One and Many: A Comparative Study of Plato’s Philosophy and Daoism Represented by Ge Hong by Ji Zhang (review)

Daoism has rarely been the object of comparative studies. Ji Zhang’s One and Many: A Comparative Study of Plato’s Philosophy and Daoism Represented by Ge Hong is an attempt to fill the gap. The author proposes “to read Plato through Ge Hong” (p. xxiv) in order to understand the core of Platonic philosophy, namely the theory of forms, within the conceptual framework of Daoism. Further, Platonic ontology, as exposed in Parmenides, is contrasted with Ge Hong’s cosmogony metaphor in Baopuzi, and the Timaeus creation myth is compared to Daoist alchemical texts. The Daoist relational ontology of essence and existence is characterized as biological, empirical, and existential, while Plato’s rational philosophy is psychological, immaterial, and ideal (p. 77). The author expresses serious objections to the utility of the Platonic legacy in persisting to shape science as a set of mathematical formulas expressing universal laws ruled by causality. Instead, he advances the model of Daoist alchemical empiricism as an appropriate substitute to inspire and guide modern science, particularly physics and cosmology. In this context, primordial indeterminateness generates actual things according to the ever-changing cycle of the five elements (wu xing). Zhang criticizes the philosophical method of searching for a commensurable ground for comparison as partial and inadequate. He has recourse to a direct confrontation between the two philosophers, Ge Hong and Plato. Traditions confront each other with whatever speculative categories they possess, regardless of their commensurability or convergence. Particularly, Daoism has never formulated an epistemology, but the author is confident that its worldview can be an adequate match to Plato’s rational inquiry into the intelligibility of what is.

The most interesting part of the book is, without doubt, the well-documented exposition of Ge Hong’s philosophy as the inheritor and epitomizer of Daoist tradition. Ge Hong (284–344? c.e.), a relatively unknown Daoist in Western literature, occupies an important position in Daoist tradition both as a theoretician and an alchemist. As we learn from the very beginning, his masterwork Baopuzi has been translated with obvious inaccuracies. Zhang offers us a fresh translation of some important fragments along with a critical study retracing Ge’s thought to Laozi, Zhuangzi, and Wang Bi. He follows the traditional Chinese method of extracting layers of meaning from previous texts, thus revealing the predominant patterns of thought running through Daoist writers through the ages. He draws a parallel between Laozi’s cosmogonical metaphor of dao as the mother of the myriad things and Ge’s genealogical metaphor of xuan (primal indeterminateness) as the ancestor of qi (determinate things). Wu (not being) and you (being) are understood within the cosmogonical metaphor as an ontological unity, whose self-changing from wu to you explains becoming. By conceiving primordial unity as both being and not being, Daoist ontology includes becoming and change, the physical objects and experience. Daoist all-inclusiveness is repeatedly contrasted with the Platonic distinction of being and not being, of essence and becoming, of intelligible forms and sensible objects. The pivotal concepts of being and not being acquire an altogether different meaning, therefore different ontological status, in the philosophies under examination. Daoist constant change is further contrasted with Plato’s conception of movement as motion and variation.

Moreover, Zhang draws some interesting parallels between Daoist ontology and alchemical practice. In this context, the alchemical transmutation of the elements coincides for the practitioner with a transformative and self-liberating journey back to the original unity of the dao. He thus becomes an immortal, a being realizing within his physical body some important intuitions of ontology, such as physical immortality, freedom, indeterminate action (wu wei) and empty mind.

Lastly, Daoism, particularly through alchemical experimentation, has formulated an empirical and highly original theory of the beginnings of the universe...