Narrative Themes & Questions for Traditions
I. REALITY
What can I say there is and what is the cosmos?
Classical Western Thought
- Transcendent unified order (cosmotic)
- Eternal
- Static
- Principled
Classical Chinese Thought
- Imminent and dynamic event
- Perpetually emergent
- Compounding and recursive
- Rhythmic and stochastic in emergence
- Acosmotic
II. IDENTITY
What does it mean for something to be what it is?
Classical Western Thought
- Reducible to true unchanging essences
- Independent
- Definitive
- Discreet
- Conceivable
- Set/fixed
Classical Chinese Thought
- Emergent through action/relation
- Ambiguous/vague
- Contextual (place, role, action in dynamics of relationship)
- Dynamic
III. KNOWLEDGE
What does it mean to know something and how is it done?
Classical Western Thought
- Representing essence in terms of conditions that make its being possible
- Privileges
- Demonstration (proof)
- Articulation (definition)
Classical Chinese Thought
- Evoking creative self disclosure
- Incorporation/appreciation/expression
- Privilege of aesthetic over logic
IV. MEANING
How do things have the significance they do and how can one explain them?
Classical Western Thought
- Fulfilling or expressing role within cosmos
- Coupling meaning with purpose (teleology)
Classical Chinese Thought
- Resonance between/from/withing and through web of relationships
- Organic rather than teleological
V. AGENCY
How is one to effectively explain how and why things happen in an intellectually satisfying manner?
Classical Western Thought
- Lifting up causality (necessary set of principled conditions that are:
- Necessarily antecedent to, and
- Necessarily expressive of following conditions in accounting for them
Classical Chinese Thought
- Lifts up correlative thinking over causal
- Privileges analogical over logical thinking
- Doesn't deny causality so much as unsatisfied with it