Il "Confucius Sinarum Philosophus" del 1687: particolarità ed effetti culturali di una traduzione

The Confucius Sinarum Philosophus was not only the first encounter of Europe's intellectuals with Confucian thought. It also marked the moment when the significant thesis was established that even in completely non-European cultures, philosophies exist. In other words, the term "philosophy" does not solely define a Greco-Western tradition of thought (which is obviously also associated with the Arab-Islamic thought that stems from Platonism and Aristotelianism) but is universally applicable. Enlightenment thinkers of the 18th century adopted this conclusion without realizing that it was born within a religious conversion strategy that assigned Confucius the role of Socrates or Seneca to give the Jesuits the role of Justin and the apologetic Fathers. Certainly, the Jesuits had a factual basis for their argument, namely the actual presence of commentaries, schools, and interpretative divergences among the "literati" themselves. They relied on this aspect to identify Confucian thought as philosophy and to convince themselves that the semantics and logic of discourse could not be so different from those of European philosophy. Neither Leibniz nor Wolff doubted this fundamental similarity, even though they sought more refined ways to ascertain it. This leaves us with an unresolved dilemma: whether referring to "philosophy" for the masters of thought in non-European civilizations is an act of homage and recognition—as the Jesuits undoubtedly believed—or a subtle form of Eurocentric dominance that uncritically exports a model of discursiveness and a relationship between thought and life shaped by European-Western history.