In the Lectures On the History of Philosophy Hegel mentions both India and China only to dismiss them immediately and thereby move on to true philosophy, which he sees only properly beginning with the Greeks. While India is dismissed, Hegel does take some time to give a quick overview of a couple of Indian philosophical systems. Chinese thought, however, does not receive even that courtesy. Compared to the length of writing given to India, China’s is but a small fraction. Confucius, Hegel says, was certainly a wise man in regard to morality and the practical ordering of the state, but he was no philosopher, and his insights are neither unique nor best stated by him. The I-Ching is acknowledged as dealing with pure categories to some extent, but also played down as a work of representation and superficial understanding. The Taoists are alone recognized as having genuine conceptual insight into Nothingness, but no more than Parmenides had into Being.

I will sidestep the issue of Hegel’s judgment that Chinese philosophy is only philosophy in semblance, and thus not true philosophy the likes of which should enter his properly systematic account of the history of pure thought. Why? Because such agreement or disagreement is semantic, the dispute over meaning itself, and one merely posited definition is as good as another. In order not to lose track of the aim, I shall not consider what is and is not philosophy in any sense. As far as things go, it is philosophical enough to treat philosophically. I wish instead to consider a comparison of Chinese thought to Hegelian thought. It is not that I wish to say that Chinese thought is Hegelian—it isn’t—or that Hegelianism is somehow Chinese. The matter and method of reasoning is simply not the same, but there are momentary parallels which are striking. Such parallels are not only striking because conclusions are relatively similar, but because the reasoning motivating the doctrines is similar. This goes not only for Hegel’s philosophy, but for other philosophies in the West.

Despite the essentially ethical substantiveness of Chinese thought, this thought straddles a line between the strongly objective universality which is metaphysical and the strongly objective particularity which is practically mundane, and as such it has a strong metaphysical tendency it is strangely at odds with. Chinese thought up to its interruption by its meeting with the imperialist West is thoroughly ontological and ethical; there is no essentially subjective or epistemic thought in it such as “I think, therefore I am.” Certainly, there are epistemic questions that arise, but they are not the beginning of any philosophy. The strongest hints toward this are perhaps to be found in Wang Yangming’s view that the study of the mind suffices to know the Tao (Way), for the mind is pattern itself, and the Tao is ultimately the Taiji (Great Ultimate) as pattern. I here place emphasis on Chinese thought, for Buddhism was transplanted from the cultural soil of India, where the conception of reality as determined or structured by the mind was a strong part of many strands of both the Vedic and non-Vedic systems. Buddhism had strongly onto-epistemic branches, but the methods of inquiry were not taken up by the Chinese Taoists or Confucians. Insofar as Buddhism had influence outside of its own adherents, it was via its monistic metaphysics and some of its ethically relevant distinctions in rational psychology such as the distinction of the original mind and human mind or desire, and the metaphysical distinctions of pattern, substance, and function which became important in late Confucianism. Something not known generally in the West is that Taoism as a philosophy was integrated into Confucianism at a certain point and ceased to be much of an independent philosophical tradition. This is why in speaking of Chinese philosophy, one really speaks of one tradition rather than multiple ones.

The purpose of this piece is primarily to extol the virtue of the Daoxue (Neo-Confucianism in the West), which was the culminating synthesis of Confucian ethics, Taoist metaphysics, and a few concepts from Buddhism. I wish to express its living pattern, and to thereby perhaps awaken the reader to an interest in a tradition which is luckily not yet dead even if in China and its cultural diaspora in South East Asia it remains a minority. To any who have sympathies with Hegelianism, this is a call to pay attention to something of utmost importance. Nearly two billion human beings live with the objective and subjective legacy of this thought, and if in it we spy the Spirit of freedom, here is a most important ally to lock arms with and intertwine into the project of human emancipation.

Change or Becoming

Change has neither thought nor action, because it is in the state of absolute quiet and inactivity, and when acted on, it immediately penetrates all things. If it were not the most spirit-like thing in the world, how can it take part in this universal transformation? —I-Ching

The system of Change is indeed intermingled with the operations of ch’ien (Heaven) and k’un (Earth). As ch’ien and k’un take their respective positions, the system of Change is established in their midst. If ch’ien and k’un are obliterated, there would be no means of seeing the system of Change. If the system of Change cannot be seen, then ch’ien and k’un would almost cease to operate. Therefore what exists before physical form [and is therefore without it] is called the Tao (Way). What exists after physical form [and is therefore with it] is called a concrete thing. —I-Ching

The I-Ching or Yijing (Book of Changes) is one of the major sources for Taoism and Confucianism’s metaphysics. More than any other civilization, the Chinese take Becoming as supreme. As can be gleaned from the quotes above, one of the surprising things about their view of Becoming (change) is that they do not conceive it alone, but see it as a trinity with Heaven and Earth. The resistance to reductionism into a singular abstraction like Being, Nothing, or Becoming is something hardly found in Western thought, and the reasoning is sound even if unexplained.

That change as such is in the state of “absolute quiet and inactivity” is a contradiction, but one that is logically consequent and true. Change itself does not change, and thereby has changed and remained the same in that very change that is no change. 

“As ch’ien and k’un take their respective positions, the system of Change is established in their midst.”

Here we see the non-reductionism of this thought, where there is no singular determinate ground to everything, but an original simplex system of change. Heaven and Earth are changed, but Change itself only is change in the relation of Heaven and Earth. There is an inconsistency, however, in the claim that without Change, Heaven and Earth would almost cease to operate, and that without Heaven and Earth there would be no appearance of the system of Change. This framing presents Heaven and Earth, and Change to have some kind of independent being in relation to each other, but a much diminished one. The Tao is identified with the system of Change before Heaven and Earth, the indeterminate before the determinate being of things. Inconsistency aside, the truer propositions regard the contradiction of changeless Change, and the inseparability of determinate being (Heaven and Earth) and Change.

The Universality of Pattern: One Is All

To investigate things in order to understand pattern to the utmost does not mean that it is necessary to investigate all things in the world. One has only to investigate the pattern in one thing or one event to the utmost and the pattern in other things or events can then be inferred. For example, when we talk about filial piety, we must find out what constitutes filial piety. If pattern cannot be investigated to the utmost in one event, investigate another. One may begin with either the easy or the most difficult, depending on the degree of one’s capacity. There are thousands of tracks and paths to go to the capital. Yet one can enter if he has found just one way. pattern can be investigated to the utmost [in this way] because all things share the same pattern. Even the most insignificant of things and events has this pattern. —Cheng I

Question: Is the Great Ultimate (Taiji) the highest pattern of the human mind? Answer: There is an ultimate in every thing or event. That is the ultimate of pattern. Someone asked: Like humanity on the part of the ruler and respect on the part of ministers. These are ultimates. Answer: These are ultimates of a particular thing or event. When all patterns of heaven and earth and the myriad things are put together, that is the Great Ultimate. The Great Ultimate originally has no such name. It is merely a name to express its character. —Cheng I

One’s nature is the one source of all things and is not one’s own private possession. It is only the great man who is able to know and practice its pattern to the utmost. Therefore, when he establishes himself, he will help others to establish themselves. He will share his knowledge with all. He will love universally. When he achieves something, he wants others to achieve the same. As for those who are so obstructed themselves [by selfishness] as not to understand this pattern of mine, nothing can be done. —Zhang Zai

To know one is to know the all, and to know the all is to know every one. The thinkers of the Daoxue took significant inspiration for this insight from the Buddhists and their view of the emptiness of things and the metaphor of Indra’s net, wherein all that is is an infinite reflection of all else, however, the Daoxue always had a similar intimation already in the Chinese classics, but with a different metaphor and significantly different meaning. The Tao is like a stream in which eddies form, arise and dissolve, as natural consequences of the flow in relation to itself. As every eddie is an expression or embodiment of the Tao, to know its singular pattern is also to grasp the general and generative pattern. More importantly, to know the flowing pattern of any eddie leads one to track this flow as it has moved through various eddies alongside, contained within, and containing this eddie. It is thus inevitable that to know any singular thing pushes us to know more and more of the concrete pattern of the world. In inverse, to know the all, the Tao, the One, or the Great Ultimate, is to know the generative self-contextualizing pattern of all things. Someone who knows the Tao knows how to know any individual tao without much problem, they know how to properly investigate truths in the one Truth. This doctrine, which is also shared by Western esotericism and philosophies which concretized such thoughts like that of the Neo-Platonists, is functionally found as Hegel’s Absolute Idea as the self-generative reality and conception of reality.

The Great Ultimate (太极) and the Absolute Idea

There is no other event in the universe except yin and yang succeeding each other in an unceasing cycle. This is called Change. However, for activity and tranquility there must be the patterns which make them possible. This is the Great Ultimate. —Cheng I

By its nature, the Great Ultimate is unmoved. When it is aroused, it becomes spirit. Spirit leads to number. Number leads to form. Form leads to concrete things. Concrete things undergo infinite transformations, but underlying them is spirit to which they must be resolved. —Shao Yung

The Great Ultimate is the One. It produces the two (yin and yang) without engaging in activity. The two (in their wonderful changes and transformations) constitute the spirit. Spirit engenders number, number engenders form, and form engenders concrete things. —Shao Yung

If yin and yang do not exist, the One (the Great Ultimate) cannot be revealed. If the One cannot be revealed, then the function of the two forces will cease. Reality and unreality, motion and rest, integration and disintegration, and clearness and turbidity are two different substances. In the final analysis, however, they are one. —Zhang Zai

The Absolute of Hegelianism is closest to the Daoxue concept of the Great Ultimate (Taiji 太极). The Confucians acknowledge that this concept was developed by the Taoists first as the Ultimate of Non-Being, but Zhou Dunyi took it in a very different direction to them. A distinction is made between the Tao and the Great Ultimate as a before and after to determination or physical existence. At the most simple and abstract level, the Great Ultimate is the absolute unity of yin (negative or passive cosmic force) and yang (positive or active cosmic force) as one process; at the most concrete level it is the unity of pattern and qi (material force). There is no great distinction between the Tao and the Taiji besides the distinction of indeterminate and determinate. The Chinese were aware of the much simpler concepts of Being, Nothing, and Change, and had from the beginning intuited the Tao to be attuned to the more profound concept of Change. In this manner, the Tao could never really be conceived as indeterminacy as such even if it could not be conceived as a determinate being. In this way the Chinese are like the Greeks and Indians in conceiving a certain determinate being to be indeterminate and mysteriously prior to determinate beings. With the Greeks we see this in the Platonic conceptions of the One beyond Being and Nothing, and with the Indians we see this in the various conceptions of consciousness like Brahman as the indeterminate yet implicitly determinate background before existence. Certain thinkers of the Daoxue came to realize that the whole separation of the Tao and the Taiji is really unnecessary, and that the language of before and after to physical form or the distinction of pure pattern and qi is contradictory to the intended meaning that the Taiji is indeed the highest reality in which all is concretely one.

The Tao is first the generation of beings, but it does not remain as their mere beginning; rather, it proceeds to develop all beings as their own individual tao much like a river maintains one great flow within which eddies may form as particular movements flowing within that great flow. The Tao is the great flow which is not determined to flow in any specific direction in immediacy, and the Taiji is this flow fleshed out into the determinate consequences of its own internal turbulences and eddies, it is the determinate patterning of things. Because the Taiji involves pattern and objectivity, it is more properly analogous to the Idea in Hegelianism, but is not determinate enough in the discourses about it to say that it is like it beyond implications of content. It is recognized that there is only one Taiji, and all individuals are particularizations of this One. Zhu Xi gives the example of moonlight and the moon reflecting on water: each water body reflects and expresses the full moon, but it is one moonlight which shines on them all and engages the reflection in the first place. All things, therefore, are themselves instances of the Taiji which are produced by the nature of the Taiji itself, and to the extent which they are at all, particular things express the nature of Taiji as their own tao or pattern. In understanding the Taiji as the productive genesis of all, and the One in which all inhere, there is an intuitive grasp of its self-generative determination and individuation.

The Rectification of Names and the Concept

The Spring and Autumn Annals examines the patterns of things and rectifies their names. It applies names to things as they really are, without making the slightest mistake. — Luxuriant Gems of the Spring and Autumn Annals

If names are not rectified, then language will not be in accord with truth. If language is not in accord with truth, then things cannot be accomplished. . . Therefore the superior man will give only names that can be described in speech and say only what can be carried out in practice. —Confucius, Analects, 13:3

Now the sage-kings are dead and the guarding of names has become lax, strange terms have arisen, and names and actualities have been confused. As the standard of right and wrong is not clear, even the guardians of law and the teachers of natural patterns are in a state of confusion. Should a true king appear, he would certainly retain some old names and create new ones. This being the case, [1] the reason for having names, [2] the causes for the similarities and differences in names, and [3] the fundamental patterns on which names are instituted, must be clearly understood. —Hsun Tzu, On the Rectification of Names

“To govern (cheng) is to rectify (cheng). If you lead the people by being rectified yourself, who will dare not be rectified?”—Confucius, Analects 12:17

“To rectify is to rectify actuality, and to rectify actuality is to rectify the name corresponding to it.” —On Names and Actuality, fragment from the School of Names

The doctrine of names and their rectification is not a very deep one in and of itself, but its significance becomes much greater in the development of Confucianism as a systematic philosophy in the Song-Ming era in which the Daoxue arose. In Hegelian terms, what Confucians mean by names are concepts by a much less rigorous standard. Names are not yet pure concepts, but the linguistic presentation of them. Why should Confucians, who care primarily for ethical substance, give such an importance to names? Because clear communication is necessary for practical execution, and in order for the Tao to be realized, our names should accord with what things truly are, and then those things which are not true to what we need to do will also be rectified if we know their proper names. For Confucians and Taoists, the objective and moral facts have an unquestioned continuity such that fact and value are not disjunct since both the facts of the world and of human social existence share one continuous form and connection in and through the Tao.

To understand what a name properly refers to is of deep importance, for the when language begins to drift away from a clear definition which is easily grasped, and instead becomes vague or even opposite to its original meaning, then problems in practical execution arise not only in the miscommunication between people, but in a disconnect between what we believe and what is true of the world. Names which have lost their rectitude can invert the appearance of truth such that what is good may be misunderstood as evil and vice versa. An example is that in modernity the names of ‘truth’, ‘good’, and ‘beauty’ have lost determinacy to the point that no one knows what they specifically refer to, and individuals now arbitrarily act on the conviction of what these mean in a way that they do not know if these really accord with any reality. In the US this is particularly a problem since in many ways we have come to disagree about what names themselves mean in the common populace. Half of the country understands ‘freedom’ to mean one thing, and the other half believes it to be another. When each comes to power, each acts according to what they believe the name to truly mean, and so they seek to rectify the world according to this understanding. Eschewing who has the more correct name, it is not hard to see that if one has an unrectified name one is bound to, like the fool in some Buddhist stories, try to straighten a ‘crooked’ tree which by its nature ought to be crooked, and so one ends up breaking it and killing it. In this loss of a meaning that has a definite relation to the world’s true operation, people act based on misunderstandings that can be dangerously opposite to reality, and which ultimately lead to self-destruction. A second layer to the rectification of names concerns not only the clarity of definition, but the unity of everyday communication and the depth of clear meaning. To rectify names, therefore, is also the task of aligning common intuitions in language with the clear and proper intuitions of deep meaning found in philosophy. The philosopher has the additional task not only of making clear and consistent definitions, but to take historical language and its common use and also align these rectified definitions as closely to common spoken names such that clear communication is advanced among not only the scholarly, but also the common people. This unity of high conceptuality and common language is also something Hegel holds not only as a doctrine, but as a result of philosophical method wherein the Universal and necessary shows itself in the individual and contingent.

Now, of course, the Confucians don’t explain themselves as referring to concepts, the theory is not developed in this way. For an interesting critique of how we Westerns easily misread the Confucians via our cultural framing, see Dr. Bryan Van Norden’s lecture on the rectification of names, wherein he refutes the notion of reading the use of names as signifiers, definitions, or concepts. About the quote, “A ruler is not a ruler, a minister is not a minister, a father is not a father, a son is not a son,” Van Norden points out that Zhu Xi comments that it means that, “The relationship between rulers, ministers, fathers, and sons had all lost the way.” This interpretation, he says, does not follow the typical Western account of semantic assent where the term ‘ruler’ in “A ruler is not a ruler” is in one sense a referred to individual and in a second sense a measuring concept, i.e. that a such a sentence concerns someone that is called a ruler but does not fit the name. While, indeed, Zhu Xi’s comment does not express this form of analysis, and does not claim it is about the rectification of names, to say that this means that the ruler and everyone else had all lost the way is to implicitly be judging by their concepts in a way that is not analytic in the way Van Norden critiques. The concept of a ruler is a relationship dynamic, and the dynamic relations which are the nature of things is their way, thus to judge that things lost their way is to judge that they have lost their concept or are failing to actualize it. What Van Norden is absolutely right to critique here is that just because one spies names, does not mean the message concerns names themselves. As Zhu Xi interprets, it does express in context of their culture the very intelligible message that the relationships have simply been lost. One can draw out of this a valid interpretation about the names, but that is not the point of the statement.

Unlike the analytic semantic ascent which focuses on literal names as terms and nouns in propositions, the Hegelian concept does not refer to things but is those things. What makes names equivalent to concepts, which are not to be understood merely as a communicative theory of language and reference, is that names are said to be intended to track how things really are, but in the context of Confucianism and Taoism at large, how things really are is dynamic and concretely interrelated, not immutable and abstract. The proper name of things, therefore, will convey this interrelated dynamism, but such a name will thereby not merely refer to a singular abstract, but to a system of different parts in developmental unity comprehended as such a necessary immanently differentiated unity. Since the Tao is a moving simplex, so too must names be.

The recitification of names, of course, is not merely about names as such. It is itself an ethical doctrine, one about rectifying the concepts in one’s mind, and also one about rectifying things to fit the name they have. This relates to the unity of knowledge and action in Confucian thought, which falls under the name of activity, will, ethicality, and most concretely humanity. That which has the name of humanity is that whose pattern is the activity of rectificatying names.

A Thing Is an Event

A thing is an event. If the patterns underlying the event are investigated to the utmost, there all patterns will be understood.—Cheng I

The conception of things as events is a logical consequence of the absoluteness of Change. Cheng I, Wang Yangming, and Dai Zhen explicitly affirm this, but this was already an implicit doctrine of the Taoists and Confucians. Although the Chinese Buddhists conceive all things as empty of inner self, merely being constituted by endless relations like beads reflecting each other on Indra’s net, this involves only the recognition of static structures, it does not involve any intuition of movement or change of any kind, and thus they do not advance to conceive things as events in themselves. In the West and India the metaphysics of the event and change has largely been put to the wayside in favor of the metaphysics of substance and identity. This metaphysics of Change or the Tao from the beginning has kept the Chinese mind from wandering too far into abstraction, for the concepts themselves demand concreteness via relation and development. For the Daoxue, the question of uniting form and content, or function and substance, was never in play because their metaphysics demanded that these could never be separated. This intuitive relation, however, is also what kept them from committing to the unity of a differentiated rational thought that would from one single determination generate all other determinations including itself. They intuited this unified difference, and rationally justified that it must be so, but they had no way to explicate from the one infinite and indeterminate pattern the development of all finite determinate patterns as a consequence of the Taiji’s simple self-referring being itself. The Hegelian Concept is itself also an event, a developmental pattern which patterns itself, and whose patterning pattern is its own content or qi.

On Mind

What is it that we have in common in our minds? It is the sense of pattern and righteousness (i-li, moral patterns). — Mencius

The origin of Heaven and Earth is based on the pattern of the Mean (the central pattern). Thus ch’ien (Heaven) and k’un (Earth) never deviate from this central pattern of existence although they are engaged in incessant transformation. Man is central in the universe, and the mind is central in man.—Shao Yung, Supreme Patterns

The mind is the Great Ultimate. The human mind should be as calm as still water. Being calm, it will be tranquil. Being tranquil, it will be enlightened.—Shao Yung, Supreme Patterns

Question: What is the difference between jen and the mind? Answer: The mind is comparable to seeds of grain. The nature of growth is jen. —Cheng I

The mind is the pattern of production. . . The feeling of commiseration is the pattern of production in man. —Cheng I

The mind is pattern.—Lu Hsiang-Shan

It is largely unmentioned that Confucianism’s second major development in Daoxué is Idealist through and through, and that this category does not apply only to the supposed extreme of Wang Yangming’s so-called dynamic Idealism. The reasons for this are mostly sociological. For one, there is a desire to not collapse Eastern thought under terms of the West as if the West has any right to measure other thought by its standards. Second, Idealism has in the West become generally collapsed into subjective Idealism, particularly phenomenalism or consciousness Idealism. The Daoxué are no such Idealists, but are rather of the currently rare strand of objective Idealism which is closer to Plato than to bishop Berkeley’s or Buddhism’s subjective Idealism. This is surprising, for it must be said that the Daoxué has an intuitively greater insight and grasp of how to present this Idealism in a clearer expression than Platonism in the common misunderstanding does.

On Li (理): Pattern

Objective viewing of things is not only desirable but necessary. To view things this way meant not to be subjective but to follow pattern which is inherent in things, and to maintain the mean in one’s emotions so they would not lead one to partiality. —Shao Yung

The origin of Heaven and Earth is based on the pattern of the Mean (the central pattern). Thus ch’ien and k’un never deviate from this central pattern of existence although they are engaged in incessant transformation. —Shao Yung

He who acts in accordance with the pattern of Nature will have the entire process of creation in his grip. When the pattern of Nature is achieved, hot only his personality, but his mind also, are enriched. And not only his mind but his nature and destiny are enriched. To be in accord with pattern is normal, but to deviate from pattern is abnormal. —Shao Yung

According to pattern nothing exists alone. Unless there are similarity and difference, contraction and expansion, and beginning and end among things to make it stand out, it is not really a thing although it seems to be. —Zhang Zai

The concept of pattern is very similar to Plato’s Idea as Form, but it is not quite the same, and due to the assumption of change it is determined dynamically unlike Plato’s Idea. Like Idea, pattern overreaches both the subjective domain of mind and the objective domain of Nature or appearances. Not only is change’s integration into the concept of pattern a difference from Plato’s Idea, but the conception of Nature as sensible and thought or Ideas as supersensible is not a strong distinction which the Confucians make or accept. While there are hints of this distinction, they constantly resist this separation and always emphasize the unity of determinate sensible things and the seemingly indeterminate supersensible Tao, Taiji, or pattern. Idea, otherwise translated as Form, has inherent semantic proximity to pattern, but there is a distinction of emphasis. Form is more static and abstract, while pattern is more dynamic and concrete. In the intuition of language use, ‘form’ tends to identify only the external bounding shape of things, but pattern calls to mind a filling of content within that bounding shape which itself may determine the bound of said shape. We do not find in the thought of the Chinese much that implies any conception of determinate abstractions, i.e. pure concepts or metaphysical objects. In most thought given to the distinction of indeterminate vs determinate, the intuition is that the Tao alone is indeterminate pure pattern, and any determinateness therefrom is immediately some determination of qi (material force). While qi itself is not identical to physical form, and is mostly considered to be ontologically prior to the arising of physical form, it is also not strongly distinguished from it. This is all to make clear that pattern never is understood in a purely immaterial abstract sense.

The constant pattern of Heaven and Earth is that their mind is in all things, and yet they have no mind of their own. . . Therefore, for the training of the superior man there is nothing better than to become broad and extremely impartial and to respond spontaneously to all things as they come. —Cheng Hao, Reply to Heng Ch’u’s Letter On Calming Human Nature

Where there is impartiality, there is unity, and where there is partiality, there is multiplicity. The highest truth is always revolved into a unity, and an essential pattern is never a duality. If people’s minds are as different as their faces are, it is solely due to partiality.—Cheng I

Lu Hsiang-Shan states, “Mind is pattern.” It is not entirely clear from the texts available that it is ever satisfyingly explained why this is so; nonetheless, the statement matches consequences in Kant’s philosophy and consequent Idealisms, and the intuition behind it is clear. With Kant, the transcendental unity of apperception already hints at the nature of the mind being the differentiated unity of thought itself. With Hegel we get the specification of mind as the initially differentiated unity of Nature with itself, culminating in Absolute Mind as the differentiated unity of mind with itself, the absolute unification of pure thought. In all these is the conception that mentality is not merely a first person subjective conscious experience of what it is like to be, its sensuous and psychological phenomenality, but rather that mentality is pure unification in difference. In Chinese thought the highest concrete reality is Heaven, under which all existence is unified in its productive power as Nature. The mind likewise manifests a seemingly all-encompassing unification not only in the appearing of the world in consciousness, but also in the grasping and execution of pattern, and pattern is identified with nature as the essential process of self-development, growth or production, in things. Not only does Heaven stand above all things as empirically highest in everyday experience, it is also the source of air necessary for life, and rain which falls to earth and engages the life power of plants; thus, Heaven generates life, its pattern is to engage all other patterns into development. It was an intuitively easy leap to the logical conception of Heaven itself as the ultimate penetration of pattern which achieved absolute depth and extension in the whole world. After all, Heaven is the concrete Tao, the Pattern or Taiji, from which all other patterns originate. Therefore, because Heaven is not only the ultimate all-encompassing unity, but also the all-penetrating pattern, and pattern itself is not physical, Heaven itself is mind. This is all fully consequent of the grasping that pattern is a unity in difference. 

Pattern is undeniably intrinsically related to thought, and it must be said that truly it is consequentially thought itself even if the thinkers of the Daoxué did not make this connection explicit. As thought or mind, pattern could ‘penetrate’ all things and find in them not only the universal pattern, but the specific pattern of the universal pattern as that thing. The Daoxué grasped that getting oneself, as arbitrary subjective beliefs and desires, out of the way of cognition was essential to grasping the pattern of things and truth itself. When we clear our minds of the obfuscations of subjective arbitrariness, that clearing itself empirically leads to the effect of a much more facile cognition of things, a much clearer penetration of their patterns wherein the clearer our mind of preconceptions and projections, the deeper and further the penetration of cognition regarding what the thing as such is for itself and not merely as it is for us in our interests. While the pattern of Heaven penetrates all things immediately and effortlessly as their very being, the pattern of the mind penetrates through mediated understanding in thinking. The empirical intuition of clear thinking and its results in efficacious power over that which is understood, one can see the consequence of the later distinctions of clear and turbid qi. The mind is constituted by the clearest and most penetrating qi, and all other things are increasingly turbid as measured by their power to effect pattern’s penetration on and beyond themselves.

On Thought

By viewing things is not meant viewing them with one’s physical eyes but with one’s mind. Nay, not with one’s mind but with the pattern inherent in things. . . A mirror reflects because it does not obscure the physical form of things. But water (with its purity) does even better because it reveals the universal character of the physical form of things as they really are. And the sage does still better because he reflects the universal character of the feelings of all things. The sage can do so because he views things as things view themselves; that is, not subjectively but from the viewpoint of things. Since he is able to do this, how can there be anything between him and things? —Shao Yung, Supreme patterns Governing the World

“When our senses of sight and hearing are used without thought and are thereby obscured by material things, the material things act on the material senses and lead them astray. That is all. The function of the mind is to think. If we think, we will get them (the patterns of things). If we do not think, we will not get them. This is what Heaven has given to us. If we first build up the nobler part of our nature, then the inferior part cannot overcome it. It is simply this that makes a mangreat.” —Mencius 6A:15

The function of the mind is to think. If we think, we will get them (the patterns of things). —Mencius

The way to think should emphasize reflection on things at hand, and should be done in a free, easy, and leisurely manner. With reflection on things at hand, the self will not be at a loss, and with free and leisurely thinking one will not be impeded by material things. —Lu Hsiang-Shan

As the Chinese have no theory of logic, even of a formal one, there should be no surprise that they lack a theory of thought as such. A lack of such a theory, of course, is nothing surprising in philosophy in general. Thought quickly is reduced to forms/universals in the West, and it is then such issues that take the front. In the Chinese the equivalent is between pattern and substance, but this is largely eschewed for the debate on substance and function. In this distinction, the mind is substance and thought is its function. While immediately intuitive, this distinction itself raises many issues where, as with other Chinese categories like yin and yang as feminine/masculine or negative/positive, instances become strangely unintuitive in different ways. One could see how under such notions it is easy to consider the mind itself the function of the body, and then what does that make thought?

What is present in the notions of thought in Chinese philosophy is a recognition that thinking as pattern is necessary for the perception or determination of things. There is no strong distinction between thought and mind, and as has been already shown, it was a position of the Daoxue that mind and pattern are the same. Besides pattern, thought being conceived as a function adds the determination of activity to its meaning. This is in line with some of the minor views in Western philosophy where thought is understood as activity. The insights that thought or mind is pattern, that thought is activity, and that concrete things themselves (qi) are one with pattern are supreme and of infinite significance. Though in Chinese thought these insights are grounded in intuitive assumptions, they are nonetheless the most astonishing assumptions which lay at the foot of Chinese thought the royal road to solving a myriad of problems which the West and India fumbled and keep fumbling. The Hegelian conception of thought as Idea also makes clear the unity of concept and object as one differentiated unity, the self-processing of reality.

On Spirit

The knowledge [of spirit] embraces all things and its way helps all under heaven, and therefore there is no mistake. It operates freely and does not go off course. It rejoices in Nature (T’ien, Heaven) and understands destiny. Therefore there is no worry. As [things] are contented in their stations and earnest in practicing kindness, there can be love. It molds and encompasses all transformations of Heaven and Earth without mistake, and it stoops to bring things into completion without missing any. It penetrates to a knowledge of the course of day and night.8 Therefore spirit has no spatial restriction and Change has no physical form. — I-Ching

Spirit is nowhere and yet everywhere. The perfect man can penetrate the minds of others because he is based on the One. Spirit is perforce called the One and the Way. It is best to call it spirit. —Shao Yung, Supreme patterns

The spirit is that which, “when acted on, immediately penetrates all things. —Zhou Dunyi

Things cannot be tranquil while active or active while tranquil. Spirit, however, can be active without activity and tranquil without tranquility. Being active without activity and tranquil without tranquility does not mean that spirit is neither active nor tranquil. Things cannot penetrate each other but spirit works wonders with all things. —Zhou Dunyi

Spirit is the master of Change. It therefore has no spatial restriction. Change is the function of spirit. Therefore it has no physical form. —Shao Yung

The spirit of man is the same as the spirit of Heaven and Earth. Therefore, when one deceives himself, he is deceiving Heaven and Earth. Let him beware! —Shao Yung

The Great Ultimate is the One. It produces the two (yin and yang) without engaging in activity. The two (in their wonderful changes and transformations) constitute the spirit. —Shao Yung

For those familiar with Hegel’s conception of Spirit, some of the quotes above should be quite striking. The Chinese, however, do not have a highly developed conception of spirit. Spirit as a concept originally implied and referred to otherworldly spiritual entities, kuei-shen, but in Daoxue philosophy describes determinations of the Tao or Taiji. Spirit is the most subtle of qi, but so is the mind. What, then, is the difference? Spirit has the connotations of ‘wonderful and mysterious’ functioning. For what is believed to have a way, a nature, or a pattern, yet whose pattern is mysterious, that is spirit. That the concept of spirit has some strong abstract resemblance to the Hegelian conception of Spirit is therefore unsurprising, for it is one of the specific names of Change. Thus we find that the concept of spirit, though a minor concept sparsely mentioned in the classics of Confucianism and the Daoxue, has the peculiar developing plurality as one that we find in the Hegelian conception of the “I that is a we, and the we that is an I.”

Final Remarks

Overall, what I have exposed here is only a fraction of the thoughts which one finds in Chinese philosophy. Metaphysics was not the express aim of Chinese thought, indeed there was a struggle for it to tackle such arcane subjects which to grounded everyday thought seem like speculative flights of fancy without practical purpose. Against later critics of the Daoxue like Dai Zhen, who critiqued its thinkers for being too metaphysical due to the influence of Taoism and especially Buddhism, I am most impressed with the depth of thought one finds in them. Not only do they prove Hegel to be utterly wrong in his dismissal of Chinese philosophy as having no shred of the Concept, they also provide an astonishing metaphysical intuition with a facility of expression which an everyday person can understand. For a tradition of thought which has as its aim ethical development, nothing could be more fitting than that such an intuitive expression should be achieved. To be sure, the Daoxue engaged in scholarly debates over concepts like any philosophical tradition, and in this one cannot deny that this scholastic obsession came to dominate in such a way that the spirit of the project was often lost in formalisms which are astonishingly opposed to the very spirit of it, but one finds that the further the thinking has developed, the more refined it has become. The very fact that there is an intuitive explication of these doctrines which does not rely on one’s submergence in an arcane and long erudition in the history of philosophy, and which would satisfy a common understanding, is admirable.