ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that through an examination of the New Script learning of Gong Zizhen and Wei Yuan, it may be shown that traditional Chinese classicism shares some commonalties with contemporary interpretive hermeneutics, insofar as both are based on the premise that the interpreter and the interpreted constantly interpenetrate. Gong Zizhen's and Wei Yuan's New Script hermeneutics reveals the ineluctable mediation of the classical ideas by the dictates of history. Gong and Wei embraced New Script Confucian classicism because its central tenet of revealing the profound principles of the classics concealed in cryptic language stood in sharp relief to the scholastic erudition of their contemporaries. In his post-1819 writings, Gong's postulation of the notion of the three ages came to be couched in more conventional New Script terms, adopting the progressive scale of historical development with an upward movement—from disorder to universal peace.
