Structure and Creativeness: A Reinterpretation of the Neo-Confucian Binary Category Li 理 and Qi 氣

Abstract

Western structuralism has produced important elements which have resulted in essential shifts in the modes of thinking in the humanities and in the cultural and social sciences. Despite these shifts, Western discourses have still not produced any general, integral, and coherent structural model of ontology and/or epistemology. This chapter intends to show that such a model can be found in Chinese neo-Confucian philosophy (960–1644). It follows the presumption that the crucial theoretical underpinnings of such models were developed much earlier in the history of Chinese thought, given that the bases of a structural approach to being had already been established in ancient Chinese philosophy. This paradigmatic foundation was further developed and elaborated by various Chinese philosophers in later centuries as a crucial feature of the classical Chinese logic of binary analogies. The article points out that the central binary concept of the neo-Confucian tradition (i.e., the concept of structure and creativenessity) (li and qi) has generally been interpreted as a dualism of idea and matter by Euro-American sinologists. However, such interpretations have overlooked an important feature of traditional, structurally determined Chinese onto-epistemology.