Living Chinese Philosophy

<p><b>Contrasts classical Greek ontology (the science of being in itself) with Confucian zoetology (the art of living).</b></p><p>In <i>Living Chinese Philosophy</i> Roger T. Ames uses comparative cultural hermeneutics as a method for contrasting classical Greek ontology (the science of being in itself) with classical Chinese zoetology (the art of living) which is made explicit in the <i>Yijing</i>易經or <i>Book of Changes</i>. Parmenides Plato and Aristotle give us a substance ontology grounded in being <i>qua</i> being or being <i>per se</i> (<i>to on he on</i>) that guarantees a permanent and unchanging subject as the substratum for the human experience. This substratum or essence includes its purpose for being (<i>telos</i>) and defines the what-it-means-to-be-a-thing-of-this-kind (<i>eidos</i>) of any particular thing thus setting a closed exclusive boundary and the strict identity necessary for a particular thing to be this and not that. In the <i>Book of Changes</i> we find a vocabulary that makes explicit cosmological assumptions that are a stark alternative to this substance ontology. It also provides the interpretive context for the canonical texts by locating them within a holistic organic and ecological worldview. To provide a meaningful contrast with this fundamental assumption of <i>on</i> or being we might borrow the Greek notion of <i>zoe</i> or life and create the neologism <i>zoe</i>-tology as the art of living (<i>shengshenglun</i>生生論). This cosmology begins from living (<i>sheng</i>生) itself as the motive force behind change and gives us a world of boundless becomings: not things that <i>are</i> but events that are <i>happening</i> a contrast between an ontological conception of human beings and a process conception of what the author calls human becomings.</p>