|
|
Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Western philosophy
If you are from the West, it is likely that you normally assume
that you are a subject who relates to objects and other subjects
through actions that spring purely from your own intentions and
will. Chinese philosophers, however, show how mistaken this
conception of action is. Philosophy of action in Classical China is
radically different from its counterpart in the Western
philosophical narrative. While the latter usually assumes we are
discrete individual subjects with the ability to act or to effect
change, Classical Chinese philosophers theorize that human life is
embedded in endless networks of relationships with other entities,
phenomena, and socio-material contexts. These relations are primary
to the constitution of the person, and hence acting within an early
Chinese context is interacting and co-acting along with others,
human or nonhuman. This book is the first monograph dedicated to
the exploration and rigorous reconstruction of an extraordinary
strategy for efficacious relational action devised by Classical
Chinese philosophers, one which attempts to account for the
interdependent and embedded character of human agency-what Mercedes
Valmisa calls "adapting" or "adaptive agency" (yin) As opposed to
more unilateral approaches to action conceptualized in the
Classical Chinese corpus, such as forceful and prescriptive agency,
adapting requires heightened self- and other-awareness, equanimity,
flexibility, creativity, and response. These capacities allow the
agent to "co-raise" courses of action ad hoc: unique and temporary
solutions to specific, non-permanent, and non-generalizable life
problems. Adapting is one of the world's oldest philosophies of
action, and yet it is shockingly new for contemporary audiences,
who will find in it an unlikely source of inspiration to cope with
our current global problems. This book explores the core conception
of adapting both on autochthonous terms and by cross-cultural
comparison, drawing on the European and Analytic philosophical
traditions as well as on scholarship from other disciplines.
Valmisa exemplifies how to build meaningful philosophical theories
without treating individual books or putative authors as locations
of stable intellectual positions, opening brand-new topics in
Chinese and comparative philosophy.
|
|