1. Special Theme: Hegel and China: “Orientalism” and Inter‐cultural Differences (Part I) 2. Author Affiliations: Professor of Chinese Religion, Philosophy and Comparative Thought, Divinity School, University of Chicago
摘要
The Middle or Center (zhong 中) is one of the most unignorably recurring motifs in almost all Chinese philosophy, in all periods, in all schools, not only in ethics but in epistemology, metaphysics and ontology as well. It is a motif that is, however, glaringly lacking in resonance in most European philosophy, with the exception of a few brief appearances in the realm of ancient Greek virtue ethics. This paper explores a short‐lived exception to this generalization: when Kant (particularly the Kant of the Critique of Judgment) got mingled with Spinoza in the minds of Schelling and Hegel, in the brief period of their collaboration as editors of the Kritisches Journal der Philosophie between 1800 and 1803. In Hegel's works of this period, particularly “Glauben und Wissen,” we see a glimpse of the philosophy of the Middle that might have been, had not both Hegel and Schelling veered away from it, in different directions, a few years later, building upon but defanging the explosive implications of the philosophy of the Middle to make it more compatible with traditional European philosophical concerns, particularly those derived from monotheism. A Chinese‐European comparative approach to the problem of the Absolute as Middle, where the experience of Beauty is literally the concrete sensuous present of this = Absolute, is attempted in this paper, tracking the premises and implications of this strange and tantalizing episode in the history of Western thought.
