CALL FOR PAPERS
Time for another Enlightenment:
Reconstructing Modernities with Chinese Philosophy and World Pragmatism
Upcoming special issue in Pragmatism
Today
The next year will see the 30th
Anniversary of the initial publishing of Heiner Roetz’s pathbreaking work
Confucian Ethics of the Axial Age: A Reconstruction Under the Aspect of the
Breakthrough Toward Postconventional Thinking (first in German in 1992, then
in English in 1993) in which Roetz (inter alia) has offered a profound challenge
to the (largely American-dominated) field of (neo)pragmatist informed
intercultural comparative philosophy and sinology. A central component of
Roetz’s argument regarding the need to “reconstruct” Enlightenment universality
involves the claim that: “the Weberian as well as the pragmatic discourses [regarding
axiological transcendence] fail to appreciate the fundamental nature of China’s
classical philosophy in general and Confucianism in particular.”¹
Roetz locates the basic nature as a “crisis of the established context and the
inherited tradition” and in recognizing that both “Hegel and Weber were wrong”
in answering in the negative regarding the question whether traditional Chinese
thinking “knew of any context-transcending reflexivity.” Roetz then goes on to
question whether pragmatist-inspired sinology is wise to be rejecting the “very
question [Hegelian-Weberian] as springing from an unjustified generalization of
modern Western idiosyncrasies.” In recounting a particular sinological
Hegelian’s response to the “esoteric Sinophilia”² of our
time for “preposterously seeking ‘ways to the self’ in a culture one of the
characteristics of which has been exactly not to develop a self-separated from
nature,” Roetz asks whether in critically interrogating the works of authors
such as Herbert Fingarette, Henry Rosemont Jr., David L. Hall, and Roger T. Ames
and others representing a trend in pragmatist and sinologically informed
comparative philosophy we might arrive at the conclusion that it is part of a
deeply problematic assurance and legacy of post-Modern anxieties to be
suggesting that:
China can teach us to recognize that
the mentality of self, autonomy, and freedom has run its course. Together
with the Chinese, we should recall our “communal rituals, customs, and
traditions” and “inherited forms of life.” We should abandon the “myth of
objective knowledge,” and adopt a “thinking that avoids the disjunction of
normative and spontaneous thought.” Confucius especially presents us a model
which for our world is perhaps "more relevant, more timely, more urgent"
than it has been even in China herself.”³
Roetz developed this critique of a
philosophical imagination of Confucius as “moral philosopher” who can save the
decadent West further, for instance, in a 2013 article A Comment on
Pragmatism in Chinese Studies, in order to suggest that some of the
aforementioned pragmatist-inspired sinological methods, might not only be
misrepresenting (or perhaps more charitably ‘creatively misreading’ Chinese
philosophy, even perhaps in profoundly good faith in a postmodern-neopragmatist
tradition of philosopher-poets bravely risking a “strong misreading” in the
interest of creative advance), but in what may be an even more ironical gesture
Roetz suggests that we may need to return to the hermeneutic circle again in
engaging with the classical pragmatist tradition itself. The collaborative and
singular work of Roger Ames has largely presented a post-modernist,
communitarian, and neo-pragmatist reading of Confucianism as part of a broader
movement of counter-discourses, or perhaps exit strategies to the European
origin (if not domination) of the Enlightenment and its limitations for moral
theory—e.g. Confucian role ethics certainly goes beyond the myth of the
foundational individual and the sole sovereignty of nation-states. Though Roetz
maintains that this approach cannot possibly do justice to the indebtedness of
pragmatism to this very Enlightenment, especially its better angels of
communicative rationality, radical political equality, and any other aspects of
Enlightenment thinking practices, and the historically emergent ensemble of
institutions that in some ways contribute to the realization and preservation of
the freedom, flourishing, prosperity and dignity of all persons around the globe.
The conditions requisite for sustaining ethical-political cultures promoting
universality and a truly inclusive modernity for all peoples and nations are
part a robustly convivial cosmopolitical vision, and why not trace this to at
least in part the problematic legacy of the colonizer-colonized dialectical
struggle that gets roughly and euphemistically shorthanded as “the Enlightenment.”
It is in this spirit of philosophical reconstruction then that Roetz has
proposed a different approach that pleads for the relevance of basic pragmatist
tenets for an ongoing project of a critical modern “reconstruction” rather than
a simple restoration of Confucianism or any other possible set of conventional
values inherited from archaic traditions. This concrete ethical claim and
specific hermeneutic task before us, as well as the other aspects of Roetz’s
philosophical corpus, have been thoroughly engaged with before and criticized
from various positions.⁴ So what we hope to realize here in this call for
contributions is articulated in the following two-part aspirational aims of
curating this specific issue of Pragmatism Today:
1) We wish to be reconstructing the
complexity of this larger discussion concerning the plausibility and
desirability of a sort of “second Enlightenment” freed from its
Western-centric imperialist hubris and with the figure of Confucius as
educator and moral philosopher at the heart of such a momentous hermeneutic
undertaking, continue to expand the conversation about ethical universality
beyond the bad universalisms haunting the hypocritical deployment of human
rights discourse in the past and ongoing in the neoimperial present.
Although we could surely trace these discussions much further back, we do
well to highlight a particularly resounding intensification of this
philosophical conversation to the year 1987 when Roger Ames and David Hall
published Thinking Through Confucius and all of the debates
surrounding that text and its methodological proposals became part of a
philosophy and cultural politics of ars contextualis.
2) In understanding how this debate,
regarding amongst many other issues at least the need for a clear-eyed
approach to China as method, that is as a philosophical culture offering
alternative resources capable of realizing a “post-conventional” modernity
on its own terms, largely freed from the transcendental pretenses and
ontological anxieties of the liberal West, we hope that contributors will
find the opportunity to be creatively reflecting on just how it is that
pragmatist elements might facilitate more effective intercultural
understandings, or otherwise be ethically generative in projects seeking to
“reconstruct” viable ethical and political philosophies from classical
Chinese sources. Simply put, how is pragmatism as a philosophical tradition
and method of thinking still relevant to unearthing what Chinese
philosophers might have to say from the Warring States Period contributing
to bringing conceptual clarity and ethical resolution to our uneasy global
present? Answering these and related questions, and hopefully avoiding the
all too frequent and scandalously amorphous “road-blocks” to inquiry that
John Dewey lamented in his preface to the inaugural publication of the
Philosophy East & West written in Waikiki in 1951 during the early
stages of the Cold War, would seem to require that at the very least we take
seriously Roetz’s challenges to be more fully acknowledging the provincial
elements of much of pre-existing pragmatist literature, and perhaps to
proceed more radically from a temporal register of modernity (or perhaps
better ‘contested and sometimes conflicting enculturated modernities’).
With such a theoretical recognition of the diverse plurality of contributing
“chronotones”⁵ foregrounded we might hope to avoid any conservativism
regarding past institutions or the valorization of certain entrenched ritual
grammars of society in reimagining universality as a central value in the
field of global ethics. By submitting the received past traditions and more
recent discourses regarding universalism to a deep “hermeneutics of
suspicion” we might in this issue also hope to remain alert to the lost
potentials that a “hermeneutics of trust” might reclaim for us—that is by
listening carefully and in relational humility to the words of wisdom that
the living tradition(s) of Confucianism and the ever evolving, communicative
ends-in-view of “World Pragmatism” might be voicing to our shared globalized
subjectivity formation in this age of increasingly profound precarity and
disjointed world solidarity.
Please send your manuscript to Joseph
Harroff (jharroff@american.edu) and
¼ubomír Dunaj (lubomir.dunaj@univie.ac.at)
Deadline for submissions May 1,
2022
The special issue is to appear in June
2020.
Editorial team:
Joseph Harroff (American University, Washington D.C.)
¼ubomír Dunaj (University of Vienna)
¹ Roetz (1993), p.2.
² Roetz refers here to: TRAUZETTEL, ROLF. 1977.
“Individuum und Heteronomie: Historische Aspekte des Verhältnisses von
Individuum und Gesellschaft in China.“ Saeculum 28, no. 3: 340 64.
³ Ibid., p.2.
⁴ Hall, David, L. – Ames, Roger T. (1995): Anticipating China. Thinking though
the narratives of Chinese and Western Culture. Albany: SUNY; Jullien, François
(2004): Detour and Access, Strategies of Meaning in China and Greece (Le détour
et l'accès). New York: Zone Books; Jullien, François (2014): On the Universal,
the Uniform, the Common and Dialogue between cultures (De l'universel, de
l'uniforme, du commun et du dialogue entre les cultures), Cambridge Polity;
Heubel, Fabian (2021): Was ist chinesische Philosophie? Kritische Perspektiven.
Hamburg: Meiner
⁵ See Massimiliano Tomba’s Insurgent Universality: An Alternative Legacy of
Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2019), p.14 for more on how “anachronistic
institutions are reactivated in a new configuration of the present; and to show
how that reactivation makes it possible to trace an alternative legacy of
modernity” beyond reductive and imperialist, hegemonic forms of universalism.
