or condition because that argument leads to an infinite regress. In an argument
similar to Parmenides’, Kuo states that non-being can never become being, nor
can being become non-being. This leads him to a general denial of ultimate
causes, as nothing can (in an absolute sense) produce anything else. Kuo seems
to have considered this from several angles. The whole universe is the condition
for everything within it; and every item, no matter how insignificant in itself,
is necessary for everything else to exist. Moreover, everything is imperceptibly
changing. “Therefore the ‘I’ of the past is no longer the ‘I’ of today” (quoted
in Fung, 1952–53: 213). At the same time, Kuo asserts that nothing can
autonomously determine anything else: “Things are what they are spontane-
ously and not caused by something else” (Chan, 1963: 335). Kuo Hsiang
combines metaphysical aspects that recall both Parmenides and Heraclitus in
the same system. But instead of reconciling the inalterability of being with the
omnipresence of change after the fashion of the Greek solutions, Kuo finds a
different resolution. It is neither the atomists’ substance with its combinations,
a Platonic distinction among realms of ideal being and empirical becoming,
nor an Aristotelean mixture of matter and form. Kuo Hsiang instead denies
the absoluteness of being, letting reality reside in the phenomenal flow of the
whole universe, incessant but necessary in its patterns. Paradoxes like those of
Chuang Tzu and the Taoists arise from the partial viewpoint of a single actor
in the universe; logical consistency lies only in grasping the whole.Class Culture and the Freezing of Creativity
in Indigenous Chinese Philosophy
In the generations connecting Wang Pi and Kuo Hsiang, Chinese philosophy
opened up a realm of abstract philosophy encompassing epistemology and
metaphysics at levels comparable to the most intense periods of the Greeks.
The external conditions which supported this intellectual structure were
ephemeral. The creativity of the Pure Conversation and Dark Learning came
from a conflict between class cultures. Neither the leisure gentry culture nor
the bureaucratic administrative culture by itself fostered creativity in the realm
of abstract philosophy. Intellectual creativity moved forward only when these
two structural bases were in a conflictual balance, with both components linked
together in the same network, such as existed around Loyang from about 240
to 300. Here we find the typical creative structure of multiple bases intersecting
at a geographical center. Typical, too, is the pattern of creativity by opposition.
The Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove and their followers developed an
iconoclastic aestheticism against the Confucian proprieties of those holding
office. The Dark Learning was developed among officeholders counterattacking
the Taoist ideology that legitimated withdrawal. Kuo Hsiang, himself a high174 •^ Intellectual Communities: Asian Paths