The Gospel of Love by Tang Junyi and the conundrum of presenting it as a Chinese Symposium
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The Gospel of Love by Tang Junyi and the conundrum of presenting it as a Chinese Symposium Joseph Ciaudo1
Received: 22 August 2020 / Revised: 3 October 2020 / Accepted: 6 October 2020 / Published online: 27 November 2020 © Academy for International Communication of Chinese Culture 2020
Abstract The Philosopher Tang Junyi is the writer of an understudied book entitled The Gospel of Love which displays his philosophy of love in the 1940s. Previous scholarship has often described this piece of work as a Chinese or a Confucian Symposium because of some resemblance with Plato’s dialogue. However, the present paper challenges this reading and raises the issue what the reader does of a philosophical work when he considers it as a transcultural production or a book that fuses different intellectual traditions. By giving a peculiar attention to Tang’s way of displaying his philosophy of love, I state that the Gospel of Love is “a Confucian book on love under multicultural garments.” Though the book conveys elements from different traditions and merges them in a well-built philosophical tale, the author was not trying to produce global philosophy of love in dialogue with others: he was attempting to articulate a defense of the family in the context of the liberalization of unions and to foster a personal messianic agenda: love was just a gateway to selftransformation or self-transcendence. Keywords Gospel of love · Tang Junyi · Love · Transcultural studies · Chinese symposium
* Joseph Ciaudo [email protected] 1
Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
J. Ciaudo 582
What could a modern Confucian philosopher have to say on love? The question sounds strange, for love seems to be a topic hardly addressed by Chinese philosophy. But it also sounds wrong: why wouldn’t a Confucian philosopher have something to say on love? Love is often said to be universal. Therefore, would it not be possible to discuss it philosophically from the standpoint of a non-Western tradition or in a fusion of horizons? Instead of always departing from Plato’s and Aristotle’s distinctions between the different forms of love (eros, philia and agape) to address this question, could it possible to enrich our vocabulary, and approach it in a more transcultural perspective?1 As it has rightly been pointed out by the editors of the Encyclopedia of Love in World Religions about a decade ago, “The languages and cultures of the world have a nuanced vocabulary of love that expands and enriches the English speaker’s understanding of human experience” (Greenberg 2008, p. xxiii). From eros, to kama, passing by the Chinese ren 仁, there are many terms with meaningful elaborated semantics and practical distinctions to speak about what the general English speaker would call “love.” Furthermore, the discussions regarding those terms and the concepts they display are often embedded in particular traditions and social contexts. The vocabulary to speak about love is, furthermore, dynamic. It has notably undergone dramatic changes since the eightee
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