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At first glance, it might seem an odd pairing: the Analects and Wittgenstein. Comparison between a classical Chinese philosophical text, whose primary topics were the cultivation of xiao (filial piety) and he (social harmony), and the corpus of an early to mid-twentieth-century Austrian philosopher, whose primary topics had to do with logic, language, and the nature of philosophy, does not obviously recommend itself. Yet, I contend in this article that there is much to be gained from careful comparison between these two very different pictures of philosophy, particularly where it comes to the practices of clarifying that which is confused or obscured. This study will aid primarily in developing Wittgensteinian approaches to ethical and political philosophy, drawing on resources from Confucianism, but it will secondarily work to identify features of classical Confucianism that may be conducive to comparative work on logic, at least under a Wittgensteinian conception of what logic may be.
Preliminary Concerns: Philosophy and the Idea of Comparison
In their introduction to their 1998 translation of The Analects, Roger T. Ames and Henry Rosemont, Jr., argue that the Western emphasis on essences in ordinary language is not reflected in ordinary discourse in Classical Chinese, that Classical Chinese is a suggestive rather than an assertive language (Ames and Rosemont 1998, p. 23). The dichotomy Ames and Rosemont draw between Chinese and Western approaches to language and reality has been heavily criticized by Michael Puett and Edward Slingerland (see Puett 2004 and Slingerland 2013). Ames and Rosemont defend their use of generalizations by arguing that a rejection of the fact/value dichotomy entails that inquirers never encounter the world free from interpretations; to use generalizations intentionally is to avoid inadvertent encroachments of bias. While this point seems apt, especially when discussing cultural and philosophical traditions, too stark a contrast in characterizations of the "West" and "China" can give rise to the view that there are intractable differences between the two. Claims of intractable difference may serve to protect discourses from outside critique, and it is wise to avoid such ways of thinking (see Nielsen 1967 and Proudfoot 1985).
Far from being a point of distinct difference between "the West" and China, Ames and Rosemont's interpretive work on Confucianism and Ames' recent interpretation in Confucian Role Ethics...