Living Chinese Philosophy: Zoetology as First Philosophy

In Living Chinese Philosophy, 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 Yijing or Book of Changes. Parmenides, Plato, and Aristotle give us a substance ontology grounded in being qua being or being per se (to on he on) that guarantees a permanent and unchanging subject as the substratum for the human experience. This substratum or essence includes its purpose for being (telos) and defines the what-it-means-to-be-a-thing-of-this-kind (eidos) 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 Book of Changes, 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 on or being, we might borrow the Greek notion of zoe or life and create the neologism zoe-tology as the art of living (shengshenglun ). This cosmology begins from living (sheng ) itself as the motive force behind change and gives us a world of boundless becomings: not things that are but events that are happening, a contrast between an ontological conception of human beings and a process conception of what the author calls human becomings. See more