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FIVE Li as the Convergence of Coherence and Incoherence in Wang Bi and Guo Xiang Xuanxue 玄學, literally “dark” or “mysterious” learning, sometimes translat‑ ed as “Neo‑Daoism” or even “Metaphysical Studies,” is the name tradition‑ ally given to the Post‑Han revival of speculative thought, taking its name from the renewed interest in reinterpreting the Laozi, Zhuangzi, and Zhouyi, known at the time as the “Three Abstruse (Texts)” (三玄 sanxuan). The movement is seen as in some manner attempting to fill the void left by the fall of the Han dynasty, and with it the undermining of the official cosmo‑ logical and political ideology, rooted in the thought of Dong Zhongshu. The Zhouyi, of course, played a major role in this ideology, but only as subjected to a particular esoteric mode of interpretation, closely linked to calendri‑ cal and political correlative schemes. Characterizing this text as “abstruse” and also linking it with the Laozi and Zhuangzi, the key sources of ironic thought, viewed as heterodox by the Han ideologues, Xuanxue rejects the previously prevailing “clarity” of interpretation of the text: it had been seen as something already comprehended and incorporated, now it is again asserted to have unplumbed mysteries parallel to those of the ironic texts, which had already been relegated to husks whose few useful insights had already been harvested and incorporated harmlessly into the Yin‑Yang cor‑ relative schemes (Yin having its origin as a mark of non‑ironic incorporation of ironic coherence, as we have seen in Ironies of Oneness and Difference). Xuanxue can thus be seen as a reclaiming of the untamed implications of the Zhouyi, and an attempt to read that text in close dialogue with the Laozi and the Zhuangzi instead of through the lens of the correlative schemes of the Han. As such, we have here a rethinking of the relation between the two streams of the tradition, a reshuffling of the ironic and non‑ironic 137 138 beyond NENESS AND DIFFERENCE cards to produce a new attempt at a synthesis—one that of course makes use of some of the moves devised by former attempts at mediation of the two trends, but makes significant innovations. We have already seen some of the developments of the notion of Li in non‑ironic traditions, and their incorporations into ironic systems, taking place in the Han. Recapping them chronologically, we had the Huainanzi’s continuation of the use of Li as part of the ironic incorporation of non‑ironic coherence in the Hanfeizi commentary to the Laozi, itself a continuation of one of the trends found in the later parts of the Zhuangzi, where Li serves as the word for limited non‑ironic coherences contrasted to but also deriv‑ ing from the largest coherence, Dao, which is, however, ironically coher‑ ent, that is, definitionally unintelligible and unknowable. We had also the revival of the straight non‑ironic use of Li, with the ironic element safely incorporated into a highly rigidified version of the Yin‑Yang system, in Dong Zhongshu, where both the Great Coherence of the whole and particular intelligible coherences were both construed as ultimately non‑ironic. And we saw in Yang Xiong’s Taixuan system an ingenious new mode of incor‑ poration of the ironic notion of coherence as unintelligible—the “Great Mystery” of the title of his work. In Yang’s system, the necessarily contrar‑ ian aspect of all coherence, Laozi’s bell‑shaped rise and fall structure of reversal, was accepted by Yang but systemized as the triplicity of (1) incipi‑ ence, (2) development into intelligible coherence, and (3) contravening decline. There, this originally ironic structure is assimilated into a system of non‑ironic Great Coherence. Lip service is given to the unintelligibility of the Great Mystery as the greatest whole, but far from undermining the knowability of particular coherences, this unknowable is present in them as their very triadic structure and interrelations. In this way, although the unknowable is called “unknowable,” it is arrayed in a perfectly determinate manner: it is Yang’s book itself. This set of determinations is presented as cohering much more directly with nature than the system of determina‑ tions found in the Zhouyi, in that the intermediary of coherence with the tradition of the sages is annulled by the fact that Yang Xiong creates his own system from scratch. The overabundance of coherences chosen out by human sages is no longer an issue here. We have a single‑ordered cosmos, which incorporates the self‑contravening of...

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