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TWO What is Coherence? Chinese Paradigms In the previous chapter we attempted to broadly characterize the typical Greco‑European handlings of sameness and difference through the lens of some version of a doctrine about universals and particulars, or alternately, its correlate or by‑product, particular substances with definite essences and attributes. We will now try to establish a framework for considering some classical Chinese notions of what I’ll be calling “coherence,” as divided into two types, the ironic and non‑ironic, as a contrasting approach to the handling of certain parallel issues. One traditional name for this kind of problem about sameness and difference is the “one‑many problem.” How much of the world is the same, forming a “one,” and how much of it is different, diversified into a “many”? Where and what is the boundary between “this” and “something else,” which warrants us in treating them as two things rather than one? How can one thing have many different aspects, or many different parts, and still be one thing? How can one quality be instantiated in many places and times? What exactly does it mean to be one or many? How does oneness relate to many‑ ness? It has often been noted by previous scholars that there is something at least odd about the way these problem are handled, or not handled, in traditional Chinese thought. It is no surprise that a twentieth‑century Chinese thinker such as Tang Junyi, taking the measure of the entire tra‑ dition, identified “mutual implication of oneness and manyness” as one of the distinctive features of Chinese thought as a whole, and his treatments of individual Chinese thinkers effectively demonstrate the way in which oneness and manyness, sameness and difference, resist the kind of analysis commonly deployed to handle similar problems in Western thought. But 49 50 IRONIES OF ONENESS AND DIFFERENCE we may wonder if Tang’s attempt at an explanation is radical enough to really resolve the perplexities here, and indeed whether it might not be too beholden to certain analytic tools derived from contemporaneous Western thought, themselves rooted in another set of assumptions about this very one‑many problem, to really clarify this point. The way to a more fundamental explanation was opened, in my view, by Chad Hansen’s controversial study of ancient Chinese logical paradoxes, which suggested one reason why the question of universals might not have developed in China in a way that is at all comparable to its development in the West. Consistent with our brief discussion of mereology as opposed to class‑logic in the previous chapter, Hansen claimed that classical Chinese nouns function more like mass nouns than like count nouns. Mass nouns (e.g., water) refer to one pervasive amorphous entity that is spread out in various places, and can be divided up in various ways, while count nouns (e.g., dog) come with predetermined units for counting. I can have “one dog, two dogs, three dogs,” and so on, but “one cup, one quart, two pools” of water. This suggestion has caused some consternation in that it fits bet‑ ter the grammar of modern Chinese (where indeed nouns are generally preceded by a special measure word to indicate the amount of that noun which is being indicated) than classical Chinese, where individual entities can, in fact, be indicated without recourse to measure words. The lack of special forms indicating singular and plural in both ancient and modern Chinese, however, remains significant in this context. The point is that if a noun indicates primarily the entire mass of that substance, everywhere in the world, the problem of relating individual members to the general class disappears. There is no need to unify individual dogs with a universal canine essence if each dog is really just one dog‑shaped scoop of the dog‑substance spread out throughout the world. The implication is that rather than an additive class derived cumulatively by assembling individuals and collating their similarities, we are “dividing down” from the whole and selecting out subdivisions for closer consideration. There is no need for a two‑level ontology here, where abstract essences or universals or forms, accessible to the intellect but not to the senses, “participate in” and unify concrete par‑ ticulars; rather, the mass and each chunk of the mass are equally concrete and available to the senses.1 Chinese thought does not have a one‑many ontology, and thus does not have a one‑many problem; in its place...

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