Appreciating the Chinese Difference: An Interview with Roger T. Ames

In an interview with LIU Yunhua and NI Linna, Roger Ames uses several examples from the Chinese philosophical canons to argue that we must strive with imagination to allow this ancient tradition to speak with its own voice, and on its own terms. There are two major problems in fully appreciating the Chinese difference, insists Ames. From a Western perspective, we are using a vocabulary inherited from the missionaries to understand Chinese philosophy, reducing it from its own status as an important contribution to world philosophy to a marginal Eastern religion. From a contemporary Chinese perspective, we must be aware that we are using the Chinese translation of Western philosophical terms invented in the second half of the nineteenth century to synchronize the Chinese language with Western modernity. A failure to be cognizant of this appropriation of Western modernity leads to a confusion between untoward claims about Chinese“transcendentalism” and“universalism” and the appropriate understanding of Confucianism as offering us common human values. The irony is that within the post-Darwinian internal critique of the Western philosophical narrative, its own strident claims about transcendentalism and universalism have been rejected broadly as a mode of fallacious thinking.