Living Chinese Philosophy

In Living Chinese Philosophy, Roger T. Ames uses comparative cultural hermeneutics as a method for contrasting classical Greek ontology (&quote;the science of being in itself&quote;) with classical Chinese &quote;zoetology&quote; (&quote;the art of living&quote;), which is made explicit in the Yijing ?? or Book of Changes. Parmenides, Plato, and Aristotle give us a substance ontology grounded in &quote;being qua being&quote; or &quote;being per se&quote; (to on he on) that guarantees a permanent and unchanging subject as the substratum for the human experience. This substratum or essence includes its purpose for being (telos) and defines the &quote;what-it-means-to-be-a-thing-of-this-kind&quote; (eidos) of any particular thing, thus setting a closed, exclusive boundary and the strict identity necessary for a particular thing to be &quote;this&quote; and not &quote;that.&quote; In the Book of Changes, we find a vocabulary that makes explicit cosmological assumptions that are a stark alternative to this substance ontology. It also provides the interpretive context for the canonical texts by locating them within a holistic, organic, and ecological worldview. To provide a meaningful contrast with this fundamental assumption of on or &quote;being,&quote; we might borrow the Greek notion of zoe or &quote;life&quote; and create the neologism &quote;zoe-tology&quote; as &quote;the art of living&quote; (shengshenglun ???). This cosmology begins from &quote;living&quote; (sheng ?) itself as the motive force behind change and gives us a world of boundless &quote;becomings&quote;: not &quote;things&quote; that are but &quote;events&quote; that are happening, a contrast between an ontological conception of human &quote;beings&quote; and a process conception of what the author calls human &quote;becomings.&quote;