Abstract:

Chinese philosophy has been a hot topic in the academic community in recent years. To philosophically justify “Chinese philosophy, ” the fundamental question is as follows: How is it possible to make philosophy speak Chinese? Past scholarship frequently confined debates to Chinese linguistic structures, inadvertently rendering the legitimacy of Chinese philosophy a contested and elusive subject. Gadamer’s contemporary hermeneutics approaches this issue by grounding it in the understanding of existence beyond linguistic structures, asserting that philosophy requires no privileged language and that philosophical thought transcends grammatical scrutiny. The philosophical capacity of a language is determined not by the presence of a copula (such as ‘to be’), but rather by its ability to enable the comprehension and articulation of existence’s universal meaning through its linguistic framework. Demonstrating remarkable conceptual synergy with contemporary linguistic scholarship, Gadamer’s hermeneutic framework embodies a paradigm-shifting reconfiguration of the language-thought dialectics, which transcends mere morphological particularities, engaging fundamentally with the existential comprehension and hermeneutic construction of universal signification through linguistic mediation. It will explicitly foreground that the narrative architecture of the Chinese language can equally encapsulate philosophical and metaphysical insights and it is the things expressed in language itself that determines thought. Within the cultural tapestry of China, aesthetics emerges as the authentic metaphysical and universal modality of thinking. Gadamer’s discourse furnishes a novel foundational argument and ideological perspective on how the Chinese language articulates philosophy, alluding to both the theoretical concerns of constructing Chinese philosophy and the fulfillment of this philosophical imperative. Against the backdrop of philosophy’s own evolution, Gadamer’s theory radically inaugurates a universal horizon for appreciating the diversity of philosophical expressions and cognitive pathways that diverge from Western linguistic paradigms

Key words: Gadamer, linguistics, hermeneutics, Chinese philosophy