CHAPTER 15
£Sequence and Branch in the
Social Production of Ideas
The long-term tendency of an active intellectual community is to raise the level
of abstraction and reflexivity.
The Continuum of Abstraction and Reflexivity
In China, the ancient Book of Poetry contains the yin and yang graphs, but
only in the concrete sense of shadow and light. It was the philosophers around
265 b.c.e. who took such terms in the sense of generalized phenomena beyond
everyday concrete objects. From these building blocks the next three genera-
tions of Chinese intellectuals constructed a cosmological system, with its cycles
and correspondences between the natural and the political world. Confucians
had begun by formulating abstract concepts for the moral realm, beginning
with li, proper ritual behavior, and abstracting into a generalized notion of
social and moral propriety. Further levels of abstraction emerged when phi-
losophers turned their explicit attention to the nature of such concepts per se.
The “Pure Conversation school,” ca. 235–300 c.e., was regarded as engaged
in “dark learning” because its adherents subjected Taoist and Confucian texts
to analysis, not for the familiar purposes of asserting the primacy of favorite
cosmological and moral positions, but for rising to a metaphysical level in
discussing being, non-being, and substance.
After the lapse of such discussions for many centuries, the Neo-Confucians
revived the level of abstraction. Ch’eng Hao gave new meaning to li as
“principle,” explicitly recognizing levels of abstraction. Chu Hsi identified li
with the cosmological origin T’ai Chi (Supreme Ultimate), while distinguishing
it from the master substance ch’i (ether/energy), and recognizing the distinction
between logical and factual priority. Still later, in Tokugawa Japan at the time
of Ito Jinsai and Ogyu Sorai, Neo-Confucian metaphysics was subjected to yet
further dissection. The fusion among moral principle and the cosmological and
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