本文旨在探討中國的公/私區分圖式,藉以反省如何走出華人政治中心的一元觀傳統。本文探究了如下的問題:為何官/民會被視同於公/私,而家、國、天下的一貫秩序中則難以形成公/私的領域區分;對私的貶抑如何遲滯了社會的發展,陽奉陰違的二元結構又何以會盛行;為何聖王傳統下批判性的公共領域,以及由士紳地方公共活動構成的表微性公共領域不會促成結構的變遷。在考察公/私語意與封建城邦、門第、士紳社會的結構有何對應及相互影響關係的同時,本文指出政治優位性的傳統與上述的發展互為因果。本文進而說明,此一傳統如何在今日功能分化的情境中造成對政治不當的高估與低估,以致無法切事地處理公共事務的問題。本文主張,完善作為制度化二階觀察機制的公共領域是走出此一困境的可能出路,因為它不只再現出環境中各種不同的看法,還能作為運作的動力及多元統一的整合機制。但本文指出,唯有當我們不但學會從多元脈絡的觀點來增進社會自我組識與論述的能力,同時更走出了華人以群為公的傳統,積極發展私領域中的公共領域,在差異而不是同一的基礎上來建立統一自主性才能真地實現。
This article examines the Chinese schemes of the distinction public/private and aims to find a way out of the Chinese politics-centered, monolithic tradition. The following problems are investigated: Why government/people was seen as equal to public/private? Why it was so difficult to build a division of public/private realms in the consistent order from family via state to the world (tianxia)? How the disparaging of the private impeded the development of society? Why the yin/yang duality structure was so popular? Why both the critical public sphere that was guided by the idea of the holy king and the representative public sphere that was constituted by public activities of local gentries could not result in a change of societal structure. In addition to an analysis of the correspondences and interactions between the public/private semantics and the societal structures in the feudal city-state society, the great literati-clan dominated society and the gentry society, this article indicates that there were a reciprocal causality between these historical developments and the tradition of political primacy. Furthermore, this article explains how this tradition caused an inappropriate overestimation or underestimation of politics in the situation of functional differentiation today's, so that the public affairs cannot be adequately dealt with according to the fact. To perfect the function of the public sphere as institutionalized mechanism of observations of second order is a possible escape of this predicament, because it represent not only the different views in the environment, but can also function both as an operating dynamic and as an integrative mechanism of multiplex unity. But an actual autonomy is only realized, it is argued, when we not only enhance the competence of society for self-organization and discourse formation from the polycontextural viewpoint, but also transcend the Chinese tradition that viewed being together as publicity, actively develop the public sphere in the private realms, and build the unity on the basis of difference instead of identity.