Platonism Across Borders: From the Global Point of View to the Inner Life of Things

Abstract

Historicist scholarship has contributed to obscuring a fundamental sense in which classical, canonical Chinese scholarship is by and large Platonic. Chinese classics have been systematically used, rather than properly understood. As a result, they have been effectively denied the right to guide us into an understanding of what they point to — their message. Now, such a message may prove to significantly help today’s scholarship in facing a crisis of standards unwittingly exposed by historicism itself. The present work questions historicist assumptions by way of 1. accessing traditional Chinese literary sources in their original poetic context and 2. testifying to the sense in which Platonism cuts across civilizational borders. In this respect, the present investigation serves as a case study inviting recognition of Platonism as a currently viable poetic solution to the crisis of modern science.