Speech and Nature: An Introduction to the Study of Traditional Chinese Scholarship
Andreacchio, Marco Antonio
This item is only available for download by members of the University of Illinois community. Students, faculty, and staff at the U of I may log in with your NetID and password to view the item. If you are trying to access an Illinois-restricted dissertation or thesis, you can request a copy through your library's Inter-Library Loan office or purchase a copy directly from ProQuest.
Permalink
https://hdl.handle.net/2142/72563
Description
Title
Speech and Nature: An Introduction to the Study of Traditional Chinese Scholarship
Author(s)
Andreacchio, Marco Antonio
Issue Date
2008
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Mayer, Alexander L.
Department of Study
East Asian Languages and Cultures
Discipline
East Asian Languages and Cultures
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
Literature, Asian
Philosophy
Political Science, General
Abstract
An authentic introduction to the scholarship of traditional China must proceed through an uprooting of the ideological obstacles or peculiarly modern biases ordinarily preventing us from understanding writers of the pre-modern past as they understood themselves. As the upshot of the unfolding of modernity, our age is dominated by the systematic rejection (not merely a fateful forgetfulness) of the very possibility---explored in all seriousness throughout China's pre-modern past---of a form of scholarship that attains to permanent features of reality underlying the "external," spatio-temporal "life-world" ( Lebenswelt)1 of experience.
This dissertation argues that in order to understand pre-modern scholarship as it understands itself we must first recover what the early-modern Enlightenment abandoned for us---namely a pre-modern understanding of free inquiry (reason) and its ultimate foundations. Given the modern understanding of reason and its foundations, the general problem of "evidence"---as of the "authority" standing over and above inquiry---is often felt to be impervious to reason. If reason cannot penetrate evidence (authority) to its "essence/heart," then reason must rely on some standpoint "external" to evidence from which to judge of evidence: it must rely on either norms or feelings. Here we find the basis for the enduring tension between the conventionalist ("positivist") and the antinomian ("existentialist") impulses of contemporary scholarship. On the one hand, the conventionalist appeal to established norms fails to contain antinomian forces expressing deep-seated dissatisfaction with the positivistic or legalistic elevation of fixed rules to the highest standard of right. On the other hand, antinomian thought fails to illuminate a basis for civil society.
If our understanding of "evidence" is to escape both dogmatic conventionalism and nihilistic antinomianism, we must regain access to an inquiry that is not banned from the "interiority" of evidence: is there a civil freedom that does not forsake the possibility of discovering its own foundation as it is in itself?
This dissertation responds to the threat of antinomianism, not by appealing to conceptual constructs or reinvented/re-appropriated traditions, but by reading Chinese pre-modern scholarship in search for a pre-modern understanding of the interplay of evidence/authority, reason/free-inquiry, and their ground.
1Cf. Edmund Husserl. 1970 [1954]. The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology [ Die Krisis der europaischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phanomenologie ]. Northwestern UP: Evanston; esp. Part III: "The Clarification of the Transcendental Problem and the Related Function of Psychology," §29, 34, 37, 38, 44, 51.
Use this login method if you
don't
have an
@illinois.edu
email address.
(Oops, I do have one)
IDEALS migrated to a new platform on June 23, 2022. If you created
your account prior to this date, you will have to reset your password
using the forgot-password link below.
