Wang Yangming: One Body With Heaven and Earth

The great man regards Heaven and Earth and the myriad things as one body. He regards the world as one family and the country as one person. As to those who make a cleavage between objects and distinguish between the self and others, they are …

Pattern Is One: Chinese Metaphysics and Hegelianism

The purpose of this piece is primarily to extol the virtue of the Daoxue (Neo-Confucianism in the West), which was the culminating synthesis of Confucian ethics, Taoist metaphysics, and a few concepts from Buddhism. I wish to express its living pattern, and to thereby perhaps awaken the reader to an interest in a tradition which is luckily not yet dead even if in China and its cultural diaspora in South East Asia it remains a minority. To any who have sympathies with Hegelianism, this is a call to pay attention to something of utmost importance. Nearly two billion human beings live with the objective and subjective legacy of this thought, and if in it we spy the Spirit of freedom, here is a most important ally to lock arms with and intertwine into the project of human emancipation.

A Respeculated State of Ancient China: The Family

The following work is speculative both in a common sense as well as a higher philosophical sense. The subject matter is primarily drawn from two sources: Hegel’s lecture on China in the Lectures on the Philosophy of History, and Hugh D. R. Baker’s book, Chinese …

PhoH: China

The Spirit of China With China and the Mongols — the realm of theocratic despotism — History begins. Both have the patriarchal constitution for their principle — so modified in China, as to admit the development of an organized system of secular polity; while among …