Reading the Confucian Cosmology of the Book of Changes as an Aestheticism

Abstract

Abstract This early Chinese cosmology made explicit in the Book of Changes that serves as the evolving interpretive context for the Confucian tradition is fundamentally an aestheticism in which each person is a specific focus within which the unbounded field of experience is implicated. What in Whiteheadian terms makes this Confucian cosmology an aesthetic order rather than reductionistic rational order, is that it is holistic, unbounded, inclusive, and resolutely anarchic. This is but to say that, in the patterned order of the cosmos in which no single privileged order predominates, all things without exception not only have their own unique role in aspiring to make the most of themselves, but by participating fully in this process of identity formation itself they become collaborators in the production of the contrapuntal harmony of the social, natural, and cosmic order.