The Primary Way

Chung-Ying Cheng

Description

In The Primary Way, the distinguished scholar of Chinese philosophy Chung-ying Cheng synthesizes his lifetime of work on the Yijing, also known as the I Ching or Book of Changes. Cheng offers a systematic engagement with the classic Chinese text as a philosophy that is still valuable and relevant today. In contemporary philosophical terms, Cheng has developed the ontological hermeneutics of the Yijing as well as its philosophical methodology of symbolic reference in a holistic and onto-generative system of trigrams and hexagrams. The book is organized around eight themes that illuminate Cheng's interpretation of the Yijing as a philosophy for creative human action and transformation. He demonstrates how the philosophy of change in the Yijing embodies early Chinese ontology, cosmology, epistemology, and virtue ethics in the interpretation of divinatory judgments. Cheng's work shows how the philosophy of change contains a vision of humanity as creatively related to heaven and earth, and how it gives positive meaning to any change as part of a ceaseless creativity. With this understanding, it enables humanity to develop its potential as a partner of heaven and earth.
Foreword
Preface

1. Introducing the Yijing (易经): Six Stages of Development and Six Topics of the Yijing

2. Yijing as Creative Inception of Chinese Philosophy

3. Interpreting a Paradigm of Change in Chinese Philosophy

4. Inquiring into the Primary Model: Yijing and Chinese Ontological Hermeneutics

5. Philosophical Significance of Guan: From Guan (观) to Onto-Hermeneutical Unity of Methodology and Ontology

6. Yin-Yang (阴阳) Way of Onto-Cosmic Thinking and Philosophy of the Yi (易)

7. On Harmony as Transformation: Paradigms from the Yijing

8. Zhouyi (周易) and the Philosophy of Wei (Positions 位)

9. Li (理) and Qi (气) in the Yijing: A Reconsideration of Being and Nonbeing in Chinese Philosophy

10. On the Yijing as a Symbolic System of Integrated Communication

11. On Zhu Xi's Integration of Yili (义理) and Xianshu (象数) in the Study of the Yijing

12. On Timeliness (Shizhong 时中) in the Analects and the Yijing: An Inquiry into the Philosophical Relationship between Confucius and the Yijing

Chinese Glossary
English Key Terms
Notes
A Bibliography of the Yijing in Chinese
A Bibliography of the Yijing in Western Languages
Works Cited
Index

Sujets

• Ancient philosophy

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 septembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438479293
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 8 Mo

Extrait

THE PRIMARY WAY
THE PRIMARY WAY
Philosophy of Yijing
CHUNG-YING CHENG
Foreword by
Robert Cummings Neville
The cover diagram is named “Fu Xi Square-Circle Diagram of Sixty-four Hexagrams.” This diagram indicates two prior different orderings among the sixty-four hexagrams. This diagram is attributed to Fu Xi, the founder of Yijing Cosmological Symbols.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2020 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Name: Cheng, Chung-Ying, author
Title: The primary way : philosophy of yijing / Chung-Ying Cheng, author.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: ISBN 9781438479279 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438479293 (ebook)
Further information is available at the Library of Congress.
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Contents
Foreword
Preface
Chapter 1 Introducing the Yijing ( 易经 ): Six Stages of Development and Six Topics of the Yijing
Chapter 2 Yijing as Creative Inception of Chinese Philosophy
Chapter 3 Interpreting a Paradigm of Change in Chinese Philosophy
Chapter 4 Inquiring into the Primary Model: Yijing and Chinese Ontological Hermeneutics
Chapter 5 Philosophical Significance of Guan : From Guan ( 观 ) to Onto-Hermeneutical Unity of Methodology and Ontology
Chapter 6 Yin-Yang ( 阴阳 ) Way of Onto-Cosmic Thinking and Philosophy of the Yi ( 易 )
Chapter 7 On Harmony as Transformation: Paradigms from the Yijing
Chapter 8 Zhouyi ( 周易 ) and the Philosophy of Wei (Positions 位 )
Chapter 9 Li ( 理 ) and Qi ( 气 ) in the Yijing : A Reconsideration of Being and Nonbeing in Chinese Philosophy
Chapter 10 On the Yijing as a Symbolic System of Integrated Communication
Chapter 11 On Zhu Xi’s Integration of Yili ( 义理 ) and Xianshu ( 象数 ) in the Study of the Yijing
Chapter 12 On Timeliness ( Shizhong 时中 ) in the Analects and the Yijing: An Inquiry into the Philosophical Relationship between Confucius and the Yijing
Chinese Glossary
English Key Terms
Notes
A Bibliography of the Yijing in Chinese
A Bibliography of the Yijing in Western Languages
Works Cited
Index
Foreword
By good fortune and the kindness of Professor Chung-ying Cheng, I had the privilege twenty-six years ago of writing a foreword to his previous large volume of essays, New Dimensions of Confucian and Neo-Confucian Philosophy . 1 That foreword made three points. First, Professor Cheng is a very Catholic thinker within the Chinese tradition, not limited to one school such as the Confucian or Daoist, but drawing freely from all. Second, he not only is a scholar writing about the past, but even more is a working philosopher addressing the issues of our own time with the resources of classical philosophy, including Western philosophy. Third, he has one of the most splendid speculative imaginations of our time. These points remain true about the essays in these two volumes of Creative Philosophy of the Yi . Yet, much has happened in the intervening years to deepen Professor Cheng’s philosophy.
First, he has thoroughly elaborated an interpretive method that he calls “onto-hermeneutics,” or the hermeneutics of being. The essays discussing this are mainly in the volume The Primary Way , although the method informs nearly all of the articles of comparison in the other volume. Cheng was inspired by the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger in the development of onto-hermeneutics, but he applied that inspiration to the texts of Chinese philosophy, especially the Yijing . Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenologies were careful to bracket out experience of value as well as commitments of existence. Heidegger was famous, or notorious, for believing that value-language already bespeaks a loss of being. Given the turns in early modern European philosophy that separated scientifically knowable facts from values, that hostility to experiential value is understandable, if perhaps misguided. Cheng’s project is a radical departure from the European phenomenologists precisely because the Chinese texts do not permit a failure to recognize their articulations of the worth of things. Cheng’s onto-hermeneutics is through and through aesthetic, dwelling on harmony. The method itself is extremely complicated, and these books invite its study in theory and practice.
Second, Cheng has devoted himself with single-minded energy to the onto-hermeneutical understanding of the Yijing . Now the Yijing is one of the most ancient and influential texts in any civilization, and the discovery of an older-yet manuscript of the text in 1973 sparked an industry of historical research. Yet the philosophical meaning of the text has often seemed like a Rorschach test for philosophers, especially for Western philosophers. Cheng has been determined that the philosophical interpretation of the Yijing not be a mere matter of speculative projection, eisegesis rather than exegesis. On the other hand, he is not willing, with so many of the historians, to leave the text as an ancient handbook for divination. With its many layers, the text exhibits extraordinary assumptions about the meaning of the world of nature and human kind. These assumptions have shaped the ways subsequent thinkers have taken the world, and they stand in many interesting contrasts with equally old assumptions in Western and Indian philosophies.
To combine these first two points, I believe that a significant achievement of Professor Cheng in these essays is to articulate the way of the Yijing as a normative way of life, a way that recognizes many of the real joints of nature and society, a way that needs to be practiced to be understood well, a way that leads to harmony in the deep senses these essays explore. To put the point more bluntly than Cheng usually does, the Yijing can be interpreted to provide an ethic grounded in the nature of being. This is what onto-hermeneutics does: not straight historical analysis, not objective metaphysics alone, but the establishment of a hermeneutical spiral that draws both an interpretation of the text from an interpretation of our own condition and a morally freighted analysis of our own condition from the orientations of the text. This is especially evident in Cheng’s repeated and multi-contextual analyses of harmony, probably Cheng’s most systematic philosophical contribution.
The third advance in Cheng’s philosophy is precisely the fact that he now has a philosophical system, expressed in these essays, which extends throughout the main topics of philosophy. The system has a vocabulary, mainly elaborated from the Yijing and later Chinese philosophies, but that vocabulary is tested and refined for our time by Cheng’s many discussions of other philosophical positions, East and West. Whereas in the volume twenty-six years ago, Cheng presented himself primarily as an interpreter, in these volumes he presents himself as a philosopher with a philosophy, and with the arguments to connect it critically with other philosophies. Irenic as always, he learns from everyone he studies. Yet he does not flinch upon discovering the limitations in other philosophies.
Two obstacles exist to appreciating Cheng’s work here. The first is that systematic philosophy itself is out of fashion. Part of what this means is that specialists bristle if the philosopher is not up on the secondary literature and the discussions that are carried on in specialized working groups. Any philosopher with a system necessarily is going to have to work with the results of those specialized working groups, and cannot be internal to them all. The virtue of a philosophic system is that it thinks the ideas in comprehensive ways that specialists miss. Also, a philosophic system such as Cheng’s can be used to address the fundamental practical philosophical issues of our time, something that the specialized analysis of ideas often cannot do.
The second obstacle is that Cheng has taken the language of the Yijing to be the core of his philosophy. The Yijing is an esoteric book, with esoteric language, rooted in a culture millennia away from our own. Thinkers whose intellectual paradigms come from analogies with modern science will find antiquity to be a hindrance rather than a help. Yet I recommend readers to persevere, because Cheng brings the intellectual motifs of the Yijing up to date. He is as aware as any modernist or postmodernist what needs to be left behind from the past.
On a personal note, I want to thank Chung-ying Cheng for his highly insightful interpretive essay on my own work, in Comparative Essays . His purpose there is to read me as a Chinese philosopher, and he does so by focusing on my theory of creation ex nihilo , which is just about the most Western notion in my thinking. I am pleased to see that he can apply onto-hermeneutics to even such a strange thinker as myself.
Chung-ying Cheng is one of the most creative and comprehensive philosophers of our time. It is our privilege to have these volumes of essays.
Robert Cummings Neville Milton, Massachusetts, November, 2017
Preface
Although the Yijing 易经 has been treated usually as a divinato