Globalization in Asia

In June 2002 the Gadamer translator Richard Palmer explained hermeneutics to China in his lecture tour. As a close associate and student of Gadamer, Palmer offered the first comprehensive outline on hermeneutics for a North American audience and did the same for China three decades later. In recovering its ancient world, China wishes to employ exegetical strategies for regenerating universal claims from both Eastern and Western classics in a search for new humanist values to suit a global age. Palmer argues that, like Confucius, Gadamer was an educator who valued the virtues of classical traditions, poetry, and art. Like Confucius, he pursued harmony through a "fusion of horizons." Drawing upon the corpus of Heidegger's work, Gadamer's "truth" and "method" were aimed at disclosing the ontological experiences of everyday life along the way to things as they are. Somewhat following Heidegger, Gadamer's Zeitlichkeit (timeliness) speaks to the power of language in revealing the universal truth of a text. The essence of ancient time can be recovered in the simultaneity or contemporaneity of today. Gadamer's emphasis on phronesis (the Greek term for practical wisdom) as an ethical judgment implies a facility for selecting the virtuous. This is similar to Confucius, who emphasizes the care of doing what is right. Part of the understanding of both thinkers involves applicatio (application) as the proper fit of understanding and daily use. Gadamer's hermeneutics can be collected into one major concept, that of wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein (consciousness in which history is always working). This is similar to Heidegger's hermeneutic circle, where one must already understand in order to understand. Gadamer's emphasis on openness in Gespräch (conversation) and respect for interlocutors is a crucial platform for China's global dialogues, as he demonstrated in an Auseinandersetzung (debate) with Habermas, Derrida, and others in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century.