| Chapter 1: | The Rationale for Reading the Analects Existentially |
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People today are living in a world that is increasingly mechanistic. The pervasive scientism and the laws of economics have reduced humanity to nothing but a conglomeration of parts that hang together, and individuals have become easily replaceable tools in the functioning of economics. What was true in the Industrial Age is very much true today, in spite of evolutionist optimism that today must be better than yesterday. The anxiety and fear about a loss of meaning have a significant impact upon humankind; scholarship in its broad sense constitutes one cultural response to this loss of meaning.
This state of anxiety or fear impinges upon human beings as long as they live. It is more or less intensely felt depending on the life courses of individuals and the circumstances of the ages in which they live. Confucius experienced the loss of a father at an early age, as well as losses of a son and of a favorite disciple in later years. He was threatened with death several times and was often disappointed in his efforts to bring order to the state. Existential concerns must have touched Confucius deeply. Beneath the façade of joy in his teachings stands a spirit that had deep concerns about the meaning of his own life, about the lives of his associates, and about the destiny of human beings in general. These existential concerns can serve as experiential basis for understanding the thought behind the received text of the Analects.
Existence and text form a dialectical relationship in the Analects. Whereas an understanding of human existence helps us appreciate the text, an interpretation of the text reveals the existential condition behind it. This is true for both the Western and Chinese hermeneutic traditions. Paul Ricoeur, for instance, indicated that there are three levels of interpretation: semantics, philosophical reflection, and existence. On the level of semantics, one deals with the structure of expressions in a text—structure that has double or even multiple meanings. This is the basic step in any hermeneutic enterprise. However, a linguistic analysis has the tendency to set up the language as an absolute, and it therefore ignores human existence behind the text, for the language itself is only a signifying vehicle. Between the level of semantics and the level of existence, there is an intermediate step of reflection that links the understanding of