Historical Nature of Hermeneutics and Origin of Confucian Classics

Ricoeur has proposed a threefold explaining for the meaning of history, i.e., out of the narration of historical narration and the explaining of history which forms a tradition, there is an understanding of historiography, or the historiography of hermeneutics. Such a historiography is a reflection to the historical narration itself, which forms a philosophical query and inquiring the origin in spirit, and not merely stops at textual research on facts. From such a historical understanding, we can temporary get rid of the limitation of material objects, pictures and records, as well as various historical materials, to restore or imagine a possible route of historical changes through a logic of the evolution of objects, thus to have a picture from a “non-verbal” world to a “verbal” one. The origin of the basic Confucian cannon of six classics overlaps Confucian history of civilization and historical views. Starting from the mere research of historical facts, we could not explain the true source of these materials, and, especially, we could not explain how these literature become classics with some sacred characteristics. Hence the origin of Confucian classics is not only the history of the literature itself, but also includes the evolutionary history of concepts and the history of spiritual expending. It is the result of continuous explanation and a series of addition of thoughts. From oral memory to script memory, from odd materials to texts with strict structure, from general historical literature to systematic philosophical classics, this long and complicated process is a prior-history before the forming of six classics, and is also the evolutionary history and construction history. It is precisely in a state of chaos, the system of six classics grow gradually, and the basic feature of Confucian classics became clearer and clearer, and are finally showed to the world as the fundamental canons of Chinese civilization.