IS ?MODERN CONFUCIANISM? AN OXYMORON? TEXTUAL AUTHORITY AND THE EARLY NEW CONFUCIAN RESPONSE TO THE MODERN TRADITION OF ANTI-TRADITIONALISM

Abstract

This study provides an analysis of the discourse on tradition, and of the way this discourse is legitimized through the authority of tradition, in two of the first texts written in the Republican period which opposed the May Fourth portrayal of Confucianism as an artifact of the past: Liang Shuming’s Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies and Xiong Shili’s New Treatise on the Uniqueness of Consciousness. I argue that both texts are for the most part as anti-traditional as the most iconoclastic of May Fourth discourses, in that they regard traditions as valueless unless they represent, like Confucianism, traditions of anti-traditionalism; traditions that pave the way to a final liberation from tradition. At work in these claims is a dialectic whereby the texts salvage particular traditions yielding trans-historical truths from the dustbin of history before presenting themselves as a locale where these traditions are entirely subsumed, finalized, and monopolized.