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A TOPOGRAPHY of CONFUCIAN DISCOURSE Politico-philosophical Reflections on Confucian Discourse
- Genre : Humanities, Science
- Author : LEE Seung-hwan
- Publisher : Prunsoop Publishing Ltd
- Pub.Year : 2004
- Pages : 384
- Format : 148 X 210mm
- ISBN :
 
What is Confucianism? Is it a way of thinking that has dominated, and still dominating, East Asian societies? Is it rather a mode of life or a behavior pattern? Or is it a system of philosophy? A religion or a belief system? Many scholars have so far tried to define what Confucianism is and ought to be in one way or another. As we find in the recent debates on the Asian Values, it is a dominant question still being asked in academia as well as in journalism. Like most things in the world, Confucianism has a thousand faces and has been interpreted in as many ways from different perspectives. To the 17th century missionaries, it was the aboriginal manifestations of Christianity in China; To some Enlightenment thinkers in the 18th century, it was a form of deism whereas to others like Montesquieu, it was but a despotism. To the Westerners of the mid twentieth century, it was the symbol of backwardness and pre-modernity; yet some American scholars in the late 20th century have noted in Confucianism the creative sprouts of post-modernity. Then how can we ever define what Confucianism is and what it ought to be? The author takes this question seriously as the starting point of his analysis of what he calls‘discourse effects’of all the talks on Confucianism so far produced in the West as well as in the East. Rather than essentialize Confucianism, LEE shifts attention to the agents of Confucian discourse, and ask why a certain claim on the nature of Confucianism replaces another in a certain context.“Language is context-dependent,” LEE argues, that“the same word can mean entirely different things according to the context in which it is used.” LEE historicizes different understandings of Confucianism without relativizing them; and contextualizes conflicting claims on Confucianism without politicizing them. His strategy is to illustrate how Confucian discourses in different contexts serve the underlying politics of the agents who actually carry out the discourses, to explain why at a certain moment in history a certain view on Confucianism has to arise.