History of Sinology/Chapter 23

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Chapter 23: Chinese Philosophy in Western Sinology

1. Introduction: Philosophy Across Civilizations

The Western encounter with Chinese philosophy is one of the most consequential intellectual events of the modern era. When the Jesuits first transmitted Confucian texts to Europe in the seventeenth century, they set in motion a dialogue between two philosophical traditions that has continued, with varying degrees of intensity and mutual comprehension, for over three centuries. This dialogue has been alternately productive and frustrating, enriching and distorting, a source of genuine philosophical insight and a mirror of Western prejudices about the nature of reason, morality, and the good life.

Chinese philosophy occupies a peculiar position within sinology. On the one hand, it was among the earliest objects of Western interest in China: Leibniz, Wolff, and Voltaire engaged with Confucian thought decades before the establishment of sinology as an academic discipline. On the other hand, it has been among the most contested domains of sinological inquiry: the very question of whether Chinese thought constitutes “philosophy” in the Western sense has been debated continuously from Hegel to the present. This chapter traces the history of the Western engagement with Chinese philosophy from its origins in the Jesuit mission through the Enlightenment reception, the great translations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the contemporary debates that continue to shape the field.

2. From Confucius Sinarum Philosophus to Comparative Philosophy

2.1 The Jesuit Transmission

The Western philosophical engagement with China began with the Confucius Sinarum Philosophus of 1687, the Latin translation of three of the Four Books that introduced Confucius to European intellectual life (see also Chapter 22). The very title — “Confucius, Philosopher of the Chinese” — was a philosophical claim: by calling Confucius a “philosopher,” the Jesuits asserted that Chinese thought belonged to the same category as Greek and Roman philosophy, that it addressed the same fundamental questions about virtue, justice, and the good life, and that it could be evaluated by the same standards.

This was a bold claim, and it was not universally accepted. The Jesuits’ purpose was missionary: they sought to demonstrate that Confucianism, properly understood, was a form of natural theology compatible with Christianity — a praeparatio evangelica that prepared the Chinese mind for the reception of the Gospel. Their philosophical interpretation of Confucianism was therefore deeply shaped by their theological agenda. They emphasized those aspects of Confucian thought that seemed most congruent with Christian natural law — the concept of tian (Heaven) as a transcendent moral authority, the emphasis on virtue and self-cultivation, the hierarchical ordering of social relationships — while downplaying or ignoring elements that did not fit this framework.

2.2 The Rites Controversy and Its Philosophical Dimensions

The famous “Rites Controversy” (Querelle des rites) that convulsed the Catholic Church from the late seventeenth century to the mid-eighteenth century was, among other things, a philosophical dispute about the nature of Chinese thought. The Jesuits argued that Confucian rituals — ancestor worship, the cult of Confucius, the veneration of Heaven — were civil ceremonies rather than religious acts, and therefore compatible with Christian practice. Their Dominican and Franciscan opponents argued that these rituals were idolatrous, that tian was not the Christian God but a material principle, and that Confucianism was not a philosophy but a religion, and a pagan one at that.

The controversy forced European thinkers to confront questions that would recur throughout the history of Western engagement with Chinese philosophy: Is Confucianism a philosophy or a religion? Does the concept of tian correspond to the Christian concept of God? Is Chinese thought fundamentally theistic, atheistic, or something that does not fit either Western category? These questions have never been definitively answered, and they continue to animate scholarly debate.

3. The Enlightenment Reception: Leibniz, Wolff, Voltaire

3.1 Leibniz and the Dream of Universal Harmony

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) was the first major European philosopher to engage seriously with Chinese thought. His interest was stimulated by the Jesuit reports from China, particularly the writings of Matteo Ricci and the Confucius Sinarum Philosophus. Leibniz saw in Chinese philosophy a confirmation of his own philosophical project: the search for a universal rational order underlying the apparent diversity of human cultures and belief systems.

In his Novissima Sinica (Latest News from China, 1697), Leibniz argued that Europe and China represented complementary civilizations: Europe excelled in theoretical sciences and theology, while China excelled in practical philosophy and the art of government. He proposed an exchange of knowledge between the two civilizations — famously suggesting that the Chinese should send missionaries to Europe to teach the Europeans the art of good governance, just as European missionaries went to China to teach Christianity.

Leibniz was particularly fascinated by the Yijing (Book of Changes) and its system of hexagrams, which he interpreted as a binary number system analogous to his own. He saw in the hexagrams evidence that the ancient Chinese had possessed a form of mathematical and philosophical knowledge that confirmed the universality of reason. His interpretation was fanciful — the hexagrams are not a number system — but it reflected a genuine philosophical conviction: that Chinese and European thought, despite their surface differences, were expressions of a single rational order.

Leibniz’s engagement with Chinese thought, as Eric Nelson has argued, belongs to the “more positive appropriation of Chinese thought and culture” that characterized the early Enlightenment, in contrast to the more negative assessments of Bayle, Montesquieu, and Malebranche, and the later hostile views of Herder, Kant, and Hegel.

3.2 Wolff and the Scandal of Confucian Ethics

Christian Wolff (1679–1754), Leibniz’s philosophical heir, provoked one of the great scandals of Enlightenment intellectual life with his Oratio de Sinarum philosophia practica (Oration on the Practical Philosophy of the Chinese, 1721). In this lecture, delivered at the University of Halle, Wolff argued that Confucian ethics demonstrated that human reason, unaided by divine revelation, could arrive at moral truth. The ancient Chinese, who had no knowledge of the Bible or the Christian God, had nevertheless developed a system of moral philosophy that was in many respects admirable and even superior to European practice.

The theological implications were explosive. If the Chinese could be moral without Christianity, then the claim that morality required divine revelation — a cornerstone of orthodox Protestant theology — was undermined. Wolff’s Pietist opponents at Halle denounced his lecture as atheism and secured his expulsion from the university by royal decree. He was given forty-eight hours to leave Prussia on pain of death.

Wolff’s case illustrates a recurring pattern in the Western reception of Chinese philosophy: the use of Chinese thought as a weapon in European intellectual battles. Wolff was less interested in Chinese philosophy for its own sake than in its utility as an argument against his theological opponents. The Chinese served as a convenient example of rational morality without revelation — a philosophical experiment, as it were, conducted on the other side of the world. Wolff viewed ancient China, as recent scholarship has shown, as “a laboratory of humanity carried out through the via experimentalis, leading to the constant cultivation of reason (cultura intellectus).” This instrumentalization of Chinese thought — using China to make a point about Europe — would be repeated by many subsequent Western philosophers, most recently by Francois Jullien.

3.3 Voltaire and Confucian Sinophilia

Voltaire (1694–1778) was the most enthusiastic of the Enlightenment sinophiles. For Voltaire, Confucius was “the greatest of all sages,” and China was a model of rational governance, religious tolerance, and moral civilization. In his Essai sur les moeurs (Essay on the Manners and Spirit of Nations, 1756), Voltaire held up China as proof that a great civilization could be built on rational principles without the superstitions of organized religion — a pointed contrast to the Europe of his own day.

Voltaire found in Confucianism “the closest equivalent to his tolerant Deism, free from superstition and fanaticism.” He admired the Chinese emphasis on moral self-cultivation, the subordination of metaphysical speculation to practical ethics, and the Confucian conviction that good government depends on the virtue of the ruler rather than on divine right or hereditary privilege. His play L’Orphelin de la Chine (The Orphan of China, 1755), based loosely on a Chinese drama, presented China as a civilization of superior moral refinement.

Yet Voltaire’s sinophilia was as selective as the Jesuits’ had been. He admired the Confucian tradition but knew little of Daoism or Buddhism. He idealized Chinese government without understanding its complexities. He used China, as Wolff had done, as a mirror in which to reflect the deficiencies of his own civilization. The “China” that Voltaire admired was largely a European construction — a philosophical utopia projected onto an imperfectly known reality.

The broader impact of the Enlightenment engagement with Chinese philosophy was, as recent scholarship has argued, nothing less than the stimulation of European secularism itself. The demonstration — however imperfect — that a great civilization could be built on rational ethics without revealed religion contributed to the intellectual foundations of the secular Enlightenment.

4. The Counter-Reaction: Hegel and the Denial of Chinese Philosophy

4.1 Hegel’s Verdict

The Enlightenment enthusiasm for Chinese philosophy provoked a powerful counter-reaction. The most influential critic was G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831), whose Lectures on the History of Philosophy (1825–1826) denied Chinese thought the status of philosophy altogether. Hegel argued that Chinese thought had never achieved the level of abstract reflection necessary for genuine philosophy. Confucian ethics, in his view, was merely a set of conventional rules for social conduct, devoid of the rational self-reflection that characterized European moral philosophy. Daoist metaphysics was a vague and undifferentiated monism that had never progressed beyond the most elementary stage of philosophical development.

Hegel’s assessment was rooted in his teleological philosophy of history, which saw the development of human consciousness as a progressive movement from East to West. In this scheme, China represented the earliest and most primitive stage of human civilization — a stage in which the individual had not yet emerged from the collective, in which morality was external and conventional rather than internal and autonomous, and in which thought had not yet achieved the self-consciousness that was the prerequisite of genuine philosophy. China was, in Hegel’s memorable phrase, “outside the world’s history” — an unchanging civilization that contributed nothing to the progressive development of human spirit.

4.2 The Long Shadow of Hegel

Hegel’s denial of Chinese philosophy as philosophy exercised an enormous influence on subsequent Western thought. For over a century, the major Western philosophy departments treated Chinese thought as an object of anthropological or historical interest rather than as a living philosophical tradition worthy of serious engagement. The institutional separation between “philosophy” departments (which studied the Western tradition from the pre-Socratics to the present) and “Asian studies” or “sinology” departments (which studied Chinese thought as part of an area-studies program) reflected and perpetuated Hegel’s hierarchical distinction between genuine philosophy and mere ethnic thought.

As Heiner Roetz has argued, Hegel’s assessment was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of Chinese ethical thought. In his Confucian Ethics of the Axial Age (1993), Roetz demonstrated that the ethical discourse of the late Zhou period — the formative period of Chinese philosophy — involved precisely the kind of critical reflection, autonomous moral reasoning, and universalist thinking that Hegel denied to it. The Confucian concept of ren (humaneness), the Mohist principle of jian ai (universal love), and the Daoist critique of conventional morality all represented, in Roetz’s analysis, “postconventional” forms of moral thinking that transcended the limitations of tradition and custom.

Roetz’s work challenged not only Hegel’s specific claims about Chinese philosophy but the entire framework that made those claims seem plausible. By demonstrating that Chinese ethical thought achieved the same level of rational universalism as Greek philosophy — that the Chinese thinkers of the Axial Age, like their Greek contemporaries, subjected inherited moral norms to rational critique and sought universal principles of justice — Roetz undermined the Hegelian assumption that philosophical thought was an exclusively Western achievement.

5. Richard Wilhelm’s I Ching and Its Cultural Impact

5.1 The Translation

Richard Wilhelm’s German translation of the Yijing (Book of Changes), published in 1924, was one of the most culturally consequential acts of sinological translation in the twentieth century (see also Chapter 22). Wilhelm’s I Ging: Das Buch der Wandlungen presented the Yijing not as an ancient Chinese divination manual but as a work of profound philosophical wisdom — a cosmological treatise on the nature of change, the interdependence of opposites, and the moral foundations of the universe.

Wilhelm had spent over two decades in China, and his interpretation of the Yijing was deeply influenced by his relationship with the Confucian scholar Lao Nai-hsuan, who guided him through the text and its commentarial tradition. Wilhelm’s translation thus embodied a genuine collaboration between Chinese and Western scholarship — a model that would be influential for later sinological practice.

5.2 Jung’s Foreword and the Western Reception

The cultural impact of Wilhelm’s translation was enormously amplified by C. G. Jung’s foreword to the English edition, published in 1950. Jung interpreted the Yijing through the lens of his own theory of synchronicity — the notion that meaningful coincidences reflect an underlying pattern of the collective unconscious. This interpretation, whatever its merits as psychology, had the effect of presenting the Yijing to a Western audience as a tool for self-knowledge and spiritual exploration rather than as a historical text to be studied philologically.

The result was a cultural phenomenon. The I Ching, in Wilhelm’s translation with Jung’s foreword, became one of the most widely read books of the postwar era. It influenced writers (Hermann Hesse, Philip K. Dick), musicians (John Cage, who used the hexagrams to compose music by chance operations), artists, psychologists, and a vast countercultural readership. Its impact on Western popular culture was comparable to that of Zen Buddhism — another instance of a Chinese intellectual tradition being radically reinterpreted through Western categories.

From a sinological perspective, the reception of the I Ching illustrates both the possibilities and the dangers of philosophical translation. Wilhelm’s translation made a central text of Chinese philosophy accessible to millions of Western readers. But the philosophical framework through which it was received — Jungian psychology, countercultural spirituality — was so far removed from the original Chinese context that the text became, in a sense, a different book. The “I Ching” that Western readers encountered was a Western creation as much as a Chinese text.

6. Jaspers’s Axial Age Theory and Chinese Philosophy

6.1 The Concept of the Axial Age

Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) proposed in The Origin and Goal of History (1949) one of the most influential frameworks for understanding the relationship between Chinese and Western philosophy. Jaspers argued that the period between approximately 800 and 200 BCE witnessed a simultaneous “breakthrough” in several major civilizations — China, India, Persia, Israel, and Greece — during which human thought achieved a new level of self-consciousness, critical reflection, and universalism. He called this period the “Axial Age” (Achsenzeit).

For the study of Chinese philosophy, Jaspers’s thesis had profound implications. It placed the Chinese philosophical tradition — the teachings of Confucius, Laozi, Mozi, Zhuangzi, Mencius, Xunzi, and the Legalists — on the same historical and intellectual plane as Greek philosophy. The Chinese Axial Age thinkers were not, as Hegel had argued, representatives of a primitive stage of human consciousness; they were participants in a worldwide movement of intellectual and moral awakening that simultaneously produced Socrates and the Buddha, Isaiah and Zoroaster.

6.2 Roetz and the Philosophical Implications

Heiner Roetz’s Confucian Ethics of the Axial Age (1993) provided the most rigorous philosophical defense of Jaspers’s thesis as applied to Chinese thought. Working from original Chinese texts, Roetz reconstructed the ethical discourse of the late Zhou period as a process of progressive emancipation from tradition and convention. He showed that Chinese thinkers of this period — particularly Confucius, Mencius, and the Mohists — developed concepts of moral autonomy, rational universalism, and individual conscience that were genuinely comparable to the ethical thought of the Greek Axial Age.

Roetz’s work was also a sustained polemic against two opposing positions: the Hegelian denial of Chinese philosophical sophistication, and the cultural relativist assertion that Chinese thought operates according to fundamentally different categories that cannot be compared with Western philosophy. Against the Hegelians, Roetz demonstrated the universalist potential of Chinese ethical thought; against the relativists, he insisted that the concepts of reason, autonomy, and moral universalism are not Western monopolies but human achievements that emerged independently in multiple civilizations during the Axial Age.

7. The Heidegger-Daoism Connection

7.1 Heidegger and the Tao Te Ching

One of the most intriguing episodes in the history of Western engagement with Chinese philosophy is the connection between Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) and Daoist thought. Heidegger’s later philosophy — with its emphasis on Gelassenheit (letting-be), the critique of technological rationality, and the recovery of a pre-metaphysical mode of thinking — has often been compared to Daoism, and there is evidence that Heidegger himself recognized and welcomed the comparison.

In the spring of 1946, Heidegger collaborated with Paul Shih-yi Hsiao, a Chinese scholar studying in Freiburg, on a translation of the Tao Te Ching into German. Although the project was never completed — the two men worked through only eight chapters before Heidegger withdrew — the collaboration testified to Heidegger’s belief that Laozi’s thought represented a mode of thinking fundamentally different from, and in important respects superior to, the Western metaphysical tradition.

7.2 Scholarly Assessments

Reinhard May’s Heidegger’s Hidden Sources (1989) documented extensive parallels between Heidegger’s major texts and passages from translations of the Tao Te Ching and various Zen Buddhist texts. May argued that Heidegger’s indebtedness to East Asian thought was greater than he acknowledged, and that key concepts of his later philosophy — the critique of “enframing” (Gestell), the notion of the “clearing” (Lichtung), the idea of language as “the house of Being” — had identifiable antecedents in Daoist and Zen Buddhist thought.

Heidegger “saw in the Laozi a thought that was comparable to the pre-Socratics in that it was thoroughly pre-metaphysical” — a mode of thinking that had not yet made the fateful turn toward the objectification of Being that, in Heidegger’s view, characterized the entire Western philosophical tradition from Plato onward. This interpretation of Daoism was philosophically productive but historically questionable: it assimilated Laozi to Heidegger’s own philosophical agenda, reading back into the Chinese text the concerns of twentieth-century German philosophy.

Steven Burik’s The End of Comparative Philosophy and the Task of Comparative Thinking (2009) pushed the discussion further, examining the relationship between Heidegger, Derrida, and Daoism within a framework that sought to move beyond the limitations of traditional comparative philosophy. Burik argued that the comparison of Heidegger and Daoism reveals the need for a new form of “comparative thinking” that avoids both the Hegelian subsumption of Chinese thought under Western categories and the relativist refusal to compare at all.

The Heidegger-Daoism connection remains a contested topic. Defenders argue that it demonstrates the philosophical depth of the Daoist tradition and the potential for genuine dialogue between Chinese and Western philosophy. Critics argue that it instrumentalizes Daoism, using it as a tool for Western philosophical self-critique rather than engaging with it on its own terms. Both positions have merit, and the debate illuminates a fundamental tension in comparative philosophy: the difficulty of engaging with another philosophical tradition without either assimilating it to one’s own categories or exoticizing it as radically other.

8. Contemporary Philosophical Sinology

8.1 Hall and Ames: Thinking Through Confucius

David Hall (1937–2001) and Roger Ames (born 1947) launched one of the most ambitious projects in contemporary comparative philosophy with their 1987 book Thinking Through Confucius. Their approach was distinctive in two respects. First, they sought to interpret Confucian thought using the conceptual resources of American pragmatism rather than the European metaphysical tradition — arguing that Confucius’s emphasis on practice, context, and social relationships was more congenial to pragmatist than to rationalist philosophy. Second, they insisted on the need to develop “an appropriate language for the interpretation of traditional Chinese philosophical thought — a language which is relatively free from the bias and presuppositions of Western philosophy.”

Hall and Ames continued their project in subsequent books — Anticipating China (1995), Thinking from the Han (1998), and Democracy of the Dead: Dewey, Confucius, and the Hope for Democracy in China (1999) — developing a broad comparative framework that juxtaposed Chinese and Western philosophical traditions. Their work was influential but also controversial: critics argued that their pragmatist reading of Confucius was as much an appropriation as the Hegelian reading it sought to replace, and that their insistence on the radical incommensurability of Chinese and Western categories underestimated the universalist potential of Confucian thought.

8.2 Francois Jullien: China as Philosophical Method

The French sinologist and philosopher Francois Jullien (born 1951) has pursued a different but equally provocative approach. Jullien came to Chinese philosophy not out of a passion for things Chinese but out of a desire to gain a clearer perspective on Western thought. His lifelong project — described as a “never-ending detour” through China — uses Chinese thought as an “outside” from which to see the presuppositions of Western philosophy more clearly.

Jullien’s prolific output — including Detour and Access: Strategies of Meaning in China and Greece (1995), A Treatise on Efficacy: Between Western and Chinese Thinking (2004), and In Praise of Blandness: Proceeding from Chinese Thought and Aesthetics (1991) — has pushed Chinese philosophy out of its marginalized position in area studies and into the foreground of general philosophical debate. His work demonstrates that Chinese thought can serve not merely as an object of study but as a methodological resource for philosophy itself.

Yet Jullien’s approach has also attracted criticism. Sinologists have questioned whether his interpretations of Chinese texts are philologically reliable; philosophers have asked whether his “detour through China” does not instrumentalize Chinese thought in the service of a fundamentally European project. As Kubin observed in his lectures, Jullien “studies China not in order to be a sinologist but to be a European philosopher. China is not his destination but his tool… He is a sinologist who wants to return to his own homeland.” This characterization — sympathetic but pointed — captures the ambiguity of Jullien’s enterprise: it has revitalized philosophical interest in Chinese thought but at the cost of subordinating Chinese thought to a European agenda.

8.3 Bryan Van Norden and the Multicultural Challenge

Bryan Van Norden’s Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto (2017) brought the debate about the status of Chinese philosophy to a broad audience. Van Norden argued that the exclusion of Chinese (and other non-Western) philosophy from the curricula of Western philosophy departments was not a defensible intellectual position but a legacy of imperialism and racism. He noted that when Europeans first encountered Chinese philosophers in the seventeenth century, they recognized them as serious philosophers; it was only with the rise of European imperialism and pseudo-scientific racism in the nineteenth century that Chinese thought was dismissed from Western academic philosophy.

Van Norden’s book was a response, in part, to the Belgian sinologist Carine Defoort’s influential 2001 essay “Is There Such a Thing as Chinese Philosophy?,” which had argued that philosophy is “an exclusively Western discipline” founded in “Greek soil.” By 2017, Defoort herself had shifted to a more inclusive position, issuing “an impassioned call for a greater inclusion of Chinese philosophy at European universities” — a testament to the changing intellectual climate.

The debate about the status of Chinese philosophy is not merely academic. It touches on fundamental questions about the nature of philosophy itself: Is philosophy a universal human activity or a specific cultural tradition? Can there be philosophy without the Greek concept of logos? Are there forms of rigorous thinking about fundamental questions that do not fit the Western philosophical template but are nonetheless philosophical? These questions remain open, and their resolution will shape the future of both sinology and philosophy.

9. The “Chinese Philosophy” Debate: Is It Philosophy?

9.1 The Terms of the Debate

The question “Is Chinese thought philosophy?” has been debated with particular intensity since the early 2000s. The debate has several dimensions: institutional (should Chinese philosophy be taught in philosophy departments or in area-studies programs?), methodological (should Chinese texts be read with the tools of analytic or continental philosophy, or do they require their own hermeneutical framework?), and substantive (do Chinese thinkers address the same questions as Western philosophers, or are they engaged in a fundamentally different intellectual enterprise?).

Those who deny that Chinese thought is philosophy in the Western sense typically argue that philosophy, properly understood, requires a commitment to systematic argumentation, logical rigor, and the pursuit of truth through reason — qualities that, they claim, are more characteristic of the Greek philosophical tradition than of the Chinese. The Chinese tradition, on this view, is better described as “wisdom literature” or “moral teaching” — valuable and profound, but not philosophical in the technical sense.

Those who affirm that Chinese thought is philosophy respond in several ways. Some, like Van Norden, argue that the exclusion of Chinese thought from philosophy is a historical contingency rooted in imperialism rather than a principled intellectual distinction. Others, like Roetz, argue that Chinese thinkers of the Axial Age engaged in precisely the kind of rational argumentation and universalist moral reasoning that the critics claim is absent from Chinese thought. Still others, like Jullien, argue that Chinese thought represents an alternative mode of philosophizing — not inferior to the Western mode but genuinely different, and therefore valuable precisely as a challenge to Western philosophical assumptions.

9.2 Beyond the Binary

The most productive approaches to this debate have moved beyond the binary of “philosophy” versus “not-philosophy.” The question is not whether Chinese thought is philosophy — a question that depends entirely on how one defines the term — but what we gain by reading Chinese texts philosophically, and what we lose by excluding them from the philosophical conversation. If philosophy is understood not as a specific cultural tradition but as the human activity of thinking rigorously about fundamental questions — questions about the nature of reality, the foundations of morality, the conditions of knowledge, the meaning of a good life — then Chinese thought is undeniably philosophical, even if its modes of inquiry and expression differ from those of the Western tradition.

The institutional dimensions of the debate have practical consequences. In most Western universities, Chinese philosophy is taught in departments of Asian studies, East Asian languages, or religious studies rather than in philosophy departments. This institutional arrangement has the effect of marginalizing Chinese philosophy, placing it outside the mainstream of philosophical education and research. The movement to include Chinese philosophy in philosophy curricula — championed by Van Norden, Defoort, and others — is gaining ground but remains far from complete.

10. Conclusion: Chinese Philosophy and the Future of Sinology

The Western encounter with Chinese philosophy has passed through several distinct phases: the Jesuit transmission, the Enlightenment reception, the Hegelian counter-reaction, the great translations of the twentieth century, and the contemporary debates about comparative philosophy and disciplinary identity. Each phase has reflected the intellectual preoccupations and ideological commitments of its time. The Jesuits read Confucius through the lens of Christian natural theology; the Enlightenment philosophes read him through the lens of rational deism; Hegel denied him the status of a philosopher; the twentieth-century translators sought to make him accessible to a general Western readership; and contemporary scholars debate whether and how he should be included in the philosophical curriculum.

What has remained constant through all these phases is the capacity of Chinese philosophical texts to challenge, unsettle, and enrich Western thought. Whether one approaches Chinese philosophy as a sinologist, a philosopher, or a curious reader, the encounter with a tradition that has thought deeply about the same fundamental questions but in radically different ways is an experience of intellectual estrangement that can be profoundly productive. The Daoist concept of wu wei (non-action), the Confucian concept of ren (humaneness), the Buddhist concept of kong (emptiness) — these are not merely exotic alternatives to Western categories but genuine philosophical contributions that expand the range of human thought about the most important questions.

The future of philosophical sinology will depend on the ability of scholars to move beyond both the uncritical enthusiasm of the Enlightenment sinophiles and the dismissive arrogance of the Hegelian tradition. What is needed is a mode of philosophical engagement that takes Chinese texts seriously as philosophy — that reads them with the same rigor, the same attention to argument and evidence, the same willingness to be challenged and changed, that philosophers bring to the study of Plato or Kant — while remaining sensitive to the historical, linguistic, and cultural contexts that shape their meaning. This is a demanding task, requiring both philosophical sophistication and sinological competence. But it is also an exhilarating one, for it promises a genuinely global philosophy that draws on the intellectual resources of all major human civilizations.

Bibliography

Burik, Steven. The End of Comparative Philosophy and the Task of Comparative Thinking: Heidegger, Derrida, and Daoism. Albany: SUNY Press, 2009.

Defoort, Carine. “Is There Such a Thing as Chinese Philosophy? Arguments of an Implicit Debate.” Philosophy East and West 51, no. 3 (2001): 393–413.

Hall, David L., and Roger T. Ames. Thinking Through Confucius. Albany: SUNY Press, 1987.

Hegel, G. W. F. Lectures on the History of Philosophy. Translated by E. S. Haldane and Frances Simson. 3 vols. London: Kegan Paul, 1892–1896.

Jaspers, Karl. Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte. Munich: Piper, 1949.

Jullien, Francois. Detour and Access: Strategies of Meaning in China and Greece. New York: Zone Books, 2000.

May, Reinhard. Heidegger’s Hidden Sources: East Asian Influences on His Work. Translated by Graham Parkes. London: Routledge, 1996.

Perkins, Franklin. Leibniz and China: A Commerce of Light. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Roetz, Heiner. Confucian Ethics of the Axial Age: A Reconstruction under the Aspect of the Breakthrough Toward Postconventional Thinking. Albany: SUNY Press, 1993.

Van Norden, Bryan W. Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017.

Voltaire. Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations. 1756.

Wilhelm, Richard. I Ging: Das Buch der Wandlungen. Jena: Diederichs, 1924.

References

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