A Confucian Critique of Gadamerian Hermeneutics

On-cho Ng
Penn State University

Quite correctly, many scholars have found in Gadamerian hermeneutics considerable resonance with the Confucian act of reading. Both modes of hermeneutics ascertain the fundamental meaningfulness of traditions and words. Both appeal to the classical and prescribe a “dialogical approach” to the sacral texts, linking history and tradition through the binding and uniting authority of language. By viewing Confucian exegesis through Gadamerian hermeneutic lenses, we may indeed develop revealing cross-cultural insights in the universal human enterprise to interpret and find meaning.

Yet in the final analysis, Confucian and Gadamerian hermeneutics are very different creatures. The current predilection to juxtapose the two tends to highlight the facile similarities and ignore the crucial differences. This paper aims to construct a philosophical critique of Gadamerian hermeneutics from the Confucian point of view. The principal argument is Confucian readings of the classics are, in their essentials, moral philosophy. Exegesis of the classics was an occasion for reflective thinking on the normative, the axiological, and the anthropological. Confucian hermeneutics was more concerned with the search for truths than the construction and application of theories of understanding.

On the other hand, while Gamaderian heremeneutics affirms the importance of tradition, and is even tempted to treat it as tantamount to truth in that interpretation must proceed from within tradition and that no critique is not itself traditional, the classics themselves are not conceived as Truth par excellence. The classics, even the scriptural ones, are ultimately merely texts.
Moreover, Gadamerian hermeneutics is propelled by the Kantian query of how understanding is possible in the first place. It is a demonstration of the western philosophic propensity to turn any engagement with reality into the preoccupation with seeking knowledge about reality. Therefore, Gadamerain philosophy is meaningful only in terms of the dichotomy of “truth and method,” that is, a paradigm very much defined by the quest to know how to know-the establishment of knowledge of reality per se.