从范畴格义看“中道”研究的哲学根基与未来路向——《文明论的历史哲学》的洞见与误区举隅

The Philosophical Foundation and the Future Research Approaches for the“Middle Road”in a Comparative Perspective of Implications of Categories:The Insights and the Mistakes of The Philosophy of History with Civilizational Approaches

以“中道”标示中华文明在历史内部“究天人之际、通古今之变”的特质,是当下中国哲学发展的一条极富前景与深度的路径。然而在理解与刻画这一特质时,学者们仍可能落入“中合西分”“中优西劣”一类窠臼,背后原因是我们将西方范畴框架(如“思辨—现实”“超越性—内在性”“绝对者—有限者”)与西方学派(如释义学)不加反思地套用于中西比较,殊不知范畴框架必然蕴含的逻辑本就是使一种文明得以挺立的隐秘生命。这表明我们一方面未能把握西方形式感的运行逻辑,另一方面未能发展出真正适合于中国文明下生存体验的论说方式。仅仅将传统名相化为哲学概念是不够的,更重要的是阐明中国哲学核心概念(范畴)的逻辑机理。未来中国哲学的首要任务在于从《文明论的历史哲学》等新著对于西学一般主题的突破继续走向对西方范畴框架的突破,足够深刻地勘定中西方在范畴逻辑与思维方式上的区别,同时聚焦于困扰全球文明的共同问题。

It is a fairly prospective and insightful way of developing the contemporary Chinese philosophy to use the“middle road”to express one key feature of Chinese civilization,namely investigating the historical changes of heaven and man through the ancient and the modern phenomena.But in comprehending and describing this feature,scholars often fall in such traditional traps as follows:1)The traditional Chinese thoughts are integrated,while the Western ones run in a discrete way.2)The traditional Chinese thoughts are better than the Western ones.The root cause for such misundestandings is that some scholars have applied some Western categorial frameworks,such as“the speculative-the actual”,“transcendence-immanence”,“the absolute-the finite”,and some Western schools of thought,such as that of hermeneutics,unreflectively to the comparative study of Chinese philosophy and Western philosophy.They have hardly realized that the logic immanent in the categorial frameworks is itself the secret life which makes one civilization come into existence.This makes it clear that we have not grasped the logic in work in the Western sense of form on the one hand,and have not developed a very suitable discourse for the existential experience in Chinese civilization on the other hand.To turn our traditional ideas directly into philosophical concepts is not enough.It is more important to make clear the logical mechanism of the critical concepts(categories)in Chinese philosophy.The primary task of Chinese philosophy in future is to proceed further from the breakthoughs of the general themes in Western philosophy made by the newly published works such as The Philosophy of History with Civilizational Approaches to the breakthroughs of Western categorial frameworks so as to distinguish the categorial logics and the ways of thinking between Chinese philosophy and Western philosophy,and meanwhile to focus on the common problems which perplex various civilizations of the world.