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Part 1
The Great Learning and Hermeneutics
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1
Expanding the Tao: Chu Hsiâs Commentary on the Ta-hsĂźeh
John Berthrong
Chu Hsiâs commentary on the Ta-hsĂźeh, completed in 1189 when Chu was fifty-nine, was a paradigmatic philosophic reconstruction of a classic Confucian text; it was also an audacious manifesto for the emerging tao-hsĂźeh movement. To be willing to recast the received text of a classic was to signal just how serious the movement was in its challenge to other schools of thought. In 1190 Chu Hsi published the Great Learning commentary, along with its sisters on the Analects, the Mencius, and the Doctrine of the Mean, as the Four Masters.1 Of course, these four commentaries and texts are now better known as the Four Books and became the basis for the civil service examinations from 1313 till 1905.
Furthermore, these four commentaries provided the formal textual warrants for Chu Hsiâs construction of the social self as an integral part of his emerging philosophic synthesis. The definition and nature of the person as a social self was part of the philosophic anthropology that resided at the center of Chuâs vision of the Confucian Tao. Defining the social construction of the self was one of Chuâs answers to the perennial question concerning the nature of human nature/hsing. In Chuâs eyes, the social self was balanced between the world as the cosmos of the ten thousand things, the emerging personâs appropriation of the world as compared and contrasted to the evidence (texts) and ideals of the sages, and its final resolution/cultivation by the mind-heart achieving a proper balance of getting the Way for oneself in service to the world. One of the chief tools for creating the self was the hermeneutic art of reading the classics, of literally tasting their meanings so that their meanings nourished the formation of a proper Confucian self identity.
Daniel Gardner begins his careful study of Chuâs interpretation of the Great Learning by cautioning against the assumption that Chu Hsi merely used his commentary as a pretext for creating his own philosophy out of the whole cloth of his own genius and the teachings of his revered Northern Sung masters. What Gardner, among others, argues is that Chu Hsi loved the classical texts and was in dialogue with them as his living masters. Chu once said that only a sage or a fool refuses to change interpretation upon deeper reflection and criticism, and he obviously did not take himself to be either a sage or a fool. Rather, Chu wanted to help students of the Confucian way grapple with both the literal meaning of the text in order to understand the deeper intellectual and existential issues of the true meaning of the words of the sages. Chu felt a real piety before the text and a desire to delve as deeply into its meaning as was humanly possible. Only a sophisticated student of hermeneutics really had a chance to comprehend the teachings of the sages.
Chu Hsi not only added the famous short section on the examination of things to the received text, he reorganized the structure of the text around the twin poles of classic and commentary. Chuâs argument was that the first section was actually derived from Confucius whereas the rest were the work of Tseng Tzu, themselves commentaries on the core Confucian text. In making his case Chu replicated the major features of the Confucian textual tradition by isolating a classic and then appending layers of commentaries to it. If this were not enough, as Gardner (1986) has shown, Chu wrote a huo-wen sub-commentary on his own commentary and also continued to discuss the text with his students. Hence, as Chuâs own choice as the gateway to classical studies, the text of the Great Learning became a miniature universe wherein the student can begin to chart the way to creating a Confucian self.
Another intriguing way to review the history of commentary has recently been suggested by the collaborative work of Walter Watson and David Dilworth on the architectonics of meaning. In two works on comparative global philosophy, Watson and Dilworth argue that world philosophy is marked by a rhythm of differing but recurring philosophic styles of climates and interest. Watson writes:
Watson goes on to make the point that Greek thought begins with reflections on ontological and cosmological issues, moves into a phase driven by epistemological questions, and then develops a semantic or hermeneutical bent. The history of modem Western philosophy also illustrates the same cycle. It begins with Descartesâ depiction of the modem worldview about what is and is not. Then it takes an epistemic turn, best represented by thinkers like Hume and Kant, and finally turns around again to contemporary philosophies of language and hermeneutics. A similar argument can be mounted for the cycle of philosophy begun by the Sung tao-hsĂźeh philosophers and followed by the Ming-Châing turns to epistemology and hermeneutics.2
Chu Hsi, basing his work on his favored Northern Sung masters, actually defined a new world of ultimate meaning. It is most definitely a worldview that proposed an alternative reading of reality when compared and contrasted to those offered by Buddhism and philosophic Taoism. This is the world defined by principle/li, matter-energy/châi, and the morality of the mind-heart/hsin as the agent of the unification of the formal and dynamic poles of reality constituted by li and châi. The worldview was realistic, pluralistic, relational, processive, and axiological in nature.3
One of the key questions that consumed Chu was the quest of becoming a fully moral person. Daniel Gardner (1986) notes that âWhat did distinguish Chu from his predecessors, however, was the attention he gave to working out a detailed process of self-cultivationâ (1986, 47). Embedded in Chu Hsiâs hermeneutic art, along with a new worldview, was a fresh understanding of the self, making the self a text that needed to be cultivated and read correctly. Therefore, the hermeneutic art became the art of personal cultivation and of placing the human being within the larger processes of the cosmos.
Recently Steve Odin (1996) has written an extended study of the social self in Zen and American pragmatism that throws light on Chuâs new hermeneutics. Scholars have long noticed the similarity of pragmatism and certain forms of East Asian thought, especially focusing on their realistic tendencies, stress on process and relationality of worldviews. Odin provides a careful comparison of modem Japanese philosophy, especially the Kyoto School, with the work of George Herbert Mead. Mead, although not as well known as Peirce, James, or Dewey, is important because of his application of the pragmatic tradition to a new theory of the self, namely what Mead calls the social self. I will try to show that Meadâs idea of the social self is an even better fit with Chu Hsiâs ideal student of the Confucian Way than with the Buddhist Kyoto schoolmenâs Buddhist kenotic self.
The first and foremost reason for this congruence with Meadâs synthesis of American pragmatic thought is the inherent realism of both systems, in contradistinction with Buddhist speculation on emptiness. The fundamental claim of Chu and Mead is that the self is real; it is social rather than individual and that it is set within a cosmos of other real object-events. Of course, the trick is to see in what sense Chu and Mead define the real. For instance, in both cases, and here I agree with Odin, one of the marks of the real for Chu and Mead is the relational quality of the self, as opposed to some kind of notion of the self or person as an enduring isolated substance, something unrelated essentially with anything else.
Walter Watson and David Dilworth point out that philosophers choose for very good reasons the voice in which they speak. According to their analysis of texts, there are four variablesâwhat they call the archie variablesâto be found in the examination of any text. First, there is the authorial perspective, the voice that the author uses to express the viewpoint of the text. Second, there is a reality qua worldview that the text embodies, either explicit as in systematic philosophic works or implicit as would be the case for literature and religious discourse. Third, the text has a method by which it explains itself. Fourth, the text expresses a principle of organization. Watsonâs and Dilworthâs archie profile for Chu Hsi is (1) a disciplinary voice, (2) essential reality, (3) a dialectical method, and (4) a comprehensive principle. What is pertinent to Chuâs commentary is the disciplinary voice in particular.
Watson and Dilworth cite the opening of Moby Dick as a good example of the personal perspective: âCall me Ishmael.â On the other hand, one could never imagine Chu Hsi beginning his commentary by writing something like, âCall me Chu Hsi.â Besides the personal voice there are the objective, diaphanic, and disciplinary modes. The objective voice is the opposite of the personal, pretends to be the normal way things are for everyone, and is impersonal in nature. The diaphanic is often, though not always, the voice of religious discourse wherein the author claims that something or someone higher is speaking through the author. The author becomes diaphanous to the truth. The disciplinary voice is that of the competent expert who is reflecting the opinion of the learned. It is a schooled voice and is phrased as âweâ rather than as the voice of an isolated individual. However, it is no less lacking in a âpersonal,â distinctive or even strong voice than any of the other three authorial perspectives. For instance, it would be hard to find in the history of global thought stronger and more unique voices than those of Aristotle and Chu Hsi, both of whom embody the disciplinary voice and spirit.
A further nuance on the modality of the commentary as a genre for Chu Hsi is suggested by Odin when he introduces the work of Stephen Pepper, an American philosopher of the mid-twentieth century. Pepper is particularly well-known for his theory of root metaphors in philosophy, a theory he developed in the 1940s and later revised and expanded in the 1960s. Pepper theorized that every philosopher has a favorite root metaphor that controls the unfolding of his or her system. In terms of Watsonâs and Dilworthâs system of archie analysis, each philosopher has an expressive way of stating the principle that guides each philosophic narrative. For instance, many great seventeenth-century Western intellectuals loved to think of the world in terms of a dualistic machine metaphor. On the other side of the world, it has often been noticed that many Confucian philosophers have used the metaphor of the world as a family or living plant.
Pepper first proposed that Western philosophers have generally used four great metaphors (such as the machine or a form), but he later decided to add a fifth metaphor. This new fifth metaphor is that of the purposive act. Pepper distinguished the purposive act from the metaphor of the organism because of the sense of craft or direction that goes into the purposeful act as creative process.4 What Pepper finally decided is that even though, for instance, Whitehead had an organic model for the relationships of the actual entities that make up this cosmic epoch, Whiteheadâs deeper metaphor concentrated on the purpose or aim that dominates the concrescence of each of these actual entities. Although the outcome of the concrescence of the actual entities was to generate a world of organic relations, nonetheless the creative moment of the concrescence itself was directional, or what Pepper would call a purposive act.
We have now assembled the host of witnesses needed to give a rich description of Chu Hsiâs commentary on the Great Learning as an example of a disciplinary expression of the creation of a person by means of the purposive act of trying to become a sage. Such an analysis makes use of Meadâs idea of the social self, Watsonâs and Dilworthâs patterns of archie analysis, and Pepperâs theory of root metaphors as means of seeing how the use of commentary was a way for Chu to help craft the Confucian person. As Gardner and others have noticed, Chu wanted to use the Great Learning as a pattern or model by which to teach the emerging social self how to be a worthy person. In Pepperâs terminology, this is most definitely a purposive actâthe reading of a text in order to launch oneself on the path of becoming a Confucian person.
There is one question that has always haunted the study of Neo-Confucian thought: Is it faithful to the Confucian classical tradition? What is implied in this question is that post-Sung philosophy of the Way is really, at some deep level, a Confucian capitulation to Taoist and Buddhist speculative philosophy. The charge is that although Chu Hsi commented on the Confucian classics, his fundamental worldview was un-Confucian in character. Few scholars would claim that Chu was self-consciously trying to deceive himself or others; Chuâs piety before the Confucian tradition was genuine. However, his philosophy was so much influenced by Taoism and Buddhism that Chu could not avoid changing the whole direction of Confucianism away from the practical bent of Confucius and Mencius towards the speculations of Taoist and Buddhist philosophers.
Mou Tsung-san, hardly a great defender of Chu Hsi, has offered a credible counter response to this quasi-Buddhist reading of Sung tao-hsĂźeh philosophy.5 Mou makes the distinction between a borrowing of a key element and the stimulus that any philosopher feels when confronted with a different position. Of course, there are cases when a philosopher will directly borrow material from another tradition. The case of HsĂźn Tzuâs obvious use of Chuang Tzuâs notion of the mind-heart and later Mohist logic are classical examples of direct borrowing. Nonetheless, HsĂźn Tzu put Confucian fingerprints all over the ideas he borrowed, and few would deny HsĂźn Tzuâs place as a great though controversial Confucian thinker.
Chu Hsi responded to the Taoists and Buddhists because of a series of fundamental philosophic convict...
