论孔孟的“本体诠释”

On the Onto-Generativity and Hermeneutics in Confucius and Mencius

通过对近四十年来中国内地“中国诠释学”发展的考察,本文认为“中国诠释学”要基于对中国经典的本体与经典文字的认知加以发抒和重建。中国诠释学不能不实际地考察中国重要经典,如儒家的“四书五经”、道法诸家甚至西方经典。以此对意义发生和其所指的真理性与价值性进行整体探讨。如果忽视经典诠释所必须包含的本体概念与其一般性及其系统性,就无法理解经典如何原初发生以及如何逐渐普及,更无法理解新经典创生的可能性与重要性。我们要在本体诠释学中体现人类心智的创造性及创新性,对历史上从语言、思维对人类进行的理解与诠释的系统考察,构建起中国的诠释学。

This article is based on my reflections on the development of""Chinese Hermeneutics"in Chinese mainland during the last forty years.At the beginning of this article,I contested an influential claim about the significance of Chinese Hermeneutics due to its inability to demonstrate the essence of Hermeneutics.Without an onto-generative rootedness in language,meanings and references are incapable of claiming their required existence.As soon as the necessity of the latter becomes noticed,however,the onto-generative paradigm and model of Chinese Hermeneutics should be recognized as well.Recently,I reexamined repeatedly the ontogenerativity(benti xing)and creativity in Chinese philosophy,and came to a clear idea of reconstructing the Chinese Hermeneutics in terms of onto-generative Chinese classics.Apart from the Confucian Four Books and Five Classics,we must actually explore other important Chinese classics so as to reconstructively interpret Daoist,Legalist,Neo-Confucian,and even Western classics.This is a holistic inquiry into the truthfulness and value of the genesis and reference of meanings.By investigating some relevant papers in recent conferences and journals of Chinese mainland,I discovered that a common drawback of them consists in confining their own interpretative work only to those historical classics of ancient China which had been well-known for long,yet without recognizing the general interpretive capability and potentiality in both the above-mentioned and many other classics.These papers did not realize that considerations of universality and systematization must be included in interpretating Chinese classics.They in fact failed to understand how the classics had been generated as well as how their meanings had been gradually formed and grasped.The possibility and importance of the onto-generative power in the creation of the classics was ignored.As a result,we must break this current dilemma by appealing to the creativity and innovation of human mind in onto-generative hermeneutics,as well as by realizing and expressing these creativity and innovation in language,art,or even actions through our comprehension and interpretation of classical texts.