On Chinese Body Thinking: A Cultural Hermeneutic (Philosophy of History and Culture)

This book uses Western philosophical tradition to make a case for a form of thinking properly associated with ancient China. The book's thesis is that Chinese thinking is concrete rather than formal and abstract, and this is gathered in a variety of ways under the symbol “body thinking". The. root of the metaphor is that the human body has a kind of intelligence in its most basic functions. When hungry the body gets food and eats, when tired it sleeps, when amused it laughs. In free people these things happen instinctively but not automatically. The metaphor of body thinking is extended far beyond bodily functions in the ordinary sense to personal and communal life, to social functions and to cultivation of the arts of civilization. As the metaphor is extended, the way to stay concrete in thinking with subtlety becomes a kind of ironic play, a natural adeptness at saying things with silences. Play and indirection are the roads around formalism and abstraction. Western formal thinking, it is argued, can be sharpened by Chinese body thinking to exhibit spontaneity and to produce healthy human thought in a community of cultural variety. Kuang-ming Wu, Ph.D. (1965, Philosophy), Yale University, is Professor of History, National Chung-cheng University, Taiwan; Rosebush University Professor Emeritus, University of Wisconsin, USA. He has published extensively on the philosophy of Chuang Tzu and distinctness of Chinese thinking. Cover Half title Imprint Contents Acknowledgments Foreword Introduction DIVISION ONE: Chinese Body Thinking: An Understanding A Preliminary Remark PART ONE: Chinese Concrete Thinking 1. Concrete Notions 1.1. Demonstratives 1.2. Affirmatives 1.3. Negatives 2. Concrete Argumentations 2.1. Metaphorical 2.2. Compact 2.3. Ironic 3. Chinese Concrete Thinking: A Summation 3.1. "I am Not Here" 3.2. Extraordinary Ordinariness 3.3. A Multiple Summation (part 1) 3.4. (part 2) 92 3.5. (part 3) 93 PART TWO: Chinese Body Thinking 4. Concrete Universals in Chinese Thinking 4.1. The Spread 42. Imperative 4,3. Concrete Universals 5. The Hiddenness of the "I" 5.1. The "I" as the Base of Thinking 5.2. The "I" as Tacit 5.3. The Structure of the "I" 6. Hidden "I" in Interpersonal Relations 6.1. Love as Plerosis 6.2. Positive Nihilation--Home 6.3. Wombing Forth Persons 6.4. Inner Touch 6.5. Confucianism 6.6. Negative Nihilation--Hell 6.7. Humanity 6.8. Life Drama 7. How Home-Hell Relations Are Possible 7.1. Mobile “I” 7.2. Ch'i 7.3. Fluidity 7.4. Evocation 7.5. Polar Continuity PART THREE: Some Concluding Remarks 8. A Summary of Parts One and Two 8.1. Our Expressions 82. The Texture of Reality 8.3. Summation 9. Cultural Mutuality 9.1. Mutual Benefiting 9.2. Five Points on Comparative Hermeneutics 9.3. Comparative Hermeneutics for Our Survival DIVISION TWO: Chinese Body Thinking: A Cultural Understanding A Preliminary Remark PART FOUR: On Body Thinking 10. Two Themes: Movement, Comparison 10.1. From Self-Movement to Self-Transportation 10.2. Western vs. Chinese on Body Thinking (1) 11. Thinking, Pointings, Body Thinking 11.1. All Thinking is Body Thinking 11.2. Pointings 11.3. Body Thinking as Embodied, as Body-Wise 11.4. Objection, Response PART FIVE: Linear Logicality 12. Body Thinking as Thinking 12.1. Universality and Necessity in Body Thinking 12.2. Six Characteristics of Body Thinking 12.3. Western vs. Chinese Thinking on Body Thinking (2) 12.4. Self-Emptying, Self-Forgetting 12.5. Bodily Death 13. Thinking as Bodily 13.1. Contingent Conditions, Logical Operations 13.2. Four Levels of Performance of Thinking 13.3. Structure of Body Thinking 13.4. General Bodily Validity 14. The Thinking Body 14.1. Universals in Human Existence 14.2. On "To Be Is To Be Perceived" 14.3. The Bodily Performative A Priori 14.4. The Body as the A Priori PART SIX: Circular Configuration 15. The Configurative as the Concrete 15.1. Part-Whole Configurative Argumentation 15.2. Concrete Concepts, Concrete Arguments 15.3. Analytical Goldinger, Chinese Cua 15.4. Merleau-Ponty and Chinese Body Thinking 16. Practical Significance of Body Thinking 16.1. Sociality in Configurative Thinking 16.2. Historicity in Configurative Thinking 16.3. Analogy in Configurative Thinking 16.4. Analytical Truths and Perceptual Truths 17. Some Concluding Remarks 17.1. Beauty in Logic and in Life 17.2. Self-Clarifying West, Bodily China 17.3. Four Questions on Body Thinking EPILOGUE 18. The Historical, the Processive 18.1. The Partial, the Analogical, the Historical 18.2. The Processive Appendixes 1: On "Why did modern science not develop in China?" 2: Western Philosophy, "a Series of Footnotes to Plato" 3: The Pragmatic Turn in the West 4: Tillich and Concrete Universality 5: Predominant Trends and Attitudes 6: Referent vs. Meaning 7: Consciousness vs. Self-Consciousness 8: Universals in Images 9: Feminism, the Gulf War, and Name-Rectification 10: Affirmatives and Nature 11: "a of not-a" vs. "a and not-a" 12: Wittgenstein vs. Lao Tzu 13: Pragmatic Explanation of Deconstructionism 14: Mencius, Wordsworth, and the Baby 15: Tillich and the Non-Metaphorical Matrix 16: Cognitive Fallacy in Plato and Socrates 17: History, Usage, and Etymology 18: "Elements" as Concrete Universals 19: Specific and General Descriptions in China 20: Concrete Phrase-Concepts 21: Historical Understanding vs. Genetic Fallacy 22: The Hidden Self 23: Grabau and Existential Universals 24: The Dog, the Music, the Person 25: Philosophy as Existential Biography 26: "Elements" as the Elemental Powers of Being 27: "Renewal in the Wide Sense" 28: Mind-Body Involvement in the West, in China 29: Logos, Mythos 30: Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Philosophical Taoism 31: On Chinese Horoscope Index

This book uses Western philosophical tradition to make a case for a form of thinking properly associated with ancient China. The book's thesis is that Chinese thinking is concrete rather than formal and abstract, and this is gathered in a variety of ways under the symbol “body thinking”. The root of the metaphor is that the human body has a kind of intelligence in its most basic functions. When hungry the body gets food and eats, when tired it sleeps, when amused it laughs. In free people these things happen instinctively but not automatically.
The metaphor of body thinking is extended far beyond bodily functions in the ordinary sense to personal and communal life, to social functions and to cultivation of the arts of civilization. As the metaphor is extended, the way to stay concrete in thinking with subtlety becomes a kind of ironic play, a natural adeptness at saying things with silences. Play and indirection are the roads around formalism and abstraction. Western formal thinking, it is argued, can be sharpened by Chinese body thinking to exhibit spontaneity and to produce healthy human thought in a community of cultural variety.

"This book uses Western philosophical tradition to make a case for a form of thinking properly associated with ancient China. The book's thesis is that Chinese thinking is concrete rather than formal and abstract, and this is gathered in a variety of ways under the symbol "body thinking". The root of the metaphor is that the human body has a kind of intelligence in its most basic functions. When hungry the body gets food and eats, when tired it sleeps, when amused it laughs. In free people these things happen instinctively but not automatically."--BOOK JACKET This book uses Western philosophical tradition to make a case for a form of thinking properly associated with ancient China. It argues that Chinese thinking is concrete rather than formal and abstract, and this is gathered in a variety of ways under the metaphor "body thinking".