The Mutual Cultivation of Self and Things , livre ebook

Indiana University Press - Yang Guorong ,
traduit par Chad Austin Meyers

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Yang Guorong is one of the most prominent Chinese philosophers working today and is best known for using the full range of Chinese philosophical resources in connection with the thought of Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Heidegger. In The Mutual Cultivation of Self and Things, Yang grapples with the philosophical problem of how the complexly interwoven nature of things and being relates to human nature, values, affairs, and facts, and ultimately creates a world of meaning. Yang outlines how humans might live more fully integrated lives on philosophical, religious, cultural, aesthetic, and material planes. This first English translation introduces current, influential work from China to readers worldwide.

Preface Context and Concepts: Yang Guorong's Concrete Metaphysics
Hans-Georg Moeller
Introduction
1. Meaning in the Context of Accomplishing Oneself and Accomplishing Things
2. Human Capacities and a World of Meaning
3. Systems of Norms and the Genesis of Meaning
4. Meaning in the World of Spirit
5. Meaning and Reality
6. Meaning and the Individual
7. Accomplishing Oneself and Accomplishing Things: Value in a World of Meaning
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

Philosophie

Épistémologie

Philosophie de l'esprit

Movements

PHILOSOPHY

Philosophie et théologie

Phenomenology

Eastern

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Publié par	Indiana University Press
Date de parution	15 avril 2016
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780253021199
Langue	English

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THE MUTUAL CULTIVATION OF SELF AND THINGS
WORLD PHILOSOPHIES Bret W. Davis, D. A. Masolo, and Alejandro Vallega, editors
THE MUTUAL CULTIVATION OF SELF AND THINGS
A Contemporary Chinese Philosophy of the Meaning of Being
Yang Guorong Foreword by Hans-Georg Moeller Translated by Chad Austin Meyers
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
Peking University Press 2011 The Chinese edition is originally published by Peking University Press. This translation is published by arrangement with Peking University Press, Beijing, China. All rights reserved. No reproduction and distribution without permission.

2016 by Indiana University Press
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-02107-6 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-253-02111-3 (paperback) ISBN 978-0-253-02119-9 (ebook)
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Contents
Foreword / Hans-Georg Moeller
Introduction
1 Meaning in the Context of Accomplishing Oneself and Accomplishing Things
2 Human Capacities and a World of Meaning
3 Systems of Norms and the Genesis of Meaning
4 Meaning in the World of Spirit
5 Meaning and Reality
6 Meaning and the Individual
7 Accomplishing Oneself and Accomplishing Things: Value in a World of Meaning
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Foreword
Contexts and Concepts: Yang Guorong s Concrete Metaphysics
HANS-GEORG MOELLER
Y ANG G UORONG IS one of the most creative and prominent Chinese philosophers of our time. He is a truly Chinese philosopher not because of his citizenship, ethnicity, or workplace, but because of the nature of his work. Yang makes ample use of the complete range of sources provided by the Chinese philosophical tradition, including all its periods and all its schools (in addition to his reliance on the Western philosophical canon). Thus to call him, for example, a Confucian would not do justice to the breadth of his approach. More important, however, Yang is also truly a philosopher, because he does not only study the history of philosophy or engage in specialized debates within the academic discipline of philosophy but has developed his own comprehensive philosophical system.
The core of his philosophical work is an outline of his Concrete Metaphysics ( juti de xingshangxue ) published in three volumes in 2011: A Treatise on Dao ( Dao lun ), Ethics and Being: Treatise on Moral Philosophy ( Lunli yu cunzai: daode zhexue yanjiu ), and the present The Mutual Cultivation of Self and Things ( Chengji yu chengwu: yiyi shijie de shengcheng ). Taken together, these books present an elaborated and encompassing philosophy, addressing perennial ontological, epistemological, and ethical questions. Yang thereby follows the trend of major twentieth-century Chinese thinkers who tried to renew the Chinese philosophical tradition of Neo-Confucianism and its efforts to merge Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism into an overarching whole while at the same time incorporating the metaphysical, historical, and existential approaches of modern Western systemic philosophy as represented by authors like Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger. In short, Yang s project establishes a unifying grand philosophy by combining traditional Chinese and Western conceptualizations into a systematic synthesis expressed in contemporary language.
Yang s philosophy is called a metaphysics for two major reasons. First, he thereby connects with the systematic methodology of Western philosophy beginning (arguably) with Plato and Aristotle. A systematic philosophy integrates all traditional fields of enquiry, that is, ontology, ethics, and epistemology. Thereby, it naturally cannot be confined to one of the contemporary professional areas of specialization such as philosophy of science, political philosophy, or philosophy of mind, and much less be concerned with debating (or solving ) specifically isolated or constructed questions as sometimes attempted in contemporary analytic philosophy. A systematic philosophy will, of course, also deal with specific questions, and it will address ontological, ethical, and epistemological issues, but it always does so with an overarching coherence in mind. The truth that emerges within or from a philosophical system cannot be grasped by summing up the truth values of its propositions, but by developing the capacity to see the connections that bind the various parts of the work together. The reader s task is not to measure up the qualities of each individual component on its own, but rather to appreciate the intricate architecture of the systematic edifice.
A true metaphysics does not abstract -in the sense of de-contextualize -its objects, but, to the contrary, always looks at them in conjunction with, to speak with Kant, the conditions of their possibility. Any object of cognition, for instance, is to a certain extent constituted by the cognitive subject for which it is an object. In this sense, metaphysics is, methodologically speaking, the art of contextualizing knowledge by not only trying to know something as something, but by also reflecting on the constitutive conditions that make something appear as that which it is. Or, to put it quite simply in Hegel s famous words: Das Wahre ist das Ganze (the truth is the whole.)
Second, as to its contents , metaphysics, in the sense of the term in the European tradition that Yang relates to, is concerned with reality, or, again, in more succinct Hegelian language, with Wirklichkeit . The German word wirken shares the same etymological root with the English word work . Thus, a true metaphysics is not merely concerned with how the world is, but more precisely with how it works. The contents of a metaphysical investigation are thus not just things, but, in the terminology of Yang Guorong and the Chinese tradition he connects with, affairs ( shi ). Reality is not an assemblage of facts that philosophy can establish or find out there ; rather, it is a work in progress, a living body of relations, effects, powers, conflicts, combinations, and so on, within which philosophy itself partakes or works. Thus, metaphysics does not primarily focus on the simple and narrow meaning of whatever it deals with, but on the world of meaning ( yiyi shijie ) and its genesis, or, in other words, on significance. A street sign or a word, for instance, may have the specific meaning stop, and once we become aware that this means that we have to halt whenever we see the sign or hear the word, we may claim to know its meaning. This sort of knowledge, however, is poor knowledge; it is a form of knowledge a child can acquire, and it may be call it pre-metaphysical. In order to understand the sign or the word, we have to be able to see it as an affair that has not only a narrow meaning, but also significance . A metaphysical understanding that opens up a world of meaning will point to the way a word or a sign works. In fact we can then see that it functions as an expression, for instance, of a context of power relations, of legal institutions, or of moral obligations. In this way, we are no longer limited to a mere perception of a sign-however true or correct it may be-but by seeing how it works we get to comprehend it in a more complex fashion, and rather than being stuck with one and only one particular meaning we are free to interpret it and not to just do what it seemingly asks us to do. If we only know the meaning of stop, we will come to a halt. Once we understand its significance, and the genesis of meaning that we, as humans, are engaged in, we can move on. In this way, metaphysical knowledge is intrinsically connected, as Yang Guorong stresses throughout this book, with cognitive and practical freedom.
For both Hegel and Yang, metaphysics is thus first and foremost wirkliches Wissen or working knowledge -knowledge that works rather than merely informs. For this reason, Yang calls his overall project a concrete metaphysics, a metaphysics that neither, like the positive sciences, deals with abstracted facts, nor, like a secular theology, with transcendent abstractions. Instead, it gains concrete significance in the sense just described. Yang links himself with Heidegger whom he credits with rightfully criticizing a metaphysics that had deteriorated to a state where it had forgotten about its essential connection with being. Yang now wants to go a step further than Heidegger and revitalize the concrete dimension of metaphysics and its concern with living, dynamic, and humanist being. This being has an essentially historical character and as opposed to beings or a being, is rooted in one s own being and unfolds as the humanized world; it differs from any abstract substance hiding behind both individuals and particular beings, and it appears in a concrete form through blending together the universal and the particular as well as the general and the specific. 1 A concrete metaphysics that is thoroughly embedded in the humanized world is thus not only reconnected with its Greek ancestors, but also, and even more crucially for Yang, with the Chinese philosophical traditions and their immersion in the living world of human society and nature.
A metaphysics, however concrete it may be, necessarily expresses it