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Abortive Approaches to Transcultural Understanding
This book is a philosophical-historical examination of the influence of the knowledge of China imparted by the Jesuits on the thinking of the German Enlightenment in the 18th century. It is not primarily concerned with a comprehensive reconstruction of the philosophy of the thinkers discussed, but rather with the political and intellectual contextualisation of a line of thought that recognised the practical philosophy and state organisation of China as different from that of Europe, while equal to it and in some respects superior to it. This challenged the claim of theology that Christian revelation alone provided access to truth. The volume analyses the opposition to this line of thought, especially on the part of Protestant orthodoxy. It argues that in the German Enlightenment of the 18th century, the possibility emerged to conceive philosophy on the basis of reason as a phenomenon not limited to Europe but as a path followed under different conditions in China.
Abortive Approaches to Transcultural Understanding
This book is a philosophical-historical examination of the influence of the knowledge of China imparted by the Jesuits on the thinking of the German Enlightenment in the 18th century. It is not primarily concerned with a comprehensive reconstruction of the philosophy of the thinkers discussed, but rather with the political and intellectual contextualisation of a line of thought that recognised the practical philosophy and state organisation of China as different from that of Europe, while equal to it and in some respects superior to it. This challenged the claim of theology that Christian revelation alone provided access to truth. The volume analyses the opposition to this line of thought, especially on the part of Protestant orthodoxy. It argues that in the German Enlightenment of the 18th century, the possibility emerged to conceive philosophy on the basis of reason as a phenomenon not limited to Europe but as a path followed under different conditions in China.
Chinese Texts in the World publishes scholarly works on the reception, transmission, assimilation, and reinvention of Chinese texts in Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas; as well as critical studies that explore new pathways connecting Chinese texts with today’s world.
Whether Chinese texts were transmitted along the ancient Silk Road, or through modern digital technologies, such well-traveled texts hold great promise for illuminating multiple aspects of China’s cultural relations with the world. The same holds true for the examination how reconfigured Chinese texts made their way back to China, to be reconstituted as culturally polyvalent, hybrid “imports”.
Critical studies explore new ways of engaging Chinese texts with non-Chinese intellectual and cultural traditions. Such studies include, but are not limited to, a traditional textually grounded Sinological work that contains a substantive dialogue with for instance Western texts; a collaborative work by Asia-based and non-Asia-based scholars on the critical issues important to different traditions; and even a work on non-Chinese texts as long as it significantly draws insights from or engages a substantive dialogue with the Chinese traditions.
Authors are cordially invited to submit proposals to the publisher at BRILL, Christa Stevens.
Please advise our Guidelines for a Book Proposal. Manuscripts that are published have been accepted after double-anonymous peer review.
《世界语境下的中国典籍》系列丛书包括两大类学术著作。一类是中国典籍接受史的研究，着重分析各种典籍在亚洲、欧洲、非洲和南北美洲的接受、传播、同化与再发明过程；另一类是典籍的文本研究，努力在今日的世界语境中重新诠释中国典籍，并寻求开拓与世界各种文化传统互动交流的新途径。
第一类著作注重传统意义上的典籍接受史研究，所涵盖的文献，既有沿古代丝绸之路流布的古代典籍，也有通过现代数字技术传播的论著。此类著作主要探究中国典籍在中国以外地区（包括亚洲、欧洲、非洲和美洲等地）传播、再解释、再创造、进一步传播过程中，体现了哪些不同路径。除此之外，也将分析这些经过重新加工的典籍文本怎样回到中国，然后又怎样作为多元文化的混合“舶来品”被吸纳接收，再次发展。这套丛书还将综述分析中国典籍翻译如何塑造海外各地对中国文化的看法。这套丛书意在开拓广大非专业读者、学生、学者们的视野，帮助他们在自身的文学和文化传统中发掘出未被留意的中国因素，也可能对中国文化影响形成全新理解。对于从事国学研究的学生和学者而言，这套丛书能帮助他们掌握西方学界在西方批评范式的影响下重新解释中国文献的最新趋势。
第二类著作注重广义上的文本分析研究，目标在于建立中文文本和异域知识文化传统之间新的互动关系。这种广义文本研究充分体现跨文化视野，其中包括三种学术成果：其一、能够与西方传统进行内容比较的汉学著作；其二、亚洲学者与西方的学者针对重要议题而展开的合着或；其三、能与中国学术和文化传统展开有实质意义的西方学术著作。
数千年来，丰富多彩的中文典籍文本历经万里，远赴各方，编织出一条条连接中国和世界文化的纽带。中国典籍文本在世界各地的传播过程，对于加深彼此相互了解，共同推动人类文明的进步具有极为深远的意义。我们希望，读者们能够通过阅读这套丛书，追溯中文文献的流传、以及观察当今中华文化的传播和再造的过程，深切体验激动人心的的文化探胜之旅。
Whether Chinese texts were transmitted along the ancient Silk Road, or through modern digital technologies, such well-traveled texts hold great promise for illuminating multiple aspects of China’s cultural relations with the world. The same holds true for the examination how reconfigured Chinese texts made their way back to China, to be reconstituted as culturally polyvalent, hybrid “imports”.
Critical studies explore new ways of engaging Chinese texts with non-Chinese intellectual and cultural traditions. Such studies include, but are not limited to, a traditional textually grounded Sinological work that contains a substantive dialogue with for instance Western texts; a collaborative work by Asia-based and non-Asia-based scholars on the critical issues important to different traditions; and even a work on non-Chinese texts as long as it significantly draws insights from or engages a substantive dialogue with the Chinese traditions.
Authors are cordially invited to submit proposals to the publisher at BRILL, Christa Stevens.
Please advise our Guidelines for a Book Proposal. Manuscripts that are published have been accepted after double-anonymous peer review.
《世界语境下的中国典籍》系列丛书包括两大类学术著作。一类是中国典籍接受史的研究，着重分析各种典籍在亚洲、欧洲、非洲和南北美洲的接受、传播、同化与再发明过程；另一类是典籍的文本研究，努力在今日的世界语境中重新诠释中国典籍，并寻求开拓与世界各种文化传统互动交流的新途径。
第一类著作注重传统意义上的典籍接受史研究，所涵盖的文献，既有沿古代丝绸之路流布的古代典籍，也有通过现代数字技术传播的论著。此类著作主要探究中国典籍在中国以外地区（包括亚洲、欧洲、非洲和美洲等地）传播、再解释、再创造、进一步传播过程中，体现了哪些不同路径。除此之外，也将分析这些经过重新加工的典籍文本怎样回到中国，然后又怎样作为多元文化的混合“舶来品”被吸纳接收，再次发展。这套丛书还将综述分析中国典籍翻译如何塑造海外各地对中国文化的看法。这套丛书意在开拓广大非专业读者、学生、学者们的视野，帮助他们在自身的文学和文化传统中发掘出未被留意的中国因素，也可能对中国文化影响形成全新理解。对于从事国学研究的学生和学者而言，这套丛书能帮助他们掌握西方学界在西方批评范式的影响下重新解释中国文献的最新趋势。
第二类著作注重广义上的文本分析研究，目标在于建立中文文本和异域知识文化传统之间新的互动关系。这种广义文本研究充分体现跨文化视野，其中包括三种学术成果：其一、能够与西方传统进行内容比较的汉学著作；其二、亚洲学者与西方的学者针对重要议题而展开的合着或；其三、能与中国学术和文化传统展开有实质意义的西方学术著作。
数千年来，丰富多彩的中文典籍文本历经万里，远赴各方，编织出一条条连接中国和世界文化的纽带。中国典籍文本在世界各地的传播过程，对于加深彼此相互了解，共同推动人类文明的进步具有极为深远的意义。我们希望，读者们能够通过阅读这套丛书，追溯中文文献的流传、以及观察当今中华文化的传播和再造的过程，深切体验激动人心的的文化探胜之旅。
Abstract
At the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries, it became indisputable in Western Europe that at the other end of the Eurasian continent lay a millennia-old traditional culture that was in many fundamental ways comparable to its own. In China, a full-fledged cultural alternative opened up before Europe. The contact of Jesuit missions with China, Japan and other countries of the Far East had one goal: evangelization, the mass production of Christians from converted “pagans”, infidels and atheists. But this was followed by economic goals, linked to colonialism. The germs of a discussion about a non-violent unification between Chinese culture and the metaphysical and practical-moral principles of the West died down as quickly as such ideas could be problematized and their propagators (cf. Chr. Wolff) compromised. Leibniz, Wolff, Bilfinger and others learned from the Chinese to understand the possibility of a different reasoning with which one can achieve the same or perhaps in some ways even better results. But they had no success. Hard military-economic aggression took hold, the consequences of which are still being borne in Sino-European relations today.
Abstract
Leibniz was not the one to discover China, as far as Western culture was concerned. His historical contribution lies in the fact he presented Europe and China as two distinct ways of contemplating the world, as fully comparable and resulting in types of societies at the same high institutional, economic, technological, political and moral level. In this sense he saw China as the “Europe of the Orient” and as such susceptible to investigation by the same tools of natural philosophy which Leibniz knew from the environs of European scholarship. He was the first representative of the classical school of European philosophy to knowingly reject Eurocentrism. Leibniz followed the intentions of learned missionaries in his understanding of the Christian mission as a cultural and civilisational task, a search for mutual agreement and connections, in favour of a reciprocal understanding.
Abstract
The chapter examines the influence of Chinese statecraft on Austrian and Prussian Cameralism. A typical representative of this connection is Justi, a German lawyer, economist and philosopher. China, in his judgment (supported by a study of translations from Couplet’s and Noël’s corpus, not just by reading travelogues and merchants’ narratives, from which Montesquieu is said to have drawn), is a monarchy, and not just any monarchy, but a wisely built and governed monarchy, where the laws applicable to all citizens and the mores cherished by thousands of years of tradition are regarded as the foundations of the state, respected and obeyed by all. Justi saw the guarantee of a functional civil service system in a strict system of civil service examinations. Influenced by Chinese sources, Justi based his political-economic framework on the foundations of a theory of the state viewed conceptually and built according to the methodological guideline of the question of the purpose of the state and its limits.
Abstract
Bilfinger took the whole issue of state administration across the border of philosophical (and also theological) theories into the realm of state law, to the beginnings of state science. This alone marked a methodological shift; as a practitioner of international relations, Bilfinger was more interested in deductive procedures, which he believed would provide him with plausible results by comparing the advantages and disadvantages of the various elements of the system of government and the organization of governance in state entities. In doing so, he was less interested in the individual elements that Wolff had examined than in the systemic arrangements manifested in the creation of successful and beneficial forms of government in the state. On the other hand, he did not ask the question that is to be expected in this context and without which state-law justification must lack something fundamental: he did not ask for the general purpose of the state. In doing so, he left out an entire methodologically specific area of thinking about the state, its governance, management, order, authority, legitimacy, legal theory, and social philosophy: namely, the area of political metaphysics and its thesis about the reason for the existence of the state. Bilfinger’s time was familiar with this ideological intention, political metaphysics as the vanguard of all sciences of government and governance already had a history, and there were authors who attempted to break out of the concept of politicization of the old Church-Christian pastoral power as well as the ancient mystifications about the reflections of the cosmogonic order in the earthly “body politic.” But Bilfinger left this strand of thinking about the state and the state system aside; he clearly did not regard it as essential to his quest for the political rationalization of absolutism, but rather saw it as a weight that would put the brakes on any pragmatically directed action to penetrate the ideological systems of Enlightenment rationalism into practical governance. In doing so, he vindicated his own methodological position, which is unmistakable.
Abstract
This chapter focuses on early Enlightenment philosophy professor Christian Wolff’s Discourse on the Practical Philosophy of the Chinese (Oratio de Sinarum philosophia practica), which was published 300 years ago this year. After Leibniz’s works Novissima Sinica and Discours sur la Theologie Naturelle des Chinois, it was another attempt to enrich European philosophy by introducing some elements of Chinese scholarship, primarily in the sphere of moral conduct and the justification of moral principles. The publication of Wolff’s work provoked one of the greatest scandals in the history of modern European philosophy (causa Wolffiana). But even this scandal couldn’t prevent the spread of the view that virtuous conduct stems from our rational human nature and is possible without an ultimate religious guarantee, throughout the European Enlightenment. Wolff provided sufficient reasons to justify this idea, which he partially confronted with the Chinese philosophical tradition. One of the main goals of Wolff’s philosophical efforts, was to provide moral justification through purely philosophical means. At the same time, he viewed ancient China as a laboratory of humanity carried out through the via experimentalis. In this way, Wolff began Enlightenment philosophy’s search for confidence and precision through experiment, leading – as the German philosopher learned from Confucius – to the constant cultivation of reason (cultura intellectus), cultivation meaning the methodical and continuing care for our reason, because only reason provides the grounds for knowledge and understanding.
Abstract
Goethe’s late work, the very end of which is the cycle The Sino-German Book of Seasons and Days, is completely autonomous in its expression thanks to the success with which it introduces the traditional and age-related routine of irony in a new, untried poeological context, for which I would like to use the term actio per distans. For a “German” book, Goethe could use resignation and irony as common and coordinating tools of poetic reflection. For a “Chinese” book, he would have to have a completely different knowledge and familiarity with cultural traditions to be able to decide anything with sufficient clarity. For the Chinese-German book, however, he could have ventured to attempt a poeticized experience of distance from the world to which he no longer belonged, and to convey this experience ironically to an understanding reader, in order to show that the world-renouncing and ironically rendered attitude is a universal (global, i.e. world-encircling) poetic figure, in which the origin of the poet is irrelevant. Goethe concentrated in himself the specific “cultural pantheism” of his time and remained always open to the idea of cultural diversity overcoming humanistic Eurocentrism, which unites in the universal humanism of the “universally human”.