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SIX The Yin‑Yang Compromise Yin and Yang have become English words, now standing as perhaps the most broadly recognized of all Chinese terms among nonspeakers of Chinese. Ask an American on the street about Chinese philosophy, and he or she will likely say something about Yin and Yang. Press a little harder, and you may hear something such as, “There are two sides to everything,” or “We have to take the good with the bad,” or “It means there is an equal goodness of good and bad, each in its own way.”1 What is problematic about these simplifications is not only that they ignore the great variety of ways in which these terms are used through the tradition (and indeed even in the pre‑Qin texts, where the concepts are not yet fully formed or universal, they admit a wide variety of implications), but, more centrally, that even when they do take on a more stable usage, these Chinese terms are in general notably less contentless and formal than their English equivalents: they are not defined solely in terms of each other (as, e.g., positive and negative, the former meaning originally anything “posited” as a point of reference and the latter defined simply as its opposite), and they are not applicable to any and every opposition. They have a more specific and less unrestrict‑ edly relative content. They cannot be reversed by redefining the system of coordinates (as “this” and “that” can, à la Zhuangzi) unless the scope of reference is expanded. That is, what is called Yin may indeed also be called Yang, just as what is called “that” may also be called “this,” and this will necessarily involve positing a complementary Yin as its context, just as the assignment of the name “this” to the former “that” necessarily posits a new corresponding “that.” In the Zhuangzian view, though, this new “that” may be precisely what was formerly called “this.” But in the Yin‑Yang systems, the corresponding Yin to the newly defined Yang will have to be something other than the item originally called Yang. Any item can indeed be called either Yin or Yang, but which is Yin and which is Yang in the context of a particular dyad is now fixed. We may view this as the distinctive rewriting 229 230 IRONIES OF ONENESS AND DIFFERENCE of the ironic Zhuangzian this‑that which makes it possible to incorporate it into non‑ironic systems of coherence. We will return to this perhaps still confusing point, which may be regarded as the central deep‑structural inno‑ vation of the Yin‑Yang compromise, its main strategy for incorporating and denuding the Zhuangzian relativism, after giving a more detailed exposition of the general contours of the system, below. Originally, Yang and Yin refer to sunny and shaded sides of a hill or a ravine, or sunshine (or, in one version, a flag illuminated by sunshine) and shade generally, as part of three sets of meteorological contrasts known as the six qi (sun, shade, heat, cold, wind, and rain)—an image that suggests contrast, alternation, and inseparability, but certainly no interchangeability or, necessarily, equality.2 In the Inner Chapters of the Zhuangzi, the dyadic term Yin‑Yang appears as a stand‑in for fate, the creator, the cause of one’s destiny,3 and again as the determinant of one’s physical health, put into a dangerous disequilibrium, described as an “inner heat,” caused by excessive worry.4 In a later chapter, one of those which Graham dates to the late third or second century BCE, they appear as the two basic cosmic forces, parallel (and more than just parallel) with earth and heaven.5 This last usage comes close to that found in the lists of parallelisms, probably of late Warring States or early Han provenance, which attempt to exhaustively categorize all phenomena into these two classes, Yin and Yang. An example of this can be seen in the document entitled “Chen” (“Balance” 稱) one of the “Four Classics of the Yellow Emperor” recovered from the Ma Wang Dui tomb, where the pairs matched to the predicative Yang‑Yin dyad include not only, respectively, heaven and earth, spring and autumn, summer and winter, day and night, father and son, man and woman, but also large states and small states, success and failure, marrying and mourning, controlling and being controlled, speech and silence, and giving and receiving.6 Graham comments on this passage, “Throughout the chain A is superior to...

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