ABSTRACT
To the extent that all acts of reading are hermeneutic exercises, involving interpretation and understanding relative to the interpreter’s historical situatedness and place in tradition, it is legitimate to ask whether the nature of Confucian exegesis may not be meaningfully probed in terms of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics. However, it may be expected that conceptual aporia appear quickly in such comparative efforts to filter Confucian hermeneutics through Gadamerian lenses. For whereas Gadamer is intent on revealing and unraveling the ontological condition of interpretation and understanding, Confucians are preoccupied with apprehending the ontology of being as a whole. Much in Gadamer’s architectonics of understanding appeals to the Confucian sensibility: his emphasis on authority and tradition, his sober respect for moral knowledge, and his healthy regard for the intrinsic integrity of words and language. In the final analysis, however, his philosophy of reading and understanding does not really transcend the domain of epistemology; and Gadamer is after all quite hostile to transcendence in the ontological sense. 1
