Jia (家) as a Primordial Phenomenon of Chinese Culture: Confucianism from the Perspective of Philosophical Anthropology

Abstract

Faced with the crisis of self-orientation brought about by modernity, some Chinese scholars in recent years have taken jia 家 (family/home) as a core element of Confucian thought to construct a philosophy. This outlook seeks to open a possible path out of the predicament supported by Chinese cultural tradition. In this paper, we employ philosophical anthropology as a methodological platform, using the concept of the primordial phenomenon as its primary analytical tool to demonstrate that jia is the primordial phenomenon in Confucian thought, thereby articulating the fundamental differences between Chinese and Western cultures. By comparing Heidegger’s and Levinas’s discussions of the home, this paper shows that jia as a primordial phenomenon overturns the presupposition of mineness (Jemeinigkeit) in fundamental ontology and re-conceives the human being as a non-punctiform structural being, namely Jia-sein. Moreover, the two fundamental kinds of experience within jia, intimate experience and transcendental experience, reveal jia as a unified field of tension that transcends the opposition between interiority and exteriority, whereby sheng-sheng 生生 (life begetting life) is interpreted as a principle of transcendence. The world disclosed by jia is an affective cosmos grounded in the primordial trust inherent in qinqin 亲亲 (familial love) and situated in a positive fundamental mood—thus, it is an existential space that remains open to the Other and to the co-existence of the self and Other. This paper concludes that jia is a primordial phenomenon of Chinese culture; its emphasis on integration means it has never appeared in the Western intellectual tradition, which begins with separation; therefore, jia is an untranslatable concept.