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Introduction Li 理 and Coherence Recap of Ironies of Oneness and Difference and Terminological Clarifications In a previous work, called Ironies of Oneness and Difference, I tried to unravel the development of notions of coherence in early Chinese thought as an alternative to models of thinking, mainly Greek and European in origin, that build upon the assumption that words such as “same” and “different” describe facts about the world and refer to real attributes of things, that the distinction between “sameness” and “difference” is in some way absolute—in other words, that things, or certain aspects of things, or facts, or qualities, simply are the same as certain other things or facts or aspects, and different from certain other things or facts or aspects. It was necessary to trace the various alternatives to this way of viewing things in Chinese thought in such a seemingly abstract and thoroughgoing manner, I believe, in order to comprehend the later development of various understandings and usages of the term Li 理1 in Chinese thought. Most students of the Chinese philo‑ sophical tradition have probably noticed that again and again they come up against a repeated tendency toward two kinds of counterintuitive claims that present persistent interpretive problems: first, assertions concerning the relation between oneness and manyness, which do not seem to be applied consistently or intelligibly, or to separate from one another neatly, and sec‑ ond, the surprising importance everywhere—in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and axiology—of negations and negative formulations, which are given a positive value, serving often as groundings of affirmations.2 These are the two main problems I am hoping to clarify with the concepts of “ironic coherence” and “non‑ironic coherence” and their relation to Li; for I hope 1 2 BEYOND ONENESS AND DIFFERENCE to show that the one‑many problem and the negation problem, and also the related problem of omnipresence, are all closely intertwined, and that this intertwining is most evident in the interplay of ironic and non‑ironic coherence that comes to be embodied in the term Li. That is what I’ll be trying to do in this book. So before launching into the discussion of Li, I would like to repeat the summary of my conclusions about “coherence” from that earlier work. In that work I attempted to draw attention to several emergent con‑ ceptions of coherence in early Chinese thought, conceived of as a fun‑ damental category accounting for the presence, value, sustainability, and intelligibility of things. This involved delineating two intertwining variants of this conception, the non‑ironic and the ironic. In both, we identified coherence as a founding, fundamental category, from which sameness and difference are negotiable, non‑ultimate derivatives. Why are things what they are, as they are, able to continue being what they are, and having the values they have? Because of the way they cohere. If they cohere differently, they are different things, have different identities. Harmonizing in a certain way allows things to manifest in a particular way, and this is the ultimate category beyond which no further specification of their ontic status can be made. Their “value,” on the other hand, is itself merely another kind of coherence: a function solely of the relation between these manifested iden‑ tities and certain human desires and endeavors, a second‑order coherence between two first‑order coherences. In sum, to be seen, known, shown as having a certain identity and value derives from a relation to a particu‑ lar context, most centrally a context of human desires and the discerning, exemplary eye of a sagely person steeped in coherence with a tradition of other such persons. These reflections will put us 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. In the Analects, we saw Confucius described as “not having any con‑ stant teacher” 何常師之有, and yet finding his teacher everywhere. Here we see already the structure of centrality and coherence. Confucius himself is the “center,” the determinant of the coherence, the “pattern,” the “prin‑ ciple,” the value. But he neither subjectively creates this value ex nihilo nor acts as a mere passive mirror of an objectively existing truth. The value he creates is a coherence, a readable converging, of aspects available every‑ where, combined by the selective filter of Confucius’s own responses and evaluations. His discernment is a selective frame that creates/finds coher‑ ence, the...

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