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274 LITERATÛRZINÂTNE, FOLKLORISTIKA, MÂKSLA
Chinese philosophical thought has endured similar ups and downs. The tradition,
largely intact for hundreds of years, was awakened from its hibernation to face
its Other. The identity of its traditional discourse in the course of the last hundred
years has suffered serious blows from outside. The Western sciences and their methodologies,
diverse philosophical theories and ideas have challenged Chinese minds.
The challenge has become even more serious in the face of the post–modern age of
borderless communication.
The third generation New–Confucianism philosopher Cheng Chung–ying has described
it as follows: “Understanding contemporary Chinese philosophy is a philosophical
enterprise that poses a methodological task: we must seek to understand how
Chinese philosophers view and appraise Western philosophical thinking and how
Chinese philosophy has rediscovered itself and defined its own identity.” 1
In the following passages Cheng Chung–ying also defines the task of a modern
Chinese philosopher who is faced with the challenges coming from the Western philosophical
tradition: “There have been two major tasks involved in responding to the
challenge posed by Western philosophy. The first task is to understand and interpret
the old in the new and interpret the traditional in the modern.” 2
“In responding to the West and constructing a new identity, it is necessary to distinguish
between the modern and the Western.”
“We must accept that science and technology can be adopted universally and are
neutral regarding cultural values, but everything beyond science and technology is a
reflection of traditional values or a reaction against them. … the task of contemporary
Chinese philosopher has two aspects: the first is to seek forms of rationality that
conform to science and democracy; the second is to find suitable place and voice for
traditional values.” 3
The core meaning of these passages might be summed up in one simple expression:
the quest for an identity. The ongoing experience of modernity has brought about
the clashes of traditional identity with the expanding otherness, namely the
universalising discourse of Western philosophical systems and previously unknown
categories and preassumptions. The redefining, rethinking and evaluating this clash–
like dialogue with the Western philosophy has occupied the minds of Chinese intellectuals
since the time when the gunshots threatened the very survival of the tradition.
The move by Western powers was supported and legitimised by their own universalistic
assumptions of the role of the Other in their worldviews, which has been
brilliantly shown by Edward Said in his epoch–making Orientalism and in its inner
discourse carried to the extreme.
From the passages quoted above, it is obvious that modern science, originally
being the product of the Western Europe and via which the Other was oftentimes
subdued, due to its universal and formal character of the language it uses to convey
its theories, is no longer a threat, nor even is being perceived as dangerous for the
survival of the tradition. It is the Western paradigm of philosophy, which is in a dialectical,
even antagonistic relationship with the tradition.
Much has been written and said about the possibility and impossibility of the
enterprise to make different cultures intelligible to each other. For the most part the
West had attributed itself the role of the discoverer, had legitimised it by its own