Anticipating China: Thinking Through the Narratives of Chinese and Western Culture

by David L. Hall, Roger T. Ames

By providing parallel accounts of the contrasting developments of classical Chinese and Western traditions, Anticipating China offers a means of avoiding the implicit cultural biases which so often distort Western understanding of Chinese intellectual culture. The book shows that failure to assess the significant cultural differences between China and the West has seriously affected our understanding of both classical and contemporary China, and makes the translation of attitudes, concepts, and issues extremely problematic.

Genres: Philosophy, China

358 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1995

Reviews

[Blaine Snow · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you've ever wanted to understand how another major world culture sees the world, not as you see it but as they see it, if you've ever wondered the extent to which you are encased in your own culture's philosophical horizons and long to see what a world outside them might be-feel-look like, if you're interested in the ways others have constructed their traditional (original, pre-modern, pre-Western-influenced) worldviews, then a prolonged study of comparative or cross-cultural philosophy between Western and Chinese and/or Indian worldviews is the ticket to eye-opening and deeply informative learning.

The book Anticipating China: Thinking Through the Narratives of Chinese and Western Culture by philosopher David Hall and sinologist Roger Ames does just that. It is the second of three books whose intentions are to forge a more accurate understanding of Chinese thought, to “create a context within which meaningful comparisons of Chinese and Western cultures may be made” (p111). They are books that help the reader put aside and see outside Western thought so that s/he can better appreciate the Chinese worldview as understood by the Chinese themselves. Hall and Ames employ a pragmatic method to help remove interpretive constructs that serve us well in understanding our own worldview but only get in the way and obfuscate our attempts to understand other cultural worldviews.

In order to help Westerners accomplish this, Hall and Ames spend the first 105 pages of the book in chapter one, Squaring the Circle, outlining key aspects of the Western worldview via an 1,000-year history of the most formative period of Western thought beginning with the pre-Socratics and ending with Saint Augustine and the beginning of the Christian era. Each of the following sections of chapter one ends with an "anticipation" or short contrasting look ahead at how this aspect of Western thought is conceptualized differently (or not at all) from the Chinese perspective:

1. From Chaos to Cosmos (First Anticipation)
2. Rest and Permanence (Second Anticipation)
3. The Watershed: Zeno and the Power of Paradox (Third Anticipation)
4. Counterdiscourse: Heraclitus and Anaxagoras (Fourth Anticipation)
5. From Theoria to Theory (Fifth Anticipation)
6. Counterdiscourse: The Sophists (Sixth Anticipation)
7. Socrates and Plato: Eros and Its Ironies (Seventh Anticipation)
8. Aristotle: Four Beginnings of Thought (Eighth Anticipation)
9. Humanitas and the Imago Dei (Ninth Anticipation)
10. The Persistence of the Rational Ethos (Tenth Anticipation )
11. Counterdiscourse: Challenges to the Rational Ethos (Eleventh Anticipation)

In the introduction, Hall and Ames introduce two primary modes of worldview construction which they term first- and second-problematics. The West is dominated by second-problematic causal thinking whereas China is more characterized by first-problematic correlative or analogical thinking.

Chapter two of the book, The Contingency of Culture, compares comparative methods and looks more closely at the first and second problematics. In the process it discusses the history of previous attempts to characterize-describe the Chinese worldview starting from the earliest Christian missionaries up to 20th Century Chinese historians and sinologists. In most cases up to the 1980s, Hall and Ames show that Western attempts to understand the traditional Chinese worldview suffered from grosser to subtler misunderstandings of Chinese thought due to unconscious applications of Western philosophical assumptions. Hall and Ames note that, although all cultural worldviews are in some sense ethnocentric, the particular form of ethnocentrism of the post-Enlightenment West is characterized by what Robert Solomon referred to as the "transcendental pretense," a peculiar form of universalizing rationality that "names a universal norm for assessing the value of cultural activity everywhere on the planet. This expression of our provincialism has arguably been more harmful than those insular attitudes that harbor more evangelical motives" (p.xiv). From the early missionaries to 20th Century historians, sociologists, psychologists, political theorists, to the post-war interculturalists, Western attempts to characterize Chinese thought and culture have distorted most Chinese concepts and ideas.

The final chapter three, Extending the Circle, takes a closer look at the contours of the Chinese worldview within this enlarged pragmatic comparative framework. Hall and Ames present the Chinese version of the pre-Socratics, the philosophers who predate the Han Dynasty such as Confucians, the Daoists, the Mohists and others, looking at some of the central conceptual differences such as li (pattern) and xiang (image). Then they look at how these philosophies coalesced into a synthesis during the Han Dynasty (206BCE-220CE) to set the stage for further developments.

The other two books in the series by Hall and Ames are Thinking Through Confucius and Thinking from the Han: Self, Truth, and Transcendence in Chinese and Western Culture. Together these volumes, along with many other works of contemporary sinologists and comparative philosophers such as A.C. Graham, Brook Ziporyn, Paul Cohen, Chenyang Li, and others are providing a new enlarged understanding of how human beings construct worlds.