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Reflections on Lao Sze-Kwang 21

out of Western models of transcendence, classical China’s world order, according
to Mou, is altogether “this worldly.”
It is Tang Junyi’s foremost contribution to world philosophy—his synoptic
philosophy of culture—that has led some scholars to associate him explicitly with a
Hegelian idealism, Lao Sze-Kwang prominent among them. But on closer exami-
nation, we see that in the specific range of uncommon assumptions that Tang Junyi
argues for as the ground of Chinese cultural uniqueness, he at least in some
important degree tries to distance himself from the homogenizing closure of
Enlightenment teleology and universalism.
In rehearsing the development of New Confucianism philosophy in this past
century, three other prominent figures belong largely to the more traditional
historical and exegetical stream of Confucian philosophy: Feng Youlan (冯友兰
1889–1990), Qian Mu (钱穆 1895–1991), and Xu Fuguan (徐复观 1904–1982), with
the latter two, along with Mou Zongsan and Tang Junyi being closely associated
with the history and the prestige of the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
When I was a student at Taiwan University in the early 1970s, I had the good
fortune to study with Fang Dongmei (方东美 1899–1977), another contemporary
philosopher who is usually included among the ranks of the New Confucians.
Certainly Fang had a comprehensive knowledge of the Chinese philosophical
tradition in all of its parts, from the classical period through to modern times. And
at different phases in his own intellectual development, he focused on different
aspects and different periods within the tradition, coming to a keen interest in
Huayan Buddhism in his later years. But Fang was fundamentally holistic and
aesthetic in his philosophical orientation, was deeply steeped in the history of
Western philosophy, and was skeptical about to all reductionistic rationalizations.
I think those students who have acquiesced in the New Confucian rubric for Fang
do so because they want to assert his stature among his contemporaries, but I have
always had serious doubts about the appropriateness of this label, and am not sure
that Fang himself, if he had lived long enough, would have accepted it.
With this historical context in mind, it can be simply stated that the contem-
porary thinker, Lao Sze-Kwang, who did live to witness the emergence of the
“New Confucian” classification, on his own reckoning, does not belong to this
New Confucian lineage. On the contrary, he both understood himself and is seen
broadly by his students and contemporaries as a world philosopher who, self-
consciously and critically applying a rigorous methodology, draws upon philos-
ophy in its broadest compass as a resource for his own philosophizing. Following
the death of Mou Zongsan in 1995, Lao Sze-Kwang had the stature of being one of
China’s leading contemporary philosophers, and as such, would often be intro-
duced with the “New Confucian” rubric that he would then, each time, adamantly
reject. Among his reasons for this strong response was his antipathy toward the