The Ultimate Why Question: Why Is There Nothing at All Rather than Nothing Whatsoever? ultimate why question: why is there anything at all rather than nothing whatsoever?

2. The Question of Being, Non-Being, and “Creation ex Nihilo” in Chinese Philosophy

43 May Sim 2 S The Question of Being, Non-Being, and “Creation ex Nihilo” in Chinese Philosophy Some commentators on Chinese philosophy maintain the position that in classical Chinese philosophy there is no question about being. Yu Jiyuan asserts that Aristotle’s examination of the question of being is linked to predication.1 That the Chinese language lacks the pertinent subjectpredicate grammar of Greek leads Yu to deny that the question of being exists for classical Chinese philosophy. Yu says, “it is the absence of predication in Chinese that is responsible for the absence of the question of being in Chinese philosophy” (440). Similarly, David Hall appeals to Angus Graham’s contrast between you (sometimes translated “being,” but more literally “having”) and wu (translated “not to be,” more literally “not to be around”) to show that the you/wu distinction “suggests contrast rather than contradiction.”2 Accordingly, Hall maintains that the Chinese language is an “aesthetic” and “correlative” language that does not deal with Being or not-being per se, so that any dialectic between being and not-being will “not be easily discoverable in the ChiI am most grateful to Msgr. Wippel for his helpful changes and comments in editing this chapter. My thanks also go to the participants of the 2006 Metaphysical Society of America Meeting at the Catholic University of America. Their questions and comments inspired me to develop an earlier version of this essay. 1. See his “The Language of Being: Between Aristotle and Chinese Philosophy,” International Philosophical Quarterly 39 (1999): 439–54. 2. See his “On Looking Up ‘Dialectics’ in a Chinese Dictionary,” in Being and Dialectic: Metaphysics and Culture, ed. William Desmond and Joseph Grange (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 197–212, esp. 201. 44  May Sim nese tradition” (208).3 Hall explains (277) that the Chinese way of categorizing things is analogical, and thus is dependent on the particularities of things, rather than logical, or dependent on the “logical essences” or “natural kinds” of things. Since Hall believes that logical thinking is required for questioning about being, and because Chinese reasoning is analogical rather than logical, he maintains that the Chinese never asked “The Question of Being.” In contrast, other commentators claim that there is a problem about being and non-being in classical Chinese thought.4 Robert Neville, for example, finds a “structural parallel” to the Western model of what he calls “creation ex nihilo” in Chinese philosophy despite the absence of such language therein.5 Specifically, Neville holds that any radical contingency , and hence any determinate being, must come from nothing. This nothing which gives rise to the created world for Neville is “a creative nothing, not mere nothing in itself.”6 Finding a similar assertion of the origins of being in non-being in Chinese thinkers like Laozi and Zhoudunyi,7 Neville thinks that being was and is a question for Chinese philosophers.8 3. See also Hall, “The Culture of Metaphysics: On Saving Neville’s Project (from Neville),” in Interpreting Neville, ed. J. Harley Chapman and Nancy K. Frankenberry (Albany: State University of New York, 1999). 4. See Tu Weiming, “The Continuity of Being: Chinese Visions of Nature,” in On Nature, ed. Leroy S. Rouner (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 113–29. Tu explains that “[a]ncient Chinese thinkers were intensely interested in the creation of the world . . . [the] real issue is not the presence or absence of creation myths, but the underlying assumption of the cosmos: whether it is continuous or discontinuous with its creator” (113). Also see Cheng Chungying, “Reality and Divinity in Chinese Philosophy,” in A Companion to World Philosophies, ed. Eliot Deutsch and Ron Bontekoe (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 1997), 185–200. Cheng tells us that the process of generation through the 64 hexagrams depicted in the I Ching gives us a “cosmogonical picture of the rise and development of reality as a world of things” (185). Cheng characterizes the process of generation as the dao and the sustaining source of the generation as taiji. He says, “It is this theory of taiji and dao that represents the main stream of metaphysical thinking in the 3,200-year history of Chinese philosophy” (185). 5. See Robert C. Neville, “From Nothing to Being: The Notion of Creation in Chinese and Western Thought,” Philosophy East & West 30 (1980): 21–34. 6. Ibid. 7. Even though I use the Pinyin system, I will retain the Wade Giles system when quoting from...