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Conclusion The Vertex of the Vortex In Ironies of Oneness and Difference, and again in the introduction to this book, I raised the several issues as a way of framing the problem of Li. We were looking for how the Chinese traditions handled the questions of repeatability, set membership, apodictic knowledge, part and whole relations, omnipresence, contextualization, determinateness, conditionality, ironic and non‑ironic coherence, pragmatism, value, nominalism/realism, and norma‑ tivity. At the heart of all these issues was a question about sameness and difference: What happens to all these conceptions if neither sameness nor difference, neither oneness nor manyness, can be an ultimate ontological fact about anything? How can we think about how early Chinese thinkers might have thought about entities that were neither same nor different, or that were both same and different? We attempted to make some headway on this issue by considering early Chinese notions of coherence, both ironic and non‑ironic, as ways of conceiving a neither/nor/both/and mode of under‑ standing for what we would otherwise call sameness and difference; and in this volume, we have looked at the term Li as an increasingly important marker of a kind of second‑order relation between certain kinds of coherenc‑ es, which cohere again so as to end up being again neither definitively the same coherence nor definitively different coherences. The term Li, we said, would play a crucial role in configuring these issues, which are approached in quite different ways in the various strands of occidental philosophy. Li, I suggested, means a harmonious coherence, which, when a human being becomes harmoniously coherent with it, leads to further harmonious coher‑ ence. We have come to see how all these meanings are combined in the Tiantai conception of Li as Centrality. We are now in a position to see how “centrality” and “coherence” converge into the meaning of Li, and how this sort of notion developed through various partial prefigurements in Confucian and Daoist thought. Let us review these findings briefly. In the Analects, we found that Confucius was said to have no “con‑ stant teacher,” and yet to find his teacher everywhere. He himself was the 307 308 beyond NENESS AND DIFFERENCE “center,” which here meant the determinant of the coherence, the “pat‑ tern,” the “principle,” the sustainable intelligible unity with the past and the future, the value. But he was depicted as neither subjectively creating this value ex nihilo nor acting as a mere passive mirror of an objectively existing truth. The value he creates is a coherence, a readable converging, of aspects available everywhere, combined by the selective filter of Confu‑ cius’s own responses and evaluations. His discernment is a selective frame which creates/discerns coherence, the value‑endowed style of culture, which is omniavailable, present in more than one place, not strictly reiterable except in the special sense of being continuable. We have here already the sprout of a model of a multiple instantiation that is neither nominalist nor realist, manifesting in a cognition that is neither objective nor subjective. In the Mencius, we had the selective definition of which of the inborn capabilities of the human animal are to be properly named “the Nature” (性 xing) with a more explicit set of criteria: precisely those spontaneous human tendencies that allow for coherence, that is, those that are appealing (valued) and discernible to other humans, and that create cohesion among humans, are to be called the Nature. These were the desires that can be satisfied independently of external material conditions, that allow for the other (for example, material) desires to also be nurtured and developed, the enjoyment of which is increased rather than decreased when shared, and so on. The material desires were to be called “the Decree,” because they are not conducive to coherence in this sense: they isolate, they cre‑ ate strife because their satisfaction depends on external material resources, which may be in short supply, their enjoyment is decreased when shared, and so on. The class name Human Nature was there also neither objective nor subjective, neither nominalist nor realist; and there again we had a “center” embodied by a living human agent, the sage, whose manifestation of these virtues makes him the organizing hub, around which this style of being, humanity, converges. The human virtues manifested by the presence of this center, by drawing others to cohere with them and emulate them, literally actualized the coherence “humanity.” Once picked out, it is seen to have always been...

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