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><b>2025 </b><b><i>CHOICE </i></b><b>Outstanding Academic Title</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>