第四讲：临命终时：《庄子》的存在主义哲学

Lecture Four：Facing Death: The Existential Philosophy of Zhuāng zǐ

Speaker主讲人：Dennis Schilling 谢林德

Date日期: 3.12, 2024

Time时间：18:00-21:00

Place地点：Room 2106, The Second Public Teaching Building 公二2106

About the speaker:

Dennis Schilling, born 1962 in Aalen, Germany, studied Sinology, Philosophy and Japanology at the universities of Würzburg, Munich/Germany, Wuhan/China, and received his doctorate and his habilitation at the University of Munich (LMU). In his doctoral thesis, he comprehensively examines the origin and development of the “imitations of the ‘Book of Changes’” (擬易) from the Hàn dynasty to the Míng dynasty, a literary genre and tradition in Chinese canonical scholarship that includes several cosmological models such as Yáng Xióng’s Tài xuán jīng (揚雄太玄經) and practical divination manuals such as the Yì lín (易林). The study analyzes “imitation” as a compositional feature in literary composition, cosmological and political thought and divination practice.

In his habilitation thesis, Dennis Schilling discusses the revival of idealism of Yogācāra-Buddhism (wéi shì xué 唯識學) in the revolutionary political thought of Tán Sìtóng (譚嗣同), Zhāng Tàiyán (章太炎) and other thinkers at the turn to the twentieth century. The study explores how Buddhist doctrines were molded into a psychology of martyrdom and an epistemology of mentalities that met the needs of political activism and propaganda.

In 2009, he published a new and annotated translation of the Book of Changes (Yì jīng, 易經) in German language. His current research focusses on ideas of life and death in ancient and medieval China as well as on the metaphysics of time and change in Chinese philosophy.

Dennis Schilling previously worked at the University of Munich and the University of Marburg in Germany and at Kainan University (Taoyuan) and National Chengchi University (Taipei) in Taiwan. Since 2016, he has been researching and supervising PhD and Master’s theses at the research department of Chinese Philosophy of the School of Philosophy of Renmin University of China in Beijing and holds courses and lectures on Chinese Metaphysics, Philosophical Anthropology, Daoist philosophy and Yì jīng studies.

Abstract:

The treatment of death is one of the most serious and complicated topics in the philosophy of Zhuāng zǐ. The strangeness of its assertions and the rigidity of its claims make it difficult to approach from a practical perspective; hence Lee Yearley assigns these passages to a strand in Zhuāng zǐ’s thought that he calls ‘the radical Zhuāng zǐ’, whose hard edges are later simplified and sanded down.

In this lecture, I will show how the philosophy of death in the Zhuāng zǐ forms the basis for an existential philosophy of death. Since death is seen as a kind of metamorphosis, it opens the door to enter the mysterious and secretive space where the transforming forces themselves are at work. Such a direct encounter with the ‘molder of things’ promises an existence beyond ordinary existence, no longer committed to the world of things, but solely to the transformation that makes things born and die.

To this end, we will analyze in depth the 6th chapter of the Inner Chapters and in particular the stories that tell how the ‘Masters’, who reveal their common vision of death, become friends. In their actions, we recognize a rather complex web of ritualized actions, linguistic confessions, examinations and obligations that we must all strictly follow and fulfill.

主办单位：

中国人民大学哲学院

中国人民大学孔子研究院

中国人民大学当代中国哲学发展研究中心