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ONE Essences, Universals, and Omnipresence Absolute Sameness and Difference What do Chinese thinkers mean when they make those assertions we trans‑ late in the form of “This is that”—for example, “this is a horse,” or “human nature is good,” or “the nameless is the beginning of Heaven and Earth”? We quickly get into trouble if, applying familiar models of particular entities that non‑negotiably possess certain properties and not others, we assume that they mean “it is really and ultimately the truth about this object here that it is a horse and not a non‑horse,” or “it is the real and definite fact about this item in the world, human nature, that it is good and not non‑good,” or “that entity which is the nameless is such that it is the beginning of Heaven and Earth, rather than not being the beginning of Heaven and Earth.” We get into trouble, that is, if we take these statements to be assertions about essences, or unchanging definitive determinations of “what it is to be this thing,” putatively valid in all contexts. Equally, though, it is clear that these assertions do not mean, “I am arbitrarily projecting horseness, goodness, or beginningness onto an indeterminate blank,” nor, “horseness, goodness, beginning are purely mental constructs,” or “purely human social constructs.” What then do they mean? One relatively simple way to zero in on the difficulty here would have to do with the status of language, and hence of every possible proposition. Are the ultimate facts about the world adequately definable in sentences made of words? If we don’t think so, we will not regard our statements that “X is Y” as meaning to assert that X is really and exclusively Y, full stop. We would have to regard the purpose of making verbal statements to be 19 20 IRONIES OF ONENESS AND DIFFERENCE something other than saying how things really are.1 And indeed, it has been suggested that the defining moves in Chinese speculation work on a very different model, where words are part of, say, an exemplary skill‑practice, meant to guide behavior in such a way as to alter perception and evaluation, rather than to describe what is really so or what is really good.2 This may seem, by Occam’s Razor, to be the best way to understand some of the strange things that come to occur in the history of Chinese thought. After all, it is not just that China had no Plato. It also had no Parmenides, and no Parmenidean assertion that “being” and “thought” must coincide, that the thinkable and the real would have to be one and the same. This is arguably the most basic assumption of the entire Western philosophical tradition, the implications of which the latter has grappled to think through, and the limitations of which it has fought to overcome at every stage of its subsequent development. It is this assertion that of course underwrites first and foremost the entire Platonic project most pervasively. This point about the status and role of language in Chinese thought is important, but it doesn’t really solve all of our problems. For one thing, the denial of the final definitional and descriptive adequacy of language does lead to certain inevitable problems and contradictions, the avoidance of which has been one of the main reasons for adhering to the assumption of linguistic adequacy in the West. In addition, we have to ask what language is doing if it’s not supposed to be telling us facts about things, and whether it can really do so while excluding any claim to at least one adequate ref‑ erence to something purported to be definitively so. We must assume that there are many ways to answer this question, and many uses of language. For even within the confines of the non‑ultimate‑reality qualification, the linguistic expressions of Chinese philosophy are not the simple reiteration of the insistence that “words do not express objective realities.” They make many claims, many different claims and counterclaims, in linguistic form, and indeed many that are found nowhere else in the annals of human thinking, which are not reducible simply to this one act of bracketing. Even if construed as tentative directives for action, they arguably involve cogni‑ tive commitments that frame their efficacy, which perhaps produce as many quandaries about the relation of language to reality as they avoid. And this is certainly acknowledged by those who have done...

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