Michael Harrington

In the 1932 version of his New Treatise on the Uniqueness of Consciousness, Xiong Shili interprets the classical Chinese Book of Changes as an illustration of the basic configurations of consciousness. His interpretation relies on concepts developed by Yogācāra Buddhism, which he criticizes, adapts, and translates into language that can then be applied to the Confucian and Neo-Confucian traditions. As a result, Xiong's interpretation of the Book of Changes bears comparison with more recent phenomenological readings of both Yogācāra Buddhism and Neo-Confucianism.

In the 1932 version of his New Treatise on the Uniqueness of Consciousness, Xiong Shili interprets the classical Chinese Book of Changes as an illustration of the basic configurations of consciousness. His interpretation relies on concepts developed by Yogācāra Buddhism, which he criticizes, adapts, and translates into language that can then be applied to the Confucian and Neo-Confucian traditions. As a result, Xiong’s interpretation of the Book of Changes bears comparison with more recent phenomenological readings of both Yogācāra Buddhism and Neo-Confucianism.

Apparently alone among medieval Christians, Eriugena argues that all life is immortal. He relies on Plato’s Timaeus as his primary source for this claim, but he modifies the argument of the Timaeus considerably. He turns Plato’s cosmic soul into the genus of life, thereby taking a treatise that originally dealt with cosmology and using it to explore the ontological significance of definition. All species that fall under the genus of life must be immortal, because a mortal species would contradict the genus. No later medieval author would take up Eriugena’s arguments explicitly, although Aquinas comes close. The two thirteenth-century thinkers to address universal immortality seriously—Aquinas and Bonaventure—argue against it, but they are more faithful than Eriugena himself to a literal reading of the Timaeus.

François Jullien is a master of repetition. Over his more than thirty books, he introduces a carefully defined set of concepts--such as “blandness” and “efficacy”--and then pairs them, opposes them, and sets them in different contexts, returning to them repeatedly without ever saying quite the same thing. One can imagine an introduction to Jullien’s work that traces each of his concepts through its development from book to book, noting explicit and implicit connections to the traditional Chinese thought that gave rise to it. In François Jullien’s Unexceptional Thought, Arne De Boever takes a different tack. As he puts it in his introduction: “I focus on certain books and topics that stood out to me within Jullien’s...

Erwin Panofsky developed the postulate of clarification to explain the mental habit common to Gothic architecture and Western medieval scholasticism, but the postulate is equally applicable to the commentary tradition of Song-dynasty China. The commentary on the Book of Changes authored by Cheng Yi (1033–1107) provides a good example of how the Confucians of the Song dynasty took their concern for clarity to a recognizably medieval extreme. By looking at how Cheng Yi understands and foregrounds the clarity of the Book of Changes, we can begin to see both what was medieval about Song-dynasty China and why the medieval method continues to be viable for interpreters of the Book of Changes.

The Neoplatonic philosopher Proclus disagrees with his predecessor Plotinus on the degree to which human souls can liken themselves to the paradigms, the intellectual formal causes of the sensible world. Plotinus claims that a part of the soul is itself an intellect and not just a likeness of an intellect, while Proclus denies that the soul can ever be more than a likeness of intellect. ;This explicit conflict between Proclus and Plotinus repeats itself implicitly in the work of the author who called himself Dionysius the Areopagite after the convert of St. Paul mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles, and Dionysius' first commentator, an anonymous scholiast assumed by many to be John of Scythopolis. Dionysius follows Proclus on the question of how the human soul likens itself to intellect. Human souls and angelic intellects all receive their likeness to this divine intellect as a gift given to them at their own level of thought . The divine intellect is light ; what the human souls and angelic intellects receive is a gift of light . ;The first commentator on Dionysius subverts Dionysius' denial of paradigmatic knowledge to human souls and angelic intellects, probably without realizing it. This commentator had access, if not to a complete copy of Plotinus' Enneads, at least to a set of extensive quotations from various treatises of Plotinus. Not only does he quote Plotinus extensively in his commentary, but his own comments on Dionysius reflect the Plotinian account of how human souls liken themselves to the demiurgic intellect. Dionysius' commentator posits the paradigms both as the intellectual side of God and as the substrate of every intellectual being, which for him includes both human souls and angelic intellects. In the work of this first commentator on Dionysius, we see a tension between the Plotinian and Proclan approaches to human knowledge of the divine intellect which prefigures later treatments of the tension in the medieval reception of Dionysius and Augustine

The Song and Ming dynasty Confucians make frequent use of what would today be identified as a slippery slope argument. The Book of Changes and its early commentaries provide both the language and the rationale for this argument, inasmuch as the Confucians regard these texts as a method for identifying tiny problems that will one day threaten the state. While today the slippery slope argument is often criticized for promoting an unreasoned resistance to change, a close look at its use by Confucians reveals that they largely avoid this criticism, using the argument in a reasoned way to target not change, but excess.