Chinese. 2. Globalization. 3. Social sciences. 4. Humanities. I. Jenco, Leigh K., 1977– editor.
B5231.C45 2016 181'.11—dc23 2015019476
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments
Foreword
Wang Gungwu
Introduction: On the Possibility of Chinese Thought as Global Theory
Leigh Jenco
Part I: Chinese Theory and the Conditions of Knowledge
C HAPTER 1
Knowing How to Be: The Dangers of Putting (Chinese) Thought into Action
Gloria Davies
C HAPTER 2
Grounding Normativity in Ritual: A Rereading of Confucian Texts
Takahiro Nakajima
C HAPTER 3
Attitudes in Action: Maoism as Emotional Political Theory
Timothy Cheek
C HAPTER 4
A (Psycho)Analysis of China’s New Nationalism
Guanjun Wu
Part II: Chinese Theories across Time and Space
C HAPTER 5
New Communities for New Knowledge: Theorizing the Movement of Ideas across Space
Leigh Jenco
C HAPTER 6
The Evolution and Identity of Confucianism: The Precedence Principle in Reforming Tradition
Chenyang Li
C HAPTER 7
Being in Time: What Medieval Chinese Theorists Can Teach Us about Causation
Ignacio Villagran and Miranda Brown
C HAPTER 8
China’s Present as the World’s Future: China and “Rule of Law” in a Post-Fordist World
Michael W. Dowdle
Appendix: Character List
List of Contributors
Index
Acknowledgments
A revised version of chapter 4 appeared in The Great Dragon Fantasy: A Lacanian Analysis of Contemporary Chinese Thought , Guanjun Wu, Copyright © 2014, World Scientific Publishing Company.
A different version of chapter 5 appeared in Leigh Jenco, Changing Referents: Learning across Space and Time in China and the West (Oxford University Press, 2015); the author thanks Oxford University Press for permission to reprint.
The authors of this volume gratefully acknowledge Nancy Ellegate for her advice and help on many aspects of this volume. As senior acquisitions editor, Nancy shepherded our work into a long and distinguished list of titles in Chinese philosophy she had helped to build at SUNY Press. Sadly, she passed away as this volume went to press. The China field owes Nancy a great debt for her enormous contribution to making Chinese philosophy and Chinese ways of thinking a key topic in Anglophone academic publishing.
Foreword
Wang Gungwu
It has been an intriguing journey reading the essays in this volume. Leigh Jenco has led her team of explorers into the length and breadth of Chinese thought in an ambitious quest. What is there in Chinese thought or Chinese ways of thinking, as seen in the questions they asked and the problems they experienced through history, that can serve as global theory? Such a pursuit, as far as I know, has never been attempted in the deliberate and scholarly way it has been done in this volume.
The Chinese learned about the idea of global theory only after multiple defeats by the Western powers and in the context of recognizing the power of the natural sciences. That idea of theory was first encountered as another dimension of philosophy when scientific methods were applied to society, in the publication of Yan Fu’s translations in the 1890s. The excitement aroused by the powerful sets of ideas and methodologies that have remained dominant ever since was unprecedented. In particular, the Chinese literati found Yan Fu’s interpretation of Herbert Spencer’s version of social Darwinism most challenging. Nevertheless, the elite thinkers of the day confronted the social sciences openly and seemed confident that universalist claims could also be made out of China’s own ancient and rich philosophical traditions. That generation was soaked in those traditions so that comparisons and analogies were drawn with the Chinese past, even as many agreed that the theories introduced from Western Europe were fresh and significant. Deep down, the brightest among them also thought that they could find equivalent theories within China to match the Western theories and that, when identified and systematized, theirs could help restore the greatness of Chinese civilization.
Time, however, was not on the side of this last generation of literati. The Confucian state, and the classical thought systems that sustained it, had given them hope. But the swift end of the emperor-state and the confusion that followed during the first three decades of the twentieth century led to the downward spiral of revolutionary appeals, first by nationalists to entrepreneurs and students, and then by internationalists to peasants and workers, for new strategies and energies to rescue the remnants of the patria and redefine viable criteria of nationhood. Faced with conditions of great distress, scholars of the May Fourth generation, many the students of Chen Duxiu and Hu Shi and returned students from famous foreign universities, felt that their only recourse was to accept those parts of Western knowledge that were graced by the nobility of science. The ensuing debates were often politicized and colored by the wealth and power that accompanied the free market and national empires, or by the futurist wonders of scientific socialism.
Despite all that, nationalist and communist leaders like Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong and the scholars close to them did not lose sight of the uniqueness of the Chinese heritage. Sooner or later, every foreign idea and institution pertaining to the relationships of state, society, family, and individual was subjected to some degree of domestication. The list of scholars who were extolled to do that was long and distinguished. But the goals were relatively modest. On the whole, they wanted theories from outside that could help explain what China had to do to remain united and strong and thus became increasingly selective about what they were prepared to accept. The possibility that those theories could be modified and in turn generate new theories was always there but that was not their priority. For most of them, Chinese experiences were distinctive and the fact that “universal” theories developed elsewhere did not necessarily apply were obvious. Thus, they were encouraged and content to tease out new generalizations and interpretations from their own data that would help them understand what they were doing, enable them to gain greater theoretical autonomy, and ultimately guide the country to a more secure future.
At the same time, postcolonial scholars in the West, and elsewhere in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, were questioning the universalism that was being claimed for social science theories. Most Chinese scholars were unfortunately closed to that intellectual development for several decades. It was not until Deng Xiaoping’s opening to the outside world that new generations of scholars learned about the changes. When that happened, the effect was dramatic.
The decades after the 1980s opened their eyes to a knowledge world that was dominated by Anglo-American attitudes to global theory. As several of the essays in this volume show, many of them mastered the key concepts and techniques to test and support what China was doing and made careers for themselves both at home and abroad. Others remained more or less skeptical and only used such theories that can really help them better explain Chinese experiences. They were also encouraged to discover that there are foreign scholars who are concerned for them not to adopt alien models uncritically. Yet others, described by liberal Chinese scholars as belonging to the “New Left,” have rejected the premises that gave birth to theories in the West, concluding that they are either too ideological or are essentially irrelevant to Chinese conditions. Nevertheless, even they have been stimulated by the prevalent methodologies to try to nurture their own theories to explain what they know happened within China and provide what they think China really needs. And there also those more philosophically inclined who are keen to discover when, where, and how China can produce fresh illuminating theories that others may find valuable.
Leigh Jenco and her colleagues have followed recent developments closely. Each essay in the volume traces some of the thinking behind the efforts to reexamine the new theories in order to find better explanations from within the Chinese heritage. But the contributors have gone further to explore other dimensions in Chinese thought through the centuries, including new lines of thinking during the past century that have drawn their inspiration, whether consciously or not, from earlier traditional ideas. Leigh and her fellow authors have taken the enterprise