I Ching Divination and the Absolutely Poetic Reconstruction of Intentionality

Abstract

If twentieth-century hermeneutics has taught us anything, it is that the understanding of a text or phenomenon is impoverished if it fails to take into account what is apparently anomalous, marginal, or suppressed. Among the most strikingly anomalous, marginal, and suppressed phenomena in the attempt of Western thought to come to terms with China is divination, as represented by the oldest extant, perhaps even the originary text of Chinese literature, the I Ching. In the positivistic, technological paradigm which still passes for common sense and which still threatens phenomenological thinking with subtle ideological contamination, especially in the a priori circumscription of the possible, divination is likely to come to presence as a quaint superstition; but to dismiss one of the paradigmatically original moments of Chinese civilization in such a thoughtless fashion is not only to exclude a very important event in the history of consciousness, but also to overlook an important fact of the nature of consciousness itself. Once allowed to enter into a productive juxtaposition with major concepts of twentieth-century Western philosophy, the phenomenon of divination casts new light on the difficult issue of the development of intentionality while, mutatis mutandis, a re-examination of intentionality illuminates an authentically philosophical approach to the phenomenon of divination.