Ironies of Oneness and Difference: Coherence in Early Chinese Thought; Prolegomena to the Study of Li

Introduction

INTRODUCTION 子曰：君子和而不同，小人同而不和 The Master said, “The noble man is harmonious [with others] but not the same [as them]. The petty man is the same [as others] but not harmonious [with them].” —Analects, 13:23 自其異者視之，肝膽楚越也。自其同者視之，萬物皆一也。 Looked at from [the viewpoint of] their differences, your own liver and gall bladder are Chu [to the south] and Yue [to the north]. Looked at from [the viewpoint of] their sameness, the ten thousand things are all one. —Zhuangzi, “Dechongfu” 當知一切由心分別諸法。何曾自謂同異。 You must understand how everything derives from the mind’s differentiation of things. For when do things themselves ever declare themselves to be “the same as” or “different from” one another? —Jingxi Zhanran, Zhiguan yili Let’s suppose for a moment that “questioning our assumptions” is something worth doing—because it frees us from prejudices, because it expands our powers of thought and action, because it opens up new possibilities, because to do so is almost the definition of learning and thinking per se, because it is (as a result or perhaps synonym of all of the above) fun. One way to do this, no doubt, would be to undertake the serious and sympathetic examination of alternate belief systems, of other types of assumptions, ones that differ in surprising ways from the ones to which we ourselves, with whatever degree of self‑reflective awareness, have been committed. Classical Chinese thought is often recommended in this connection, and rightly so. But the uncovering of alternate beliefs about “what is so”—how the world might happen to be, how human beings might be constituted, and 1 2 IRONIES OF ONENESS AND DIFFERENCE so on—is perhaps less unsettling, and hence potentially less salutary, than the contemplation of alternate possibilities for what constitutes a belief, for what is intended in saying that anything is “so,” or for the preconditions that are unconsciously assumed in even formulating the choice between alternative beliefs. To entertain an alternative view about what things exists or do not exist is perhaps not as disorienting in its implications as glimpsing alternative possible assumptions about what a “thing” is, what it would mean for something to exist, or the relation between existing and not‑existing, or between “being one thing” and “being another thing.” On these grounds, the seemingly very abstract and distant question of what is meant by sameness and difference may prove to be a pressing matter of profound importance. A moment’s thought immediately reveals that some prereflective assumption about what counts as “the same” and what as “different” would have to serve as a defining premise in each and every possible human judgment and activity, every desire and value, every philosophical conclusion and logical principle, every cultural institution and political development. As it happens, this consideration points us directly toward one of the most puzzling and intriguing things about many classical Chinese thinkers: the way they handle ideas of “sameness” and “difference.” This is reflected in the most basic implications of apparently simple declaratory sentences— what is meant by saying “what” something “is”—and also in the most puzzling features of Chinese metaphysics, where modern interpreters seem again and again to find the material resisting analysis in terms of hard and fast notions of some set of really existing items that are factually “the same” and others that are “different.” Again and again, in a variety of ways, we come across similar quandaries for interpretation: One? Many? Inner? Outer? Same? Different? And even: All? None? The persistent reoccurrence of such ambiguities, and the usually unsatisfying solutions offered for them, suggests that these either‑or alternatives are perhaps not the most useful questions to ask when dealing with Chinese thought. Rethinking Same and Different To clarify what we’re getting at here, let’s put it this way: everything we can say, everything we can feel, everything we can know or want or imagine, presupposes some sense of what it means for something to be “the same as” or “different from” something else. If this list of types of experience is exhaustive, then all experience involves a strange preconscious procedure known as identifying: determining the identity of something. Maybe it is not an exhaustive list, if we consider some tacit or undifferentiated aspect of experience to be part of what we know or feel; possibly the above applies only to what we can clearly and distinctly know 3 INTRODUCTION or feel, which emerges out of a more inchoate mass of not...