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Variations On The Yin And The Yang
July 19, 2018
For China, being a gigantic market of 1.4 billion people, a potent geopolitical actor having influence across the globe and an ancient civilization is both a strength and a singularity. None of the other players of the international community combines these three dimensions of power.
The Chinese economic and socio-political dynamics are largely covered by the media, but the more arduous study of "civilizational China" as an object of sinology and cultural history is much less common even if it better explains the behaviors of the Middle Country.
The Chinese writing system which took form on oracle bones more than three millennia ago and which is still in use today, a taste as much as a quest for political unity more reminiscent of the ancient Romans than classical Greece, but also a set of more abstract principles can be considered as constant features of the Chinese civilization.
With the passage of time these constituting elements have certainly evolved but they withstood the internal revolutions and the external shocks of the incomparably long Chinese history.
Among China's philosophical concepts, the Yin (阴) and the Yang (阳) have always had a special status and significance. They stand as a key to decipher the classic Book of Changes (易经) and its combination of broken and solid lines forming the 64 hexagrams, they are the foundations of the rich and much alive Chinese traditional medicine but contemporary Chinese thinking, art, fashion, cooking or aesthetics can not be understood without a reference to these principles inherent to the Chinese mind.
Like for the notion of "Dao" (道), the Way, or "Da Tong" (大同), the "Great Unity", a mere transliteration of the Yin and the Yang into other linguistic contexts is preferable to what can only be defective translations.
Traditionally, one paraphrases the Yin as the feminine, the negative or the shadowy side, while the Yang is depicted as the masculine, the positive or the luminous versant, but the Yin and the Yang should be taken as such, two opposite but interconnected forces, at the origin of everything being both distinct and inseparable, an infinite productive tension.
Represented as "
", the Yin-Yang diagram (阴阳图), also known as the taijitu (太极图), the "supreme ultimate" that Zhou Dunyi (1017–1073) introduced in his Taiji Tushuo, is nowadays universally recognized.
Inspiring and explanatory, the diagram "
" is a rich and profound symbol which gives access to the Chinese mind, its cognitive operations and its perception of the world.
The visualization of the Yin-Yang diagram reveals a positive approach of contradiction. The Yin is not the exclusive opposite of the Yang, they nourish each other, they are both separate and one, the Yin is in the Yang as much as the Yang is in the Yin, they are simultaneously within and outside each other.
Non-exclusive opposites are natural and familiar to the Chinese mind, while the Western mind would tend to ask, like Hamlet, "To be, or not to be", China would answer "To be, and not to be".
In the most common use of the Chinese language, linguistic opposite compounds are numerous, the contraries do not annihilate each other, their juxtaposition is a transformation into a third meaningful idea.
A beginner in the learning of Mandarin rapidly encounters examples of this lexical characteristic: duo-shao (many/few – how much), hu-xi (exhale/inhale – breath) or chang-duan (long/short – length).
This generative contradiction is also at the source of a more sophisticated literary creation. In Cao Xueqin's 18th century masterpiece Dream of the Red Chamber, the often commented "when one takes fiction for reality, reality is fiction, when one takes nothing for being, being turns into nothing" (假作真时真亦假，无为有处有还无) is a reflection on the nature of a novel and it beautifully plays with the interactions among opposites.
In the field of philosophy, both Sun Zi (544–496 BC) and Zhuangzi (369–286 BC) make such a use of paradoxes and contradictions that the most intriguing part of modern quantum physics does not surprise those familiar with the Taoist tradition.
As the Yin and Yang philosophy fully recognizes the essentially contradictory realities, it is also a representation of a cyclical approach of time. It has to be noticed that the Yin-Yang diagram is made of circles and that not a single straight line enters in its composition.
When the European continent of the Enlightenment in the 18th century began to believe in the notion of progress, it also gradually adopted a linear comprehension of time. Western modernity tends to assume that the future which has yet to come will be better than the present and it looks at the past as something which has to be overcome.
As an ancient civilization, China is not exclusively concerned with a future necessarily carrying with it progress, for it remembers itself as an alternation between rises and declines. Time passes but it does not have to be an advancement into another qualitatively discontinuous step, as the two monumental studies of the Chinese ancient history – Sima Qian's (135–86 BC) Records of the Grand Historian and Sima Guang's (1019–1086) Comprehensive Mirror in Aid of Governance – show, it is a repetition of the same patterns.
Through her long history, China experienced moments of glories (the Tang or the Song dynasties) but also of painful moments of decays, the end of the Ming dynasty ending with the suicide of the young Emperor Chongzhen (1611–1644) or the long agony of the Qing Empire that Cao Xueqin (1715–1763) anticipated with the foresight of a real genius.
The incipit of Luo Guanzhong's Romance of The Three Kingdoms, another true masterpiece of the Chinese literature written in the 14th century, is an obvious reference to the cyclical rhythm of the Chinese history: "The world under heaven ("tianxia", 天下), after a long period of division, tends to unite; after a long period of union, tends to divide".
The rendition of an essentially contradictory reality, the illustration that, in a cyclical conception of time, the past can also be the future, the Yin-Yang diagram can also symbolize the organic junction between the East and the West.
In this perspective, the East and the West, like the Yin and the Yang, should not be interpreted as two definitive standing blocks absolutely external to each other, but as two active poles that complement and nourish each other.
For the ancient Greeks who gave Europe its intellectual foundations but also for classical China, civilization has been shaped by opposition with the barbarians. Barbarians were a degraded otherness in a divided mankind.
In the "Orientalism" that Edward Said (1935–2003) deconstructed or in the "Occidentalism" which mirrors it, the imagined other is always in a distant belittlement, but an East-West transformative dualism is the cultivation and the appreciation of meaningful interactions.
In today's world of unprecedented interdependence, the contrast between the East and the West allows the contours of their respective identities to appear with clarity, but at a higher level of awareness, differences are not what separates but what makes a concrete universalism possible.
Cultural identities, contrary to the globalists' fantasies, do exist and they should be allowed to flourish but, in their most accomplished forms, they are the realization that they thrive both from the reinterpretation of the traditions which made them what they are and from the equally valuable existence of the other.
In other words, sameness and otherness can be understood as another variation on the Yin-Yang principle, and they do not exist absolutely by themselves but through their interrelations.
When 21st century renascent China proposes to the world the vision of "a community of destiny for mankind", it is fully itself in the reinterpretation of the ancient concept of "Da Tong" and, at the same time, it rightly assumes that the East and the West, like the Yin and the Yang, can infinitely cross-fertilize.
"The Silk Road effect" is not the exchange of goods across an objective physical geography, it is the constant transformation of the East and the West when they are wise enough to appreciate their vital and inherent interconnection.