Discuss And Reaffirm The Normative Meaning Of Classics

Abstract:In modern times, the normative meaning of classics has been censured extensively, which reflects the essential issues of modern society:how normative value maintains its invariability in the unsettled history. The writer traces the cause of the dilemma back to the Enlightenment, finding that disenchantment of rationalism causing the awakening of historic awareness, which led to the rise of value relativism in the twentieth century. The writer inspects the censuring of classics, examining this phenomena in both Chinese and Western contextTo reaffirm the classics, the writer has examined the dilemma in sight of the Philosophical Hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer, by revealing the results of the Enlightenment to justify the classics. As a part of tradition, the classics make it possible to understand the external and internal world, so they have normative meanings. On the other hand, although the classic are historic, they talk to us directly, overcoming the distance of time, which ultimately reflects the timelessness. The timelessness is not something which transcends a kind of historic value, but a special pattern existing in history. In the end, the dissertation discusses the normative meaning of classics in modern China.