Notes on Roger T. Ames, “Thinking through Comparisons"

Ames, Roger T. “Thinking through Comparisons: Analytical and Narrative Methods for Cultural Understanding.” Early China/Ancient Greece : Thinking Through Comparisons, edited by Steven Shankman and Stephen W. Durrant, SUNY, 2002, pp. 93-110.

I think Ames' primary point here is to distinguish the western approach to philosophical inquiry (analysis) from the Chinese approach (narrative). He argues that western approaches to philosophical understanding attempt to define what things are: "the reality behind appearance, the univocal aspect behind the many instances, the literal behind the metaphorical, the root meaning behind the history of a term's usage" (105). He suggests that language is also understood in this way--"words--our repositories of cultural interests--are a currency that on investigation are expected to yield up etymologies that not only reveal their particular historical careers, but more fundamentally bring to light their ostensive root meanings--their essential and literal definitions" (106). [There's a sense in which he does this when writing earlier about the "lineage called Confucianism" and remarks that "[i]n the Chinese language, 'the world' is shijie 世界, literally the succession of 'generational boundaries' conjoining one's own generation to those who have come before and to the generation that will follow this one" (103); my question about mentioning this is whether he's not applying a western kind of analysis to a Chinese term. Do modern Chinese people think of shijie in these terms? What is the value (for today) of this kind of "literal" definition?]

In contrast to the way that western philosophy analyzes its object, Ames argues that "the classical Chinese tradition begins with the assumption that the human being (or better, the human 'becoming') is something that one does rather than what one is; it is how one behaves within the context of the human community rather than some essential endowment that resides within one as a potential to be actualized" (106). [This reminds me of a thought that I had years back when I was looking at Tunghai University's labor education system; I had read an article about it that argued that Labor Education could help students zuo ren 做人--this idea of learning to zuo ren seemed to me to be a kind of rhetorical education in the sense that students were learn a kind of action or way of being as part of a community.] 

One point that Ames makes in the chapter concerns the "porous nature" of Chinese thought (particularly Confucianism, but I think this could be broadened--in fact, he wonders at the end of his essay whether we should be calling that narrative of Chinese thought Confucianism or Chineseness [108]). He suggests that this porousness is what has enabled Chinese thought to absorb and sinocize (sinicize?) outside philosophies such as Buddhism, etc. As part of this, he writes that "any reference to Chinese 'democratic' ideals introduces terrible equivocations: the promotion of seemingly individualistic values in the absence of Western notions of the individual, autonomy, independence, human rights, and so on" (102). This of course makes me immediately wonder what Ames would think of the democratic development of Taiwan (to the extent that Taiwan can be considered a "Chinese" society, which is of course a subject of passionate debate). I'll have to see if he has given his perspectives on this point.