Abstract

This essay has two related contentions. First, by examining two early Qing exegetical works on the Great Learning, one by Chen Que (陳確 1604-77) and another by Li Guangdi (李光地 1642-1718), the essay reveals that Confucian hermeneutics was essentially moral philosophy. Exegesis of the classics was an occasion for speculative thinking on the normative, the axiological, and the anthropological. The embedding of moral philosophy in hermeneutics meant that it was animated by the search for and affirmation of truths, rather than by the construction and application of theories of understanding. Second, it argues that Confucian engagement with the classics, as with all acts of reading, is subject to the tyranny of the hermeneutic imperative, the self-evident priciple that all thoughts involve interpretation and are relative to the contingent context of particular historical forces and factors, especially the interpreter's preunderstanding. To the extent that the acts of reading and interpreting inexorably forge a dialogical relation between the text and the reader, and since understanding is a universal element in this relation, the nature of Confucian hermeneutics may be fruitfully and comparatively pondered with reference to some contemporary theories, Gandamer's in particular. This essay contends that in the final analysis, Gadamerian hermeneutics exemplifies the Western philosophical predilection to reduce engagement with reality to the search for an analytical method/theory, whereas the Confucian counterpart is metapractical in intent and substance, broadly philosophical for its ontological confrontation with reality as an integrated whole.