Does Chinese Philosophy lack Universality? A Path from Early Western Interpretations to Mou Zongsan

Though less sharp than in the 19th and early 20th century, the “exclusion” of Chinese thought from the philosophical field is often an assumption for a large part of Western philosophers and a “burden” for the Chinese counterpart. In order to relieve this “burden”, it is necessary to accurately understand the intellectual reasons behind this exclusion. In the first part of our article, by focusing our attention on the histories of philosophy of the late 17th and early 18th century, we will penetrate the monolicity and strength of this “exclusion”, which is anchored in a cultural and religious process concerned with European identity more than with China. We refer to the complex process of secularisation of culture and consequently of philosophy, which arose mostly within the German Eclecticism and afterwards within German Enlightenement, two intellectual faces of modern Lutheranism. In the second part, we try to compare Mou Zongsa's definition of Chinese universalism with the German Eclectics' definition of their complete lack of universalism.