哲學的任務之一，是對生命的意義提供反思。自唐君毅在《祖國》發表〈說中華民族之花果飄零〉一文以來，迄今已超過五十載。本文將分析這五十餘年來中國哲學在花果飄零過程中，所提出適用於指引海外華人生命意義的幾個構想。第一，是在中國大陸由馬克斯主義政權統治之後，許多華人
流散海外，新儒家唐君毅於痛定思痛之餘，提出「靈根自植」構想，為海外華人點燃指引生命明燈。第二，是中國哲學在海外逐漸達成學術生根，包含在學界成立中國哲學學科、學會與刊物，進入學術競爭體制；同時華人也自覺到面對了不同文化與價值的競爭甚至衝突，此時哲學學者如成中英、柯雄文等人提出了「衝突的均衡」或「和諧辯證法」的構想。第三，面對全球化與後現代的衝擊，以及處處有多元文化與多元離散團體共存的跨文化互動情境，本人在與多元他者進行文明交談的脈絡下，提出「相互豐富」的構想。至於今後在相互豐富的條件下，中國哲學能否在世界哲學脈絡中，出現怎樣的嶄新面貌，還有待當前與未來中國哲學家在理論與實踐上的共同努力，以及批判性的省思和觀察。

It is over fifty years since the publication of Tang Junyi’s 唐君毅 essay
“On the Drifting Away of Chinese Culture” (1961), one of the first hilosophical works on the Chinese diaspora. This paper discusses several major ideas proposed by Chinese philosophers over the past fifty years or so about the meaningfulness of life for Chinese people in diaspora. The first is Tang Junyi’s idea of the “self-planting of spiritual roots,” proposed at the time when Chinese were fleeing overseas after the Communists came to power in China in 1949; the second is the idea of “balance in conflict” or “dialectics of harmony” proposed by Profs. Antonio Cua 柯雄文 and Chung-Ying Cheng 成中英 at a time when Chinese philosophy was being established as a formal discipline in the North American academic world together with its own journals and associations, and Chinese cultural values were in competition with the values of other cultures; I propose a third idea, namely that of “mutual enrichment” through the method of
“mutual strangification,” to face the impact of globalization and post-modernism and the new of dialogues with different diaspora communities from different cultural origins.