庐山面目:论研究视野和模式的重要性

从阐释学观点看来,理解总是以理解者的视野为前提,但"阐释循环"的要义并非证明理解难免循环或主观。我们应该如何理解中国及其历史、文学和文化?中国研究应该采取怎样合适的视野和模式?二十多年前,柯文曾提出在美国的中国研究中,应该有"中国中心"的观念,但直到目前,美国的汉学研究并没有以"中国为中心",却更多受西方理论和社会科学方法的影响,而且也没有重视中国学者的研究成果。本文通过讨论几个具体例证指出,随着中国近来的变化发展,学术交往和互动的机会迅速增加,我们早该打破"内"与"外"的隔阂,抛弃"社会科学模式"自以为是的优越感和(西方)"理论复杂性"的自傲,融合中西学术最优秀的成果,努力奠定理解中国及中国文化坚实可靠的基础。

The True Face of Mount Lu: On the Significance of Perspectives and Paradigms

From a hermeneutic point of view, understanding is always conditioned by one's own horizons and perspective, but the point of the "hermeneutic circle" is not to legitimize the circularity or subjectivity of one's understanding. How do we understand China, its history, literature, and culture? What should be the appropriate paradigms or perspectives for China studies? More than twenty years ago, Paul Cohen argued for a "China-centered" approach in American study of 19th-and 20th-century China, but so far American scholarship on China has been more influenced by Western critical theories and social science methodologies and is far from "China-centered," and it has not taken native Chinese scholarship into serious consideration. By discussing several exemplary cases in the humanities, this paper argues that, with China changing fast and opportunities of intellectual exchange and interaction much improved, it is high time that we broke away from the isolation of "insiders" and "outsiders," discarded the complacency of superior "social science models" or the arrogance of (Western) "theoretical sophistication," and engaged the best of Chinese scholarship in an effort to establish a more reliable ground for understanding China and its culture.