The Cogito and Onto-Being of the Mind: Philosophical Early Modernity in Descartes' and Wang Yangming's Metaphysics

This essay seeks to demonstrate the metaphysical commensurability between Chinese and Western philosophy through a comparative study of the metaphysics of the mind as expounded by René Descartes and Wang Yangming. This commensurability, I suggest, brings to light a shared but hitherto neglected philosophical early modernity registered in the metaphysical reorientation from Nature or things towards the mind. The ontological primacy of the mind asserted by both Descartes and Yangming lies at the root of the epistemological and moral autonomy marking the modern subject that rose to prominence in Renaissance Europe and Ming China. The parallel philosophical early modernity manifested in Cartesian and Yangming's metaphysics of the mind, I propose, calls into doubt the alleged lack of metaphysics in Chinese philosophy.