NEUROSCIENCE, CONFUCIANISM AND CHRISTIANITY

Professor Oliver Davies and Professor Xinzhong Yao
King’s College London

Contemporary neuroscience offers us radically new understandings of what it is to be a human being. It lays bare the basic universal structure of human social cognition in face to face encounter, where the interactive development of shared gesture and shared language in the immediacy of the here and now grounds in us a shared sense of world as the place of our common action and of ourselves as potential collaborators. This paper argues that this new scientific self-understanding allows us to read both Confucianism and Christianity side by side: as high-level cultural intensifications and realizations of our basic human solidarity. This sheds new light, potentially, on the sharing of common authoritative texts in these traditions (e.g. Confucian Classics and Christian Bible respectively), commanding common action, and on the traditional practices of reading or accessing such texts. It potentially offers insights also into the sharing of ‘religious’ culture as both language and gesture (through rites) and of a common transformational orientation to the world of space and time, through an imaginative and cognitive holding to the place of the ‘heavenly’. In conclusion, the authors argue that cutting-edge neuroscientific research may offer Sinology an avenue for presenting traditional forms of Chinese ethics and philosophy in ways that make their basic structures more accessible to the world today. This in turn may facilitate the integration of traditional Chinese thought into contemporary Chinese and global debates around ethics and philosophy, political theory and political economy. 

神经科学，儒家学说和基督教义

奥利弗·戴维斯、姚新中
伦敦国王学院

当代神经科学让我们对人之为人有了全新的理解。它揭示了在面对面相遇时人类社会认知的基本普遍 结构，在此时此地的直接性中，面对面相遇的共有手势与共有语言互动式发展为我们共有的世界感奠基，这世界既是我们共同行动的空间，又是使我们成为潜在合作 者的地方。本文认为，神经科学提供了一种通过科学达成自我理解的途径，它使我们能够把儒家学说与基督教义放在一起阅读：此二者都作为高端文化的强化和对我 们基本人类团结的实现。潜在地，这学科从一个新的角度揭示了在这两个传统中公认的权威文本的共享性，这些文本要求共同的行动，也阐明了阅读或进入文本的传 统实践。它将会通过对“神圣”世界之想象的和认知的把握，揭示宗教文化作为语言和姿态（通过仪式）的共享性，以及共同的转型方向——导向时空的世界。它潜 在性地为共有的“宗教文化”和转型方向提供洞见：共有的“宗教”文化，包括语言和手势（通过仪式）；向着时空世界的共有的转型方向，通过想象性和认识性的 持存通向“天国”。综上所述，笔者认为，前沿的神经科学研究为汉学创造了一条展现中国传统道德和哲学的坦途，使汉学的基本结构更易为今天的世界所知晓。这 也相应地促进了传统中国思想和当代中国与全球关于道德、哲学、政治理论和政治经济学论争的一体化。