Jenco APSA draft 2005
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times sages transmitted the Six Classics to support what is best in man and to express concern for
later ages” just as a rich householder stores up wealth for his progeny (Wang 1960, 215). The
Classics transcend mere texts; so too does their interpretation transcend the merely linguistic and
formal.
Many of these principles about the understanding of classics are shared across the classical
tradition, despite major differences in interpretation and implementation. Several hundred years
after Wang Yangming, the Qing dynasty scholar Kang Youwei and his reform-minded classicism
give us further insight into how similar assumptions are put to very different uses. Where Wang
Yangming sees the Classics as an invitation for inwardly directed cultivation and renovation for
the purposes of making a better world and a better, more sagely individual, Kang Youwei begins
from a very different interpretive stance and directs similar assumptions about the Truth contained
in the classics outward toward the administrative problems of politics. A major political reformer
in the late Qing dynasty, Kang is particularly interesting for our purposes here because his
Westernizing projects of constitutional monarchy and social justice were less concerned with
realizing particular goals promoted by Euro-Americans than they were with the possibility of
bringing to fruition a political ideal urged by his interpretative stance on the Classics.
2. Kang Youwei
Kang was the last and “most central” (Liang 1985, 447) of a group of Qing dynasty
scholars who leveraged their political reform on the “New Text” versions of the Classics,
grounded in empiricist research into textual authenticity. Their hermeneutic stance is linked to a
debate that began thousands of years ago in the Han Dynasty, when “Old Text” versions of
certain classics appeared that were maintained to have survived the “burning of the books and the
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Gadamer identifies the reading and interpreting of the Gospel as similarly action-oriented, “a form of…service,” but
his reliance on dialogue and interpellation as a hermeneutic technique may be due to his assumption about the finitude
of truth not shared by Confucian exegetes, a point I discuss below (Gadamer 1975, 306-10; see also Ng 2005, 301).
Convention