At The Margin: The Enlightenment School And The Hermeneutic Experiment

The neo-Confucian revival ushered onto the central stage of the Cultural Discussion a time-consciousness in which the present can no longer

define itself by posing against the past. The neo-Confucianists have reiterated that only through the remembrance of tradition can Chinese modernity be rescued from colonization by the Western model. This is a culturalist position grounded in the perspective of historical continuity rather than in the fantasy of making a leap into the future from a zero-degree present, a position held by radicals like Liu Xiaobo.^[66] Neo-Confucianists were not the only participants in the Cultural Discussion who stressed the inner drive within tradition to perpetuate itself in continuous self-rejuvenation. In this section, we shall take a look at two of the marginal, albeit infinitely suggestive, discourses that explore the theme of the diachronic relationship of tradition to modernity from epistemological standpoints markedly different from neo-Confucianism: the qimeng (enlightenment) philosophy and the hermeneutic school of thought.^[67]

The Qimeng School

The qimeng school, whose advocates included Xiao Shafu, Feng Tianyu, and Shen Shanhong, did not simply present a retrospective show of tradition like the neo-Confucianists. Tradition, in their view, had a serpentine course of its own, untamed and collusive. The qimeng philosophies revisited those historical crossroads where tradition encountered modernity. One such crossroad—the late Ming and early Qing dynasty, from the reign of Shenzong Emperor (1573–1620) of Ming dynasty to Kanxi Emperor (1662–1723) of Qing—was highlighted by Xiao Shafu, Feng Tianyu, and Shen Shanhong as the beginning of the Chinese enlightenment tradition from which they claimed that the May Fourth iconoclastic thinking originated.

Under the heavy influence of the Western paradigm that attributed the birth of critical reason (the Age of the Enlightenment was known as the Age of Reason) to advanced materialist culture, the qimeng school advocates were eager to demonstrate that the material condition of China in the late sixteenth century was already ripe for the rational critique of superstition, transcendental thought, and the ancien régime in whose terms tradition was usually defined. What they presented was a bustling picture of Southeast China under the sway of a burgeoning capitalist mode of production at the turn of the seventeenth century, a picture still contested among social and intellectual historians.^[68] This was the period, Feng Tianyu and Xiao Shafu proclaimed, that Chinese intellectuals first practiced the rationalist critique of the idealism of the Song-Ming neo-Confucianism.^[69] And, thanks to the quick development of printing techniques and other means of disseminating knowledge,

these intellectuals founded the "learning of practice" (shixue ) that stressed "objective investigation over subjective speculation" and "concrete evidence over empty talks."^[70] The origin of Chinese enlightenment and cultural modernity, Feng and Xiao contended, should therefore be pushed back from the May Fourth period (a period intimately connected in the popular memory with foreign imperialism) to the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. Accompanying this revisionist attempt to relocate the genesis of Chinese modernity, a long list of China's earliest "enlightenment philosophers" was introduced and scrutinized rigorously: Gu Yanwu, Huang Zongxi, Wang Fuzhi, Fang Yizhi, Xu Guangqi, Mei Wending, and Tang Zhen.

The enlightenment school derived its nomenclature from the revalorization of the notion of qimeng . However, in contrast to those who defined the May Fourth Movement as first and foremost an aborted enlightenment movement engendered by the confrontation between Chinese and Western culture, the school formulated a hypothesis that the seeds of enlightenment were already sown within the Chinese virgin soil long before the imperialists' forced entry and that they could trace the historical continuity of the qimeng motif throughout the late imperial history all the way to May Fourth. Modernity was understood as a self-generated, albeit crisis-ridden process already incorporated within a premodern Chinese history that was marked by sudden critical branchings from tradition into unpredictable destinations. For cultural critics, locating such branchings amounts to the sharpening of their consciousness of the moments of "missed decisions and neglected interventions."^[71] A look backward to the treacherous paths of China's past where perilous conditions of possibilities converged and then dissolved by chance presented an alluring invitation to those who were eager to prove that China can make its own modernity on its own terms.

To understand why Xiao Shafu, Feng Tianyu, and their colleagues felt compelled to recover an indigenous discourse of enlightenment, we need to look into the enlightenment complex from which Chinese elite have suffered since the May Fourth period. Underlying this complex is their unquestioned premise that enlightenment serves as the primary catalyst for the making of the modern and their uncomfortable recognition that the qimeng model prevalent during the 1920s was fundamentally an imported conceptual category. That a Western model of enlightenment could yield only a colonial modernity in China was a theoretical predicament from which nationalistic Chinese intellectuals would fain extricate themselves. The long quest into China's historical past for seeds of en-

lightenment was therefore an indispensable task for those whose hidden agenda was to tame the hegemonic Western discourse of enlightenment. Anyone familiar with the cultural politics of localism could predict the ultimate conclusion reached by the qimeng school: Modern China's search for sociocultural modernity was internally motivated and had a history and model of its own.

Paradoxically, the advocates of the qimeng school could only take leave of the Western masters in theory. In practice, it was science and democracy—the two familiar markers of Western Enlightenment—that guided their search for those early landmarks of modernity in premodern Chinese discourse. Thus they claimed to have rediscovered an embryonic democratic consciousness (minzhu zhuyi yishi ) in late Ming and early Qing thinkers as well as a burgeoning scientific spirit illustrated in the two epochal dictums hewu jiuli (investigating materials to look into their principles) and Gu Yanwu's jingshi zhiyong (governing the world for practical purposes).

To compound this dilemma of reinventing Chinese history in Western epistemological terms, the school confronted an even more daunting technical problem in that they tried to regain access to the subversive voices within a history dominated by Confucian orthodoxy. Contemporary qimeng advocates were of course no poststructuralists trained to track down gaps, absences, lapses, and ellipses in a given text. They were unaware of the problem that no matter how hard one tries to extricate the seditious moments from a predominantly hegemonic discourse, the two remain overlapping and curiously interdependent territories. The treasure hunt for moments of enlightenment in the late Ming and early Qing texts ended up privileging certain fleeting phases of modernity spotted in both personal and historical contexts. What was retrieved was a long list of discrete points of connection and correspondence—ranging from Gu Yanwu to Liang Qichao and Zhang Taiyan—that told us little about the paradoxical landscape of local resistance where nascent antitraditional forces emerged and then receded in cases such as Liang Qichao (1873–1929) or where they coexisted with old cultural canons in cases such as Fang Yizhi (1611–1671), whose half-scientist profile merged into his Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist triple personae.^[72]

Nor did such a list succeed in answering questions about the larger historical processes that assimilated or rationalized subversive discourses. The fact that modern historians had access to those texts suggests that the texts had been co-opted by and incorporated into the canonical tradition at large. Should one not ask whether such discourses underwent a

process of domestication? And to what extent? What was written off and rearticulated during such a process? Was there a built-in mechanism within each discourse that promised its survival and kept it from being outlawed from the historical archive? And what desensitizing measures need to be applied to them so that they serve as models of inspiration for the present-day enlightenment devotees? By the same token, the study of the texts' complicitous relations with that part of tradition that defeated the spirit of modernity would enable us to trace patterns of the historical vicious cycle that delivered visions of liberation only to dissipate them into the abyss.

If the qimeng advocates truly wished to learn from China's own history, they would be more interested in the collaborationist than the antagonist aspect of the early qimeng masters' relationship with tradition. Only then could they begin to understand that it was oftentimes the "enlightenment philosophers" (whether the early Qing or the May Fourth thinkers) who defeated themselves in the end. All were torn between two cultural personalities: one pushing them toward modernity, and the other pulling them right back into the recalcitrant hold of tradition. The dilemma of "fighting against tradition from the standpoint of tradition" characterized all Chinese enlightenment discourses.^[73] The late Ming and early Qing masters were by no means immune. Seen in this context, China's premodern discourse of enlightenment calls for critical appraisal rather than premature applause.

My reservations about the qimeng school's idealization of those early thinkers notwithstanding, certain themes sketched out in the latter's writings are so strikingly innovative that they outstrip their own epochal consciousness and echo contemporary critical impulses. For instance, Wang Fuzhi (1619–1692) refuted the puritanical doctrine of Song-Ming neo-Confucianism—"Depositing the Way of Heaven [by] exterminating human desire"—by proclaiming the opposite: "The Way of Heaven and the desire of human beings share the same substance in form, but are [only] different in their content transformation" (tianli renyu tongxing yiqing ).^[74] In 1662, Wang's contemporary Huang Zongxi (1610–1695) published Mingyi daifang lu (Waiting for the dawn: A plan for the prince), a radical text made up of the critiques of authoritarianism and half-baked theories about civil rights.^[75] Huang was also credited for spelling out that both industry (gong ) and commerce (shang ) were fundamental to the governing of the state.^[76] Tang Zhen (1630–1704) went a step further than Huang Zongxi by preaching egalitarianism ("If myriads of things were made equal, then each would be able to find its own

place") and calling all emperors since the Qin dynasty (221–207 B.C. ) "bandits."^[77] And then there were the earliest pioneers of Chinese science—Fang Yizhi, Xu Guangqi (d. 1633), and Mei Wending (d. 1721) whose relationship with xixue (Western learning) was sometimes characterized by total compliance and sometimes by critical selection.^[78]

An indulgent look at this impressive catalogue may convince us that a budding empiricism paired with a slowly evolving civil rights (minquan ) movement steered seventeenth-century China to the threshold of enlightenment. Didn't Liang Qichao compare Huang Zongxi's Waiting for the Dawn to Rousseau's Du Contrat social (1762) and congratulate Huang for anticipating the latter by a hundred years?^[79]

Yet it remains uncertain how contemporary qimeng scholars might make best use of this catalogue to promote their own cause. Was the list construed by them as a discourse of modernity only after they subjugated it to a laborious process that filtered the moments of enlightenment from the premodern and darker moments of history? Or was nothing more than a neo-Confucian discourse disguised by a pseudonym? The first perspective suggests the school's dubious affiliation with the modernists' camp, whereas the latter perspective conjures up the possibility of the qimeng proponents' fruitful collaboration with the neo-Confucian revivalists: the catalogue of the rational minds of the Ming-Qing dynasty might be presented as the testimonials not of modernity, but rather, of neo-Confucian tradition that gave credence to its own capacity to produce progressive and enlightening elements within itself.

Most critics have adopted Guo Qiyong's position by distinguishing the qimeng school from their neo-Confucianist contemporaries. Tu Weiming, on the other hand, had the right instinct in proposing, however subtly, the potential fellowship between the Confucianism of the third stage and the followers of the school. He disagreed with Feng Tianyu and Xiao Shafu's argument that the Ming-Qing philosophers were critical of the negative capacity inherent in the Song-Ming neo-Confucianism in constricting the growth of elements of enlightenment. Instead, Tu insisted that the so-called enlightenment movement that unfolded in the late sixteenth century belonged to the Confucian tradition itself. It was a "categorical error," therefore, to crown the advocates of "the learning of practice" such as Huang Zongxi, Gu Yanwu, and Yan Yuan as anti-Confucian and stand them in an antagonistic relationship to the neo-Confucianists of the Song and Ming dynasty.^[80]

Theoretically, both positions—whether we designate the qimeng school fellow travelers with modernists or neo-Confucianists—lead to

problematical hypotheses. I have suggested how the school's attempt to discover what is modern about premodern China risks overglorifying the "enlightened" blossom without recognizing its deep entanglement in dense, poisonous weeds. The coexistence of these two domains (possibilities of enlightenment and lethargic forces within tradition) makes the proposition of separating the one from the other almost impossible. Tu Weiming was right to assert the collaborative aspect of the Ming-Qing philosophers and the Song-Ming neo-Confucianists, although a counterargument can be made that such collaboration should elicit suspicious frowns rather than applause, contrary to Tu's convictions. Thus the deadlock: To promote a model that is inseparable from the counterforces that compromised its efficacy can only deepen the syndrome of schizophrenia that disarmed the May Fourth modern intellectuals. Wasn't the seventeenth century model in this sense a precedent for, rather than a potential relief to, the aborted May Fourth enlightenment? As a result, any effort to retrieve the modernist raison d'être from the qimeng school cannot but sound problematic.

The collaborationist project between neo-Confucianism and the qimeng school invites its participants on a mind journey that is no less crisis-ridden than the separationist-modernist path discussed above. The danger this time is the ideological co-optation already at work in some of the qimeng discourses. Although the anti-imperialist discourse and the propagation of people's rights prevalent in Huang Zongxi's Waiting for the Dawn seems to deliver an image of the champion of modern democracy, the primary principle on which the work is based is derived from Mencius' view of guimin (valuing the people), a view deeply constrained within the overarching terms of monarchism.^[81] This is not a people-centered political philosophy but rather a strategy aimed at ameliorating the contradictions between the ruler and ruled and, eventually, a utilitarian means of improving the efficacy of sovereign power. Huang's other proposals for the reform of the imperial system point to further conceptual limitations as he fails to extricate them from the traditionalist discourse of absolute monarchy. Tang Zhen's theory about yangmin (nurturing the people), a parallel concept to guiming , can also be traced to the influence of Mencius. In voicing his radical critique of dictatorship, he produces a major work on the art of learning and governance, Qianshu (Hidden writings), that includes chapters like "Zun Meng" (Paying homage to Mencius) and "Zong Meng" (Enshrining Mencius) that clearly reveal the Mencian heritage in which the making of a statesmanship for the people means the same as the polity by the people.

It is interesting to note that whereas some intellectual historians point to this ideological bonding between the early Qing masters and neo-Confucianism as an undesirable sign of constrained historical imagination, others such as Yu Yingshi foreground the bonding unapologetically.^[82] A typical neo-Confucianist would argue that any contemporary school's lingering ideological affiliation with the neo-Confucian heritage is in fact an asset rather than a bond to be dissolved. Thus Yu took pains to demonstrate that Huang Zongxi's putative political radicalism reveals the reformist spirit that has always been part and parcel of the politico-pragmatic tradition within neo-Confucianism. The scholar-official's concern with the welfare of the people and with the art of governance is not something outside the Confucian discourse. The Marxist praxis is to revolutionize the world; the Confucian one, Yu reminded us, is to realign an imperfect world order. Following this line of argument, we have to reassess carefully the historical position of the Ming-Qing enlightenment philosophy: what does it mean that Huang Zongxi and his fellow travelers did not deliver a radical perspective of democratic revolution? Did they fail to follow through the enlightenment agenda? Or was their agenda from the very start a neo-Confucianist one—an agenda that never meant to reach beyond the mere task of readjustment and ritualistic censure of the regime? In other words, is their critical impulse a radical one that fell short of realizing itself, or a conventional one that delivers an exquisite performance of the "mainstream Chinese thinking"?^[83]

The preference of the contemporary qimeng school is quite obvious. The catchword for the 1980s is certainly not "mainstream." They would rather accept the limitations that come with the first alternative than be stuck with a label that conveys the sense of a stagnant continuity rather than a turning point for change. In other words, they would like to present the early enlightenment discourses as overlooked interventions rather than as formulaic expressions of the status quo. The difficulty of taking this position, however, resides in the fact that as Xiao and Feng (each with his own ideological agenda) demonstrated, the Ming-Qing thinkers were deeply implicated in the traditionalist discourse. The crux of the matter is not whether one can ignore or rationalize the existence of such an ideological collusion, but how to expose it, and in the course of doing so, how to turn the liability of collusion into a critical instrument with which contemporary descendants of the qimeng philosophy can accomplish the following tasks in sequence: penetrating the paradox of Chinese enlightenment to its core, dissolving the twin poetics of qimeng and utopia, and in their place proposing a new kind of post-topian critical writing.^[84]

The Hermeneutic Experiment: An Epistemological Turn toward Self-Positioning?

Perhaps no one is more persuasive than Gan Yang in demonstrating that the current program of neo-Confucian revival is a "pseudoproposition" and a humiliating gesture of traditionalists' "capitulation" to the demands of modernization.^[85] Although he still has faith in the neo-Confucianists' efforts to recover substantive reason to rescue modernity from self-alienation, he believes it is "off the track" to relocate (or reinvent) instrumental rationality in neo-Confucianism (i.e., seeds of science and democracy) for the purpose of serving modernity.^[86] He shares the Weberian conviction that modern society dictates the differentiation of value spheres. Hence the splitting off of both rationalities in opposite directions is a natural reality that neo-Confucianists simply failed to comprehend. The creative reappropriation of substantive rationality into an instrumentally rationalized society is a utopian perspective, which in his view does not work in modern Chinese society. His proposition is neither sentimental nor cynical: exterminate the link between the Hegelian dialectics of totality and neo-Confucianism, facilitate the bankruptcy of the Hegelian myth of totality (the happy historical fusion of instrumental and substantive reason), and allow the separate realms—the cultural, social, cognitive-instrumental, and aesthetic-moral—to coexist and prosper in their own terms.^[87]

The question still remains: How should neo-Confucianism justify its raison d'être and reposition itself in a modern society? Gan Yang proclaims that the proper niche for neo-Confucianists is in the temple of academy, a pure elitist and idealist domain where they can make a total commitment to Geisteswissenschaften (the human sciences) rather than to sociopolitical reform. The reappointment of neo-Confucianists to the guardianship of the humanist tradition is an ideological strategy that Gan Yang designates as wenhua baoshou zhuyi , "the conservationism of culture."^[88] Needless to say, although Gan Yang spells out quite clearly that the "culture" to be "safekept" and "guarded" by neo-Confucianists is renwen chuantong (the heritage of humane studies) as a whole rather than some mainstream Chinese, or more specifically, Confucian culture, his proposition about the "conservationism of culture" suffers various misinterpretations in the hands of both pro- and antitraditionalists. Ironically, a typical critique is to relegate him to the camp of cultural conservatives like the neo-Confucianists he himself has criticized rigorously.^[89] Without investigating its meaning carefully, some of Gan's critics, including Tu Weiming, collapse the term "conservationism" easily into the modern concoction of baoshou , "conservatism."

What confounded Gan Yang's critics was the seeming contradiction between his radicalism (consider his well-known 1985 manifesto "breaking away from tradition is the best way of inheriting tradition") and his 1988 proposition about conservationism.^[90] Very little has been said about Gan Yang's significant modification of Gadamer's hermeneutic vision in his earlier relentless critique of Confucian traditionalism.^[91] One can well imagine that given his background in hermeneutic philosophy, Gan would be a natural advocate of conservationism from the very start. But in 1985, the persona he projected was characterized by an articulate defiance toward tradition. It was hardly surprising that for the first few years during the Cultural Discussion, those associated with the Committee of Culture: China and the World , of which he was the spiritual leader, were often mistakenly relegated to the school of "total westernization," a label they shared with unredeemed radicals like Liu Xiaobo for quite some time. Did Gan Yang go through an intellectual transfiguration between 1985 and 1988 in his approach to the notion of tradition? Or did his two agendas—radical discontinuity between tradition and modernity on the one hand, and conservationism on the other—merely coexist as two sides of the same coin?

Putting aside the thorny issue of Gan Yang's subtle transformation from an uncompromising radical to a radical conservationist, let us focus on the methodological position of his latter persona. First of all, the hermeneutic roots of Gan's conservationism seem obvious. His position privileges the notion of the fusion of horizons, an unmistakable proposition of hermeneutic epistemology. How to reinvent tradition from the standpoint of contemporaneity—a hermeneutic rewriting of "historical continuity"—carries the main burden of Gan Yang's cultural criticism. At the same time, we should recognize that Gan Yang was increasingly skeptical about the privileged vantage point of modernity. He raised the new strategy of fighting at both battle fronts (liangmian zuozhan ), which dictated the double critique of modernity and tradition as central to the mission of cultural introspection undertaken by contemporary Chinese intellectuals.^[92]

The major contribution Gan Yang made to the Cultural Discussion can be recapitulated as the substitution of a diachronic paradigm for a synchronic one. In discrediting the older terms of debate—zhongxi zhi zheng (China versus the West), a spatial configuration that dominated thought since the late Qing dynasty and drew the current Cultural Discussion deeper and deeper into a deadlock—Gan Yang foregrounded the antagonism between tradition and modernity and redefined the history

of modern China since the late nineteenth century in terms of the battle between substantive and instrumental reason.^[93]

The paradigm gujin zhi zheng (tradition versus modernity) entered the Cultural Discussion as an epistemologically revalorized binary.^[94] To those who cast a suspicious look at the so-called new paradigm and wondered how one could differentiate it from its May Fourth precedent, Gan Yang made no better reply than a vague rejoinder that its contemporary form had collected more depth.^[95] To give Gan Yang the benefit of the doubt, I will demonstrate, in Gan's spirit, the challenge that he posed to the various interpreters of Chinese modernity.

Gan's fundamental strategy is again metonymical. It is not "modern consciousness," he claims, but rather the concept of "tradition," that needs to be subject to a creative reappraisal. An invitation to reinterpret tradition predictably leads to its revalorization. During this adventure into the epistemological field opened up by hermeneutics, Gan Yang accidentally ends up pleasing traditionalists and orthodox Marxists, both of whom have a huge stake in enshrining the past—whether it is seen as a Confucianist or socialist past. His ultra-leftist critics and those traditionalists who claim to have found an ideological ally in him seem not to have noticed that the very notion of reinventing the past—opening a hermeneutical circle—is itself a modern ideology (and more specifically, a modern school of philosophy and literary criticism).

The ideas of Western hermeneutic phenomenology were first introduced to China through academia. In summer 1983, the Institute of Foreign Philosophy of Beijing University sponsored a series of lectures on "Post-Analytic Philosophy," which covered a long list of modern Western philosophers: Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Gadamer, Ricoeur, Derrida, and Richard Rorty. A conference on "Philosophy and Hermeneutics" was held in Shenzhen in 1987.^[96] Gan Yang himself translated Ricoeur's The Conflict of Interpretation . Even without his formal acknowledgment of the influence of hermeneutic theory, his writings deliver more than a handful of its imprints:

Tradition is something "that has not yet been prescribed." It is always in the process of making and creating. It forever unfolds to the "future" infinite possibilities or a "world of possibilities." Exactly because of this [nature], "tradition" can never be equated with things that "already existed in the past."^[97]

Facing "tradition," [every generation of us Chinese] should undertake a mission whose burden cannot be carried by the "past." This mission is to create that which was absent in the "past." (57)

Specifically, the "tradition" that we understood is the sum total of the possibilities engendered by the endless encounters, confrontations, conflicts, and appropriations (the new homogenizes the old) that took place between the "past" and the "present." (60)

The hermeneutic dialogue of the present with the past delivers a holistic experience of temporality that does not single out serviceable inheritance and relegate the rest to historical amnesia. Gan Yang would agree with the qimeng school that the past is connected to the present by a chain of continual destiny from the Ming-Qing Confucian gentry all the way to the May Fourth iconoclasts. However, in contrast to the school's selective memory that recognizes only those so-called enlightened moments (the exemplary past) in history, Gan's hermeneutic remembrance of the past takes stock of its entire holdings, unsightly as well as exemplary. This epistemological reorientation is especially significant to the Chinese people whose nostalgia for the golden past coexists with their habit of blocking the bad memories that testify to the guilt and shame of their own history. Nostalgia is only a sham copy of genuine historical consciousness. The solidarity of the present with the past takes the form of onerous introspections rather than nostalgic celebration of the moments of fleeting glories.

The beneficial service of hermeneutics to the Cultural Discussion extends to the neo-Confucianists as well. The paradox of hermeneutic understanding should drive home a message that even the most savvy representatives of neo-Confucianism at present only vaguely perceive. Nearly all neo-Confucianists admit that modernity poses such a challenge to tradition that the latter has to be reinterpreted in order to serve the former better. What they are not prepared to accept is this paradox: The hermeneutic call of reinventing the past leads inevitably to the demythologizing of the past. The "objective" meaning in history can no longer be spoken of, for history cannot be known except through the subjectivity of the historian. Who is to "create that which was absent in the 'past'" but the interpreter who stands on the shifting ground of the here and now?

It is this issue of the subjectivity of the perceiving and interpreting subject that serves as the focal point of reference in the ideological agenda underlying Gan Yang's hermeneutic exercise. I want to emphasize that no intellectual game and no methodological fever in modern and contemporary China can ever claim ideological innocence. In Gan Yang's case, he is immune neither to the trap of the historical "anxiety consciousness" he himself has ridiculed nor to Chinese intellectuals' peren-

nial project of reconstructing the cultural China.^[98] The issue at hand—the cultural subjectivity of China—is unnamed in his critical exercises. His surface text seems clear and simple: an interpretive reorientation that attempts to bail the Chinese discourse out of the old spatial paradigm of the local (zhong ) versus the global (xi ) and replace it with the temporal paradigm of tradition versus modernity. Hermeneutics thus rescues Chinese critics who have been stuck for decades in the pseudo-binary of sinification versus westernization. And with that binary goes the conceptual barrier that China is modernizing itself at the bidding of external aggressors. Once this barrier is passed, the suggestion that China can revolutionize itself from within looms large. What else but the "confrontations and conflicts" between tradition and modernity could trigger the radical change that swept modern China? At this point, Gan Yang only needs to valorize the paradigm of tradition versus modernity as part of his overall hermeneutic project that grew out of the politics of resistance—a project that empowers an indigenous subject to write against the colonial discourse that deprives the colonized of its agency to make its own history. Yet Gan Yang does only half of the job. He foregrounds the temporal paradigm without accompanying it with a parallel discourse that would lay bare his hidden twin agenda of resistance and subject formation.

I shall make an attempt to pick up where Gan Yang left off. To do so, I propose to retrieve the ideological agenda underlying his hermeneutic project in the following terms: Hermeneutics provides a timely epistemological revolution and serves as a methodological tool that could help Chinese theorists rediscover the agency of change from within and redefine the terms of resistance as modernity versus tradition, thus depriving the West of its power to dictate the pace and agenda of China's modernization and moving the entire arena from the global back to the local subject again.

Gan Yang's unarticulated concern about cultural subjectivity finds its various manifestations in several of his later projects, all of which are characterized by his fervent search for an alternative modern, which in the wake of the Tian'anmen crackdown is defined more and more in economic (reformative) rather than in cultural (revolutionary) terms.^[99] Yet whatever topics of inquiry Gan chooses, whether they are possibilities of a "gradualist reform" or the model of "development without privatization,"^[100] he reveals more poignantly than ever one of the unnamed anxieties that plagued the participants of the Cultural Discussion: Does

China still remain a cultural subject of its own integrity after unlatching nearly all of its floodgates to Western methodologies?

The issue of cultural subjectivity is an important one that deserves a chapter of its own. For the moment, I shall pursue the significance of the hermeneutic project only a bit further. The major task of tracing the mutation of the subject throughout the 1980s will be taken up in chapter five, "Romancing the Subject."

What needs to be examined in conjunction with the ideological agenda underlying Gan Yang's temporal paradigm of tradition versus modernity is the thorny issue of subject formation. Although Gan Yang's influence was mainly confined within academia, and more specifically within the Editorial Committee of Culture: China and the World (a group of young scholars from the Chinese Academy of the Social Sciences and students from Beijing University), his thoughts often reverberated in theoretical discourses that seem to move, however imperceptibly, toward a revitalized sinocentrism that is both antihegemonic and hegemonic at the same time.

One such reverberation occurs in Zhang Xudong's intriguing comment that "it is the natural-historical langue of Chinese society that is determining the cultural parole of any invading discourses [from the West]."^[101] Utilizing the Saussurean paradigm of langue versus parole, Zhang turned the Western langue into the subordinate position of parole—an ingenious reversal of Joseph Levenson's earlier formula that privileges the West in its discursive power relationship with China. According to Zhang, the Chinese intellectuals are simply experimenting with various Western speech acts to articulate the Chinese grammar. China, instead of the West, reemerges as the crowning subject and the host of the linguistic game. We are, in other words, brought back to the supreme logic of the "Chinese experience." And what comes to mind but Mao Zedong's Chinese Marxism and the saga of the Taiping Heavenly (Christian) Kingdom (1850–1864)—two supreme examples of how China borrowed Western vocabulary merely to serve its own agenda and interests?

The emergence of the politics of subject formation is compelling in an era in which global capitalism homogenizes local space with both its material and discursive goods. It is imperative that the crisis of Chinese cultural identity should lead to resistance, and resistance to subject formation. What looks ominous, however, is not the discourse of autonomy that every project of self-formation is bound to emphasize. The moment of danger begins when such a project theorizes and wills its ultimate

subjugation of the Other—the reversion of the once-dominant Western discourse into the subaltern position of mere parole. What this seemingly antihegemonic project manifests is the mere inversion of the Hegelian dialectic: that the slave can be empowered and turned into the image of the master. This is a dilemma that can best be captured in the imagery of a cycle. The politics of resistance dictates the construction of an empowered national and cultural subject, and the subject, once empowered, cannot but initiate another project of hegemony. A new problematic emerges when we simply substitute the imperialist project with an ethnocentric project. Solving the double bind of the discourse of subject formation is a herculean task. And yet, cultivating a sharpened consciousness of this dilemma should be the most important responsibility of every enlightened Chinese critic who writes against Eurocentric hegemony with missionary passion. To identify—and to critique in turn—nostalgia for sinocentrism in one's own discourse is still a viable alternative to a simple reversal of Levenson's Eurocentric logic.

The subscription to nativist romanticization that Zhang Xudong's comment seems to constitute is something that the Chinese hermeneutic school has yet to reckon with. But for a long time, Gan Yan's influence was felt in a quite different realm via the Committee of Culture: China and the World . For many young scholars and students on university campuses, Gan's mentorship was delivered through his editorship of the two major translation series entitled "The Library of Modern Western Academic Learning" and "The Library of New Knowledge" that the committee put forth in quick succession in the mid-1980s. Both series introduce the Occidental tradition in a systematic way. The first series focuses on twentieth-century Western scholarship in philosophy, the social sciences, and the humanities, including Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Marcuse, Adorno, Habermas, Gadamar, Ricoeur, Foucault, Derrida, Rorty, Nietzsche, Cassier, Jung, Shaklosky, Eco, Todorov, Freud, Benedict, Weber, Mills, de Beauvoir, and Levenson. All contributed to the boom of ideas that led to the crowning of the mid-1980s as the years of methodology fever. To complement the first heavily theoretical series, the second series is made up of lighter fare in three different categories: biographies of masters in Western culture (Freud, Weber, and so on), influential "minor works" by Western writers such as Camus' Le Mythe de Sisyphe and M. Buber's Ich und Du , and foundation series in any branch of knowledge such as the Prentice-Hall Foundations of Philosophy Series.

Such an inventory seems to contradict the very principle that Gan Yang articulates in his hermeneutic project. The Chinese Hermes is preoccu-

pied with Western, rather than indigenous or even East Asian tradition. One wonders how this overemphasis on Western academic learning qualifies, if not undercuts, his own project of subverting the old ideological configuration that privileges the "West" over the "East."

Perhaps Gan's tradition versus modernity paradigm is meant to be nothing more than an academic discourse (such was the fate that he prescribed later to the neo-Confucian discourse) that marginalizes itself knowingly.^[102] Although the epistemological turn that hermeneutics introduced during the Cultural Discussion carries immense possibilities of revolutionizing a Chinese historical consciousness rooted firmly in the temporal past, it seems too much an elitist concoction to compete with other discourses that gained easier access to the public thanks to their idiomatic expression articulated in the common vocabulary of science (Jin Guantao) and ethics (neo-Confucianism). The notion of enlightenment (qimeng ), an indigenous term that underwent a semantic transformation in the late Qing, had just acquired an aura of familiarity and made its way finally into the national psyche.^[103] In this regard, the qimeng school stood a better chance of joining the mainstream culturalist platform than Gan Yang and his colleagues. Jieshixue , the newly coined Chinese equivalent for "hermeneutics," will have to wait longer to find its niche in the heartland of China.

But doesn't this expectation run counter to Gan Yang's own prescription for modern society? He has argued all along for the differentiation of the cultural from the social sphere. Perhaps, then, the most appropriate place for jieshixue is where it belongs now—the ivory tower at the margin of social discourse. Intriguingly, a passionate critic of elitism himself, Gan Yang has actively promoted the making of elitist discourse through his fervent involvement and investment in the Committee of Culture: China and the World . His contributions to the systematic introduction of Western thinking to post-Mao China are invaluable. One cannot help wondering whether the brilliant philosopher will be remembered primarily as a distributor of Western thought or as a practitioner of indigenous cultural politics in the era of "postcoloniality."