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.
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.
The Mutual Cultivation of Self and Things: A Contemporary Chinese Philosophy of the Meaning of Being
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The Mutual Cultivation of Self and Things: A Contemporary Chinese Philosophy of the Meaning of Being
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Overview
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.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253021199 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2021 |
| Series: | World Philosophies |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 328 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Yang Guorong is Zijiang University Professor at East China Normal University in Shanghai and a leading figure in Chinese philosophy. He has published ten books on classical Confucianism, neo-confucianism, Daoism, modern Chinese thought, and Chinese and Western philosophy.
Chad Austin Meyers is a Ph.D. candidate in Chinese philosophy at East China Normal University. He has published "An Outline of a Concrete Metaphysics" and "Yang Guorong's Concrete Metaphysics" in Contemporary Chinese Thought.
Read an Excerpt
The Mutual Cultivation of Self and Things
A Contemporary Chinese Philosophy of the Meaning of Being
By Yang Guorong, Chad Austin Meyers
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2016 Indiana University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-02119-9
CHAPTER 1
Meaning in the Context of Accomplishing Oneself and Accomplishing Things
Accomplishing oneself and accomplishing things is a concrete historical process of knowing the world and knowing oneself and reforming the world and refining oneself, which simultaneously generates meaning and produces a world of meaning. The world in-itself cannot pose for itself the question of meaning, which is to say that there is no way to dissociate meaning from one's own being. Humans question the meaning of the world and the meaning of their own being; therefore, the genesis of meaning owes its origin to the "being" of humans. As the introduction to this book has already demonstrated, from the perspective of one's own being and its relation to the world, the intension of meaning or "the meaning of meaning" implicates within itself several questions: "What is it?" "What does it mean?" and "What should it become?" The question "What is it?" specifically refers to which things exist and how they exist (in what form do things exist?), which involves the connection between the presentation of things and the human being's intentional activity. The question "What does it mean?" refers to the value or worth that a being may have. With regard to objects, such a question asks whether or not something accords with the needs and ideals of human beings and to what extent; such needs and ideals concern not only life as a process of survival on the material level, but also cognition and practice in spiritual life and the social sphere. With regard to the human being, "What does it mean?" is directed at the very meaning of one's own being: Why, or for what, in the end, does one exist? The meaning of one's own being or the confirmation of the meaning of human life is always grounded in the ends and ideals that human beings value. When the process of one's own being is consistent with the specific ends or ideals one finds worthy, life appears to be richly fulfilled with meaning; and vise versa, when one is either lacking or distantly separated from a valued goal, human life then inevitably strikes one with a sense of meaninglessness.
Referring to properties and attributes at the factual level, "What is it?" primarily concerns cognizing or knowing, whereas "What does it mean?" concerns qualities of relevance and relationships of value, and hence involves evaluating. The meanings, which cognizing and evaluating respectively reveal and confirm, always exist in the mode of ideas. By contrast, the question "What should it become?" has more practical meaning, referring to both how the object should "be" and how oneself should "be." As regards the object, "What should it become?" implies transforming "Nature in-itself" (tian zhi tian) into "Nature for human being" (ren zhi tian) through the practical activity of human being, by means of which values at the level of ideas are actualized, that is, obtain an actual form. For oneself as human being, "What should it become?" implies moving toward an ideal mode of being through the activity of cognizing and practicing in the continuous realization of the meaning of human life.
From cognizing facts to evaluating values, from knowing the world and changing the world to knowing oneself and changing oneself, from linguistic description to linguistic expression, meaning concerns a variety of domains. Yet, clarifying "the meaning of meaning" is a task that cannot be accomplished if solely confined to logical analyses of the intensions of the word "meaning"; at a much more original level, such a task concerns the genesis of meaning. Here, the historical unfolding of the process of accomplishing oneself and accomplishing things (knowing the world and changing the world, knowing oneself and changing oneself) is the actual source of meaning, insofar as meaning is generated in the processual interaction of human being with the world. Through the creative activity of refining the world and refining oneself, human being continues the quest for meaning and simultaneously fills the world of meaning with concrete historical content.
What Is Meaning?
As the human's own way of being, which differs from that of things, accomplishing oneself and accomplishing things opens the world up and impresses the mark of human upon the world, which consequently generates different domains of meaning. Broadly speaking, meaning is precisely a form of being that has entered human being's horizon of cognition and practice, be it a concrete being or an idea. Opposed to the domain of meaning is the domain of non-meaning. Here, however, a distinction must be made between non-meaning and the meaningless. Meaninglessness is itself a phenomenon belonging to a domain of meaning; something is either meaningless in the sense of being incomprehensible or meaningless in the sense of lacking value. What is meaningless can only be said in a relative sense, relative to the "meaningfulness" of a domain of meaning. In other words, the meaningless pertains to the domain of meaning. By contrast, non-meaning essentially does not belong to the domain of meaning; it could be understood in a broad sense as the beings that have never entered human being's cognitive and practical horizon. As objects that human being has never encountered, such beings still exist outside of the domain of meaning. Neither the issue of meaning nor that of meaninglessness ever occurs with regard to such beings.
In contemporary philosophy, Heidegger gave extensive consideration to the relationship between meaning and Dasein. According to Heidegger, "Meaning is an existential of Da-sein, not a property which is attached to beings, which lies 'behind' them or floats somewhere as a 'realm between.'" Dasein here primarily refers to the being of the individual, and an existential is something related to the activity of individual existence. A property of beings he opposes to this is an attribute that is contained within the object but subsists outside the process of human existence. For Heidegger, meaning is by no means a pure and simple objective determination; it essentially comes into life through individual existence, which he understands as a process of projection. This "projecting" refers to the human being's self-determination and self-realization, which entails transforming the being of the possible into the being of the actual through the act of existing. It is precisely from this perspective that Heidegger links meaning to human being's projecting and stresses that projecting consists precisely in the opening up of possibilities.
Heidegger therefore notices that the birth of meaning is inseparable from human being. However, Heidegger understands human being as Dasein, and the being of Dasein is first of all individual existence. In fact, the content of the existential of Dasein is individual existence. As for this link between meaning and individual existence, Heidegger is quite clear, declaring that the phenomenon of meaning "is rooted in the existential constitution of Dasein." From the perspective of accomplishing oneself and accomplishing things, individual existence mainly concerns the dimension of accomplishing oneself. However, the process of accomplishing oneself simultaneously consists of a plurality of aspects pertaining to one knowing oneself and refining oneself, among which individual existence is only one. Placing the focus entirely on individual existence implies restricting meaning to merely the one dimension of accomplishing oneself. What needs to be pointed out here is that in Heidegger, in correlation with his phenomenological background and the importance he finds in the existential of Dasein, meaning is always related to care, anxiety, and other internal experiences of individual existence, and thereby in substance deals much more with the domain of ideas. As the second half of this book will demonstrate, at the level of actuality, human being's existential condition is not only directed at accomplishing oneself, but also unfolds as a process of accomplishing things in the broad sense (knowing the world and changing the world). The latter at once exhibits the practical character of human beings and also constitutes the real source and historical ground of meaning at much deeper and broader levels. In so far as Heidegger came to understand the meaning of meaning from the perspective of Dasein's existence, his insight into the interrelation between Dasein and the genesis of meaning must be acknowledged. However, at the same time, he ignored the process of accomplishing things (knowing the world and changing the world) and placed too much importance on the ideational dimension of internal experiences like anxiety and care, and thereby failed to genuinely grasp the real relation between the genesis of meaning and the being of humans.
What is meaning itself; that is, what is meaning within the domain of meaning? A concrete analysis of the process of accomplishing oneself and accomplishing things could unearth an intrinsic clue to the solution of such a problem. As stated previously, the historical content of accomplishing oneself and accomplishing things is one knowing the world and knowing oneself as well as changing the world and changing oneself. So, this process first concerns one understanding the world and oneself: knowing the world and knowing oneself, in essence, consists in self-understanding and understanding the world, but changing the world and changing oneself is also inseparable from understanding the world and oneself. Whether it is one refining oneself (accomplishing oneself) or refining the world (accomplishing things), both presuppose a grasp of true being. To grasp true being is to concretely know, and hence, understand what is actual. As for knowing what is actual, the meaning of being lies in being understood or being understandable. For those who have no knowledge of paleontology, a fossil of an archaic organism simply does not have meaning associated with an archaic organism: even if a fossil, when human being encounters it, enters human being's horizon of cognition and practice and henceforth acquires a meaning that would distinguish it from being in-itself, for humans who are unable to understand it from the perspective of paleontology, its meaning will simply consist in being some form of rock, which obviously is not the meaning that it, as a fossil, truly possesses. A fossil is a specific kind of being, whose intrinsic meaning is presented through human understanding, and this act of understanding is itself attributable to the process of knowing the world. We can see that at the level of knowing or understanding what is actual, meaning mainly involves the question "What is it?" and in pointing to questions such as "What things exist?" and "How do things exist?" meaning itself acquires cognitive content as well.
Logically or formally speaking, meaning at the level of understanding is also exhibited as comprehensibility, whose basic precondition is following the laws of logic, and first and foremost the law of identity. Jin Yuelin once pointed out that "the law of identity is the most basic condition of the possibility of meaning." The law of identity demands that a concept has a definite intension, that is, a concept in a defined context must express a meaning without arbitrarily shifting. For instance, "father" refers to father and cannot at the same time refer to son, "teacher" expresses teacher and cannot at the same time mean student. Disobeying the law of identity, concepts become confused, which makes it impossible to establish meaning and think about or understand objects and questions. In addition, it is necessary to obey the law of non-contradiction: "The limit of thinking is contradiction. What is contradictory is unthinkable." What the law of identity affirms is that A = A; the law of non-contradiction then emphasizes that A cannot at the same time be non-A. Ideas only have meaning and moreover thinking and understanding only become possible once contradictions are eliminated. So, whereas cognition at the level of fact mainly concerns meaning at the level of content, then according with logic, as the necessary condition of possibility of understanding and thinking, formally determines meaning at the level of ideas. In brief, at the level of form, being meaningful means according with the laws of logic, and hence, being understandable; what is meaningless is thus something that is not understandable, because it disobeys the laws of logic.
In everyday expressions we can see further into the connection just noted between logical form and meaning at the level of understanding and cognition. "Plants need sunlight and water to grow" is a meaningful statement, because it envelops some content that can be cognized, and moreover, the way it is expressed is also permitted by the rules of logic, which makes it understandable. However, the statement "the daytime is heavier than water" is meaningless, not only because it fails to provide substantial content to be cognized, but also because it is not understandable due to the illogical connection it draws between two objects belonging to different categories. Of course within certain contexts, even if an expression were to lack logical connections in the narrow sense, after undergoing certain transformations, it could still be seen as expressing some kind of meaning. As for the statement mentioned previously, if daytime were used as a metaphor for things containing positive value and water for those with negative value (for instance, sinking), then the two would acquire comparability insofar as they would be referring to the same category, that of value, and the statement concerned would thereby also acquire some kind of meaning. The following statement is similar in kind: though death befalls all men, it may be heavier than Mount Tai or lighter than a goose's feather. While Mount Tai and a goose's feather originally belong to types of phenomena differing in kind from life and death, at the metaphorical level of values, they express a communicability in kind. As metaphors, Mount Tai and a goose's feather refer to different values of death and thus also express a certain meaning. It needs to be pointed out that in the earlier case, logical laws in the broad sense still constrain the declarative process and values also pervade cognitive content that is understandable; the metaphor here first expresses an idea of value through a linguistic transformation, and so the meaning associated with it much rather concerns the domain of value, which we will discuss at greater depth later on. Such phenomena of meaning can be seen in artistic works (like poems).
Refining oneself (accomplishing oneself) and refining the world (accomplishing things) is not only a task of grasping actuality, it also unfolds as a process of changing the world and changing oneself in accordance with human ends and ideals. One of the differences between human being and other things lies in the fact that human being is a kind of being, but one who is also not just "there"; human being exists in this world but does not merely exist in the world, because human being is never satisfied with the form of the world as it is already constituted. Human being faces what is, but at the same time also ceaselessly contemplates, what ought to be. What ought to be is precisely an ideal mode of being, whose basis is an understanding of what is, and which is also simultaneously infused with human ends, which in turn contain values in the broad sense. With an end as the point of concern, the meaning of being correspondingly presents its intrinsic content as that of value: Considered from the purposive dimension of accomplishing oneself and accomplishing things, having meaning consists precisely in having value. The Chinese proverb "fetching a glass of water to put out a flaming cart of wood" is usually taken as an example of meaninglessness, but the meaninglessness found in this case does not have anything to do with one not being able to understand some phenomenon or action; the meaninglessness here points to the lack of real value or effect a glass of water would have in relation to the end of extinguishing a cart of wood engulfed in flames. Similarly, "the praying mantis raised an arm to block a moving car" is another Chinese proverb taken as an example of meaninglessness. The content of the meaningless found here lies in the lack of any substantial or positive value that a praying mantis's arm would have in relation to a certain aim (like halting the momentum of a moving car). By extension, meaning in this domain simultaneously involves ends, actions, and functions, and being meaningful consists in both the intrinsic value that accomplishing oneself and accomplishing things envelops within itself as well as the effect and function that different things, ideas, and actions may have in relation to this process. So, it is clear that meaning at this level predominantly corresponds to the question "What does it mean?" and ends and values constitute its substantial contents.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
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