Study is recently re-invoked as an alternative educational formation to disrupt the learning trap and trope. This paper calibrates study and learning as two hermeneutic principles and correlates them with seeing, hearing, and observing as three onto-epistemic modes that respectively underpin Greco-Christian, Rabbinic, and ancient Chinese exegetical traditions. Linking study and learning with the hermeneutic issues of language, text, meaning, and reality, my calibration unfolds in four steps. First, I introduce an epistemic aporia encountered in interpreting some Chinese educational “wind” (...) texts, exposing our naturalized reasoning of learning along a representational enclosure. Second, turning to Susan Handelman’s writing, I trace this learning-as-representation enclosure as being conditioned upon the Greco-Christian exegetical mode of seeing, meanwhile correlating study back with the Rabbinic hearing hermeneutic. Third, I move on to explicate an onto-cosmological Yijing observing, proffering a study hermeneutic as a movement of observing, following, and attuning to wendao, literally put, “a crisscrossing pattern that turns with dao.” Finally, I re-observe and study the crisscrossing Chinese educational “wind” texts, evoking a Chinese “wind-teaching” sensibility so far rarely discerned through representational thinking and learning. (shrink)

The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate a new approach to transcultural postcomparative philosophy, which may be tentatively called “the method of sublation,” using the example of Adorno and Gong Sunlong’s respective views on the relationship between concepts and objects. The term sublation is a neologism commonly used to translate Hegel’s idea of Aufhebung. It is derived from the Latin term sublatio, for its original meaning covered all three crucial connotations of Hegel’s Aufhebung – to lift up, to preserve (...) and to eliminate. The method thus encompasses all three of these three notions that are crucial to any process of creating something new from the interactions between two or more distinct discourses. In this philosophical sense, it has the three meanings of producing, eliminating, and preserving arguments, propositions, or ideas. Moreover, unlike “synthesis” the term “sublation” refers to a process rather than a stage. The sublation method aims to develop new forms of transcultural philosophizing and to overcome the impasses of traditional comparative approaches through procedures of “conceptual comparison” rather than relying only on the “comparison of concepts”. It starts from similarities and differences identified in the basic paradigms of different culturally and semantically defined frames of reference, and uses the method of discursive translation to transfer meanings across different languages and ideational traditions. Through a contrastive analysis of the similarities and differences between Adorno’s and Gongsun Longs conceptions of concepts and objects (or names and realities, respectively), the paper demonstrates the importance of considering different culturally conditioned paradigms and frames of reference in order to gain new, more complex, and more pluralistic philosophical insights. (shrink)