Beyond Oneness and Difference: Li and Coherence in Chinese Buddhist Thought and Its Antecedents

Chapter Three: The Development of Li in Ironic Texts

THREE The Development of Li in Ironic Texts We have turned back to the earlier texts of the non‑ironic tradition to find the gradual emergence of the term Li, and its connection to the notion of coherence understood in the non‑ironic sense there, also tracing the development of the non‑ironic notion of Li a few steps forward in time. We now turn our eyes to Li in the late Warring States ironic texts. The term appears only the once in the “pure” ironic texts, the Daodejing and the Inner Chapters of the Zhuangzi. But we find it emerging as a key term in the later developments of that tradition, which we may regard as a kind of mirror image of the “appropriations of the ironic into the non‑ironic” considered in Ironies of Oneness and Difference, namely, the Liji texts “Daxue” 大學 and “Zhongyong” 中庸 and the Yin‑Yang compromise as developed in the canonical commentaries to the Zhouyi 周易. In those works, we saw ironic themes and insights adopted and integrated into a non‑ironic framework, enlisted to serve non‑ironic ultimate values. In the later ironic texts, we find the parallel situation in reverse: they make a place for some of the concerns and insights of the non‑ironic tradition, arriving at a com‑ promise position of their own, where non‑ironic values are subordinated to ironic ultimate values. Li turns out to be a central tool in effecting this form of the rapprochement of the two traditions. However, as we shall see, this development spans a number of distinct phases, which can be found scattered throughout these works. Li and Non‑Ironic Coherence in the Later Parts of the Zhuangzi: Integrating the Non‑Ironic The perspectivism of Zhuangzi’s “Inner Chapters,” as we saw in Ironies of Oneness and Difference, entails a strong denial of the existence of unique, 71 72 beyond NENESS AND DIFFERENCE univocal natural kinds: the world considered in isolation of human beings possesses no privileged ways of cohering. The predictive and normative func‑ tions of knowledge are there dismissed; what was so in the past is no guide for what will happen in the future, and what happens here, or for me, is no guarantee of what happens there, or for you. There can be no gener‑ ally formulized rules about things or actions, not even in the rough and ready, pragmatic sense. In the Laozi, Dao did have a weak “predictive” and “normative” sense; it suggested that a general and predictable course for all things was the reversing rise and fall from not‑being‑there to being‑there to not‑being‑there, and that this told us something important on how best to deal with things in general. Still, the nature of this single course was necessarily ironic with respect to any more specific determinate (coherently intelligible) course or generalizations about particular things. Only coher‑ ence in the new, ironic sense of the term is left. As we have already seen, this was not an insurmountable problem for those who wished to defend the non‑ironic sense of coherence. One reason for this was because coherence already involved a perspectival ele‑ ment from the beginning, even in the non‑ironic tradition, in that it always implied coherence with human desires in particular. Another reason is that Zhuangzi’s argument doesn’t really entail the denial of real coherences, but rather the overabundance of them, and the impossibility of combining them into a single mega‑coherence. This implication is granted and responded to by Xunzi, as we saw above: the sage‑kings simply pick out the best coherences from the multitude of coherences really available in the world, best here meaning those which lead to the maximal coherence with those desires within human psychology and tradition that are themselves maxi‑ mally coherence‑making for human society. But several other positions were developed in the early Chinese tra‑ ditions to accommodate both the ironic and non‑ironic applications of coherence, forming new syntheses. In this chapter I will discuss several compromises between ironic and non‑ironic coherence that can be described as attempting to accommodate the latter to the former. These can be divid‑ ed into three types, all found already within the later parts of the extant Zhuangzi text. In all of them, as in the Xunzi, the term Li plays a newly prominent role. First Type: Li and Dao both Non‑Ironic The first type of combination of ironic and non‑ironic...