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18 R. T. Ames

We now know why Lao with his intra-cultural approach to philosophy had to
abandon Hegel and formulate his own, more capacious theory of philosophy
of culture. Hegel’s teleological philosophy of culture is ethnocentric and exclu-
sionary, and in its commitment to a strong teleology, is univocal rather than being
pluralistic and accommodating. But this further criss-crossing—that is, Lao’s
transformation of Hegel and Parsons into a holistic theory that is consistent with
the tiyong vocabulary of a persistent Chinese cosmology—leads us to ask the
second question: Is Lao Sze-Kwang then a Chinese philosopher? Indeed, it is
this same complementary, contrapuntal dynamic that seems to be evident in Lao
Sze-Kwang’s “double-structured theory” of culture that would resist any strong
teleological and exclusionary, ethnocentric assumptions that we find in Hegel. To
the extent that this wenhua understanding of “culture” is open-ended and is
“orientative” in its unrelenting pursuit of personal and world transformation, Lao
Sze-Kwang posits a philosophy of culture that is congruent with what he takes to be
some of the basic and distinctive assumptions of Chinese culture. But it is his
profound discomfort with severe or final distinctions among cultures, his theo-
retical strategy for sustaining a balance between uniqueness and multiplicity, and
his inclusive approach to the discipline of philosophy broadly that might dissuade
us from categorizing him as a “Chinese” or any other kind of philosopher. That is,
Lao Sze-Kwang is a philosopher—enough said.
And this leads us to consider the appropriateness of considering Lao
Sze-Kwang to be one more in the pantheon of New Confucians that have had such
prominence in the philosophical life and the prestige of the Chinese University of
Hong Kong philosophy department. As I have said, I want to advance the claim that
Lao Sze-Kwang is first and foremost a sui generis philosopher with broad global
interests, and thus by definition should not be tailored to fit any existing and
necessarily exclusionary category, Chinese or Western. To reflect on the career of
Lao Sze-Kwang as a world philosopher (“with Chinese characteristics” perhaps),
we will first need some historical and philosophical background to set the inter-
pretive context.
There is a history in the Chinese academy of Western philosophy being pre-
sented as “philosophy in China” without reference to its own indigenous traditions
of philosophy. And going the other way, the commentarial history of Chinese
“thought” (思想) has often been taught especially in “Chinese” and Chinese
literature departments without any perceived need to appeal to or engage Western
philosophy. Resisting such exclusions, there has been over time a significant cadre
of Chinese philosophers who have been shaped in their thinking and writing about
their own tradition through a conscious appropriation of the Western canons—
particularly German idealism and Marxist philosophy. The best among these
original and hybridist Chinese “comparative” philosophers who have been using