Collaterality in Early Chinese Cosmology: An Argument for Confucian Harmony (he 和) as Creatio In Situ

Title

Collaterality in Early Chinese Cosmology: An Argument for Confucian Harmony (he 和) as Creatio In Situ

Author

Roger T. Ames

Page

43-70

DOI

Abstract

One important benefit of the Guodian and Shanghai Museum strips is the new insights they are providing in our understanding of the early intellectual evolution of both Confucianism and Daoism. Beyond what is new in these documents, these same materials can be used to qualify, corroborate, and reiterate perhaps old but still undervalued insights into the interpretive context within which we construct our understanding of early China. One hugely important example is when the distinguished French sinologist Marcel Granet observes rather starkly that “Chinese wisdom has no need of the idea of God.” This characterization of classical Chinese philosophy has had many iterations, albeit in different formulations, by many of our most prominent sinologists both Chinese and Western. Indeed, our best interpreters of classical Chinese philosophy are explicit in rejecting the idea that Chinese cosmology begins from some independent, transcendent principle and entails both the metaphysical reality/appearance distinction and the plethora of dualistic categories that arise from such a worldview.
The philosophical implications of this seemingly off-hand observation are fundamental and pervasive. One consequence of taking this insight into Chinese cosmology seriously is that it enables us to disambiguate some of the central philosophical vocabulary of classical Chinese philosophy by identifying equivocations that emerge when we elide classical Greek cosmological assumptions with those indigenous to the classical Chinese worldview. We will find that an important corollary to the absence of “God” in Chinese cosmology is the need for a different language in thinking about issues as basic as cosmic origins, the source of meaning in the world, and the nature of creativity itself.

Keyword

cosmology, creativity, collaterality, origins, meaning.

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