Overview
Yang Guorong is a contemporary philosopher with little need for introduction—and not only because he has been introduced here before.Footnote1 Professor Yang’s decades of prolific scholarship cover nearly all major fields of Chinese philosophy, from the pre-Qin Masters to neo-Confucian metaphysics on to modern academic philosophers. That scholarship is accompanied by a series of major works laying out his own original philosophy, comprised principally of his “concrete metaphysics.”Footnote2 Most recently he has expanded on that theorizing by formulating the philosophy of “affairs” introduced in the essays collected here. This introduction outlines and contextualizes their main arguments.
So what is a philosophy of affairs?
“Affairs” translates the Chinese shi, a most commonplace term. You shenme shi? (What’s up?) You shi ma? (Everything all right?) Zhe shenme shi? (What’s this?) Yet despite its everyday nature, the term itself is strikingly difficult to render into English—and this is in fact a defining feature of the philosophy. Yang argues that “affairs,” shi, offers a view of the world that is distinctively Chinese. It belongs to “Chinese philosophy,” shaping and shaped by a unique metaphysical outlook and, most importantly, giving us a unique philosophical framework for understanding our understanding. While we might identify this with the Chinese nation or tradition or ethnicity or culture, in the most deeply important sense Yang describes the ideas and arguments he puts forward here as Chinese in the sense of being deeply rooted in Chinese language and the particular philosophical systems that grew within and through it. We can thus say it is distinctively Chinese philosophy in both the sense of being a philosophy of China and its culture, zhongguo zhexue, and being a philosophy that operates in ways distinctive to and shaped by Chinese language, hanyu zhexue.Footnote3 In fact, it integrates the two in a way so inseparable that it calls into question the contemporary push to distinguish the two. The philosophy of affairs, that is, is shaped by the unique conceptual schemes of its original language; it was also a force that shaped the language itself.
Perhaps the most troublesome thing about translating the term shi here is that its closest English equivalent is the informal, slang use of the word “thing”: wo you shi (I have a thing—in the sense of some engagement); zhe zhong shi (this kind of thing). But a main point of the essays that follow, in laying out the basic framework of the philosophy of affairs, is precisely the distinction between affairs and things, shi and wu. The core argument of the philosophy of affairs is to point out that it is necessarily through affairs that we engage with things in meaningful ways. Affairs must be conceptually distinguished from things in order to recognize their role in determining how we understand and value things. A crucial failure of much philosophy—ancient and modern, East and West—is overlooking the importance of affairs here. This has led philosophers to overemphasize either human subjectivity or the objective qualities of things, attributing to them functions rightly ascribed to affairs.
Affairs are the actual, concrete activities of humans engaging and interacting with one another and with things. The arguments that follow point out that meaningfulness—encompassing both facts and values—arises through these affairs of human practice. It also has valence only within affairs. Yang embeds meaning entirely in the world of interactive human life, what he calls the “actual world”: The affairs of human activity make up the “actual world” of what is real and meaningful for us. As explicated in the first essay in this issue, “‘Affairs’ and the Actual World,” this world is real in a particular manner: It is what is actualized for human subjects. “Actuality” describes the peculiar form of being that is made possible by humans for humans in their engagement with one another and through their functioning with and use of objects. This is the distinctive outlook Professor Yang draws from and attributes to “Chinese philosophy.”
What is so important about the philosophy of affairs? “‘Affairs’ and the Actual World” presents it as a corrective to other prevalent but problematic philosophical outlooks. It lays out in detail how viewing the world in terms of affairs illuminates the shortcomings specific to three common but misguided ways of viewing the world: the objective scientific or materialist outlook that seeks to understand things as objects independent of humans; the phenomenological view concerned primarily, even exclusively, with the world as understood by human minds; and the analytic view seeking to understand truths about the world through language and its structure. Each of these approaches has been highly influential, and each captures important parts of the actual world and how it exists for us. Each is, however, partial, and usually, especially among philosophers, one is adopted at the expense of the others. Scientism and materialism overemphasize objectivity, while the phenomenological and analytic frameworks overemphasize subjectivity. As Yang sees it, the question is not which outlook should prevail in the ongoing contest among them; we need not debate whether it is better to be Analytic or Continental philosophers or whether truth is independent of or constructed by human experience. The better question is how to incorporate the disparate qualities of the world captured by each into a more holistic view. The philosophy of affairs, we are told, does just that.
Yang’s philosophy of affairs, then, most of all directs us to look to the actual world of human life in search of understanding and meaning. Meaning is not constituted merely by human minds, nor by language, nor through perception of objective qualities, but rather by the active, constructive application of human minds and language to the objects and interactions co-constituting the world.
The outlook from affairs might thus be described as relentlessly humanist. Yang’s insistence that meaning originates through people enacting affairs directs us to think of the actual world as existing through and for human subjects. We must look to our interactions with one another and with the objective world to understand and explain it. These are, moreover, always concrete: Humans are living, breathing, feeling, thinking, acting, situated, historical, relational agents. We should not seek truth purely in the objectivity of things independent of us. (In this sense, the common identification of truth with what is natural, in opposition to the presumptive falsity of artifice, deeply misguides us.) Nor should we look to some transcendent existence beyond human life. (In this sense, the common identification of truth with an authority beyond us, in opposition to human fallibility, deeply misguides us.) What is meaningful for humans occurs—and is made—in and through our concrete activities, experiences, thoughts, and feelings of interacting with objects and with one another.
Facts, values, and virtues
This concrete brand of humanism sees the meaningfulness that arises from affairs to encompass both values and facts. The outlook from affairs thereby unifies the source of fact and value, the grounds of is and ought. Both arise through human life and the activities that constitute affairs. This has several philosophical virtues. Perhaps the most important is that it consolidates the strengths of diverse ethical outlooks that other contemporary philosophers have placed in seemingly interminable conflict and competition: conventionalism, constructivism, relativism, realism. For Yang, the conventional and constructed nature of human moral norms, and their cultural and historical shifts, make them no less real and authoritative. Moral values and empirical facts alike both arise through historically situated, concrete interactions among humans and with objects.
How is that? One way Yang has put this is, “The world of meaning in conceptual form is not only being that is understood and cognized but also being that is invested with values through the act of evaluation.”Footnote4 Definitional concepts, that is, imply specific forms of value. That value, moreover, arises through concrete human experience and practice. For example, we judge a knife good only through conceiving of it as serving a particular function (slicing vegetables) and we measure its value in line with how well it performs that function or not (whether it dices tomatoes or just smooshes them). The relevant function falls within the parameters of how we factually define the object. It is irrelevant to the goodness of a knife whether it floats, although that is quite relevant to the goodness of a boat. But note also that this is a matter of how humans understand and cognize the object, which is in turn a matter of the praxis of their concrete engagement with it. Conjoining these observations, we see that calling something good or bad is done in reference to situated human practices, which are themselves informed by people’s historically particular ideas, interests, and interactions. The good has its ontological basis in concrete human existence—the relational practices of living, feeling subjects and their use of objects.
Ethics and morality, Yang argues, are this general sense of goodness as applied to humans themselves. “When the object of evaluation shifts from thing to human, the general sense of ‘good’ begins to engage moral goodness.”Footnote5 Moral judgments, then, are not a matter of transcendent principles or rational deduction; they are composed of the ideas and practices of situated subjects in their interactions with one another—that is, of their enacting affairs. Like all kinds of good and bad, moral and ethical values arise through concrete human existence and are relative to human functions, needs, ideas, desires, and preferences.
Let us further contextualize Yang’s position a bit, to draw out its unique facets. Similar arguments seeing the moral good as an extension of the general good have been given by Philippa Foot and Judith Thomson.Footnote6 Both of those philosophers build on Peter Geach’s distinction between predicative and attributive uses of the term “good.” On the basis of that grammatical distinction, Foot and Thomson deny the coherence of saying something is simply “good” as such—good simpliciter. Things and acts are good only in particular attributive ways: good as this sort of thing, or good for that. As Geach put it, “There is no such thing as being just good or bad, there is only being a good or bad so-and-so.”Footnote7 To say something is simply “good” is illegitimate—to speak nonsense or mistakenly. Yet that is precisely how people most often think of moral goodness. This argument, then, sees the majority of ethical thought and discussion, which aims at and describes things as predicatively good, as fallacious. It rejects the key—and almost universally accepted—premise of what Thomson calls “Moore’s story”: “that there is such a property as goodness—all good things have it and all things that are not good lack it.”Footnote8 It is a well-trodden philosophical question what such a property would be like. But Thomson goes further than skepticism of it, and further even than denial that there is in fact the property we call goodness. Thomson says it is wrong to see us as even referring to such a property in the first place. We call things good only in the manner Professor Yang describes: good as or at being some sort of thing in particular.
While sharing this basic premise with Yang, Thomson exemplifies precisely the manner of philosophizing that the philosophy of affairs indicts and seeks to correct. Yang in the following charges such arguments with being overly bound to language as the medium for investigating reality. (This applies rather fully to both Geach and Thomson, and less to Foot.) Consider how the discussion runs when it follows this linguistic line: Philosophers object to Thomson by claiming that we do in fact use the term good to mean just plain old good.Footnote9 Richard Arneson, for example, argues that we do see certain events as “good, period” and charges Thomson with ignoring the connection of such predicative use to moral value. Thomson in response admits we do after all use the term in the predicative sense, but posits that this is merely expressive, equivalent to a “hooray,” and not meaningfully descriptive of a property of goodness. The discussion centers on how we use language.
Contrast this with the route Yang takes. The philosophy of affairs affirms that our use of the term “good” references an actual quality within some state of affairs and these constitute predicative properties of goodness, including moral goodness. This is possible because goodness for Yang, as for other moral realists (i.e., Richard Boyd, David O. Brink, T. M. Scanlon),Footnote10 is a property of concrete relations of particular subjects to particular actions within particular circumstances. Looking to understand goodness as a form of meaning that arises within the human activities of affairs rather than as a matter of language yields very different conclusions from shared premises. This is an example of the divergence between viewing the world through affairs and viewing it through language.
The view through affairs is much closer to Philippa Foot’s development of Geach’s argument, which supports her theory of natural goodness by explaining moral goodness as an evaluation of concrete human activity. In fact, Geach’s original identification of good as attributive, not predicative, turns on the claim that it is relative, nonabsolute in a manner comparable to being large or small. Foot explains:
As “large” must change to “small” when we find that what we thought was a mouse was a rat, so “bad” may change to “good” when we consider a certain book of philosophy first as a book of philosophy and then as soporific. Seen in light of Geach’s distinction, thoughts about good actions, which are fundamental to moral philosophy, appear with thoughts about good sight, good food, good soil, or good houses.Footnote11
Foot develops this to argue that “moral judgement of human actions and dispositions is one example of a genre of evaluation itself characterized by the fact that its objects are living things.”Footnote12 She thereby defines morality as grounded more narrowly in “facts about human life” specifically.Footnote13 What facts? Natural normativity derives from the distinctive functioning of a particular kind of living thing, and along the same lines, morality is a form of natural normativity specific to humans, one that evaluates the distinctive features of human life. Following Aristotle, the most important feature of human life for Foot is the rational will, so that rationality is of special pertinence to what is naturally good for humans.Footnote14
Yang argues along similar lines, but through a distinctive framework that looks to concrete human experience and practice rather than the Aristotelian teleology of human capacities and capabilities. Like Foot, he distinguishes human activity from “things,” living and not. However, humans are not simply a subset of the world—a certain category of beings with unique attributes. We instead take up the role traditional Chinese thought grants us as cocreators of the cosmos. In cooperation with heaven and earth, we help generate and fashion the world, crafting and cultivating the things in it. We may be tempted to say that this also makes Yang’s theory of goodness less naturalistic than Foot’s, but that would understand naturalness in a manner opposed to human creation. Such a distinction is precluded by the framework Yang draws on and develops. The outlook from affairs integrates the natural into the world of human activity and meaning-making—our “actuality.”
Knowing and making the world
Understanding moral goodness in this way gives it, along with rightness and wrongness, actual truth values on par with facts. Morality is understood as a subset of value generally, and value is one of the two principal subsets of meaning, with the other being fact.
Facts, Professor Yang tells us, are a matter of understanding the world, and values are a matter of changing it. These happen to also be the topics of Noam Chomsky’s two Russell Lectures (1971): “On Interpreting the World” and “On Changing the World.”Footnote15 Chomsky tells us, “A central problem of interpreting the world is determining how, in fact, human beings proceed to do so. It is the study of interaction between a particular, biologically-given, complex system—the human mind—and the physical and social world.”Footnote16 Chomsky rejects empiricism in arguing that knowledge is structured by language and language is structured by universal, biologically given principles. Thus, “A system of knowledge and belief results from the interplay of innate mechanisms, genetically determined maturational processes, and interaction with the social and physical environment.”Footnote17 Human understanding is produced through applying—and therein cultivating—our biological (physical and psychological) inheritance in the world through engaging with other people and things. Such a view ties knowledge of objective properties of the world to embodied practice: How we understand the world guides the concrete ways in which we act in it, while the ways we act in the world also shape our understanding of it.
Yang Guorong accepts this basic view of things but believes too little attention is paid—not by Chomsky specifically, but among philosophers generally—to the central role of the “interplay” and “interaction” here. The mind, the physical environment, and the social environment are essential components joined only in the interaction among them, and it is this interplay that constitutes the “actual world”—the world of “affairs.” This directs our attention to the creativity of social life and human action and recognizes them as foundational sources of understanding and forces of change. Factual knowledge and practical wisdom alike are produced through concrete practices and experiences of engagement with things and one another.
In this, the philosophy of affairs resonates closely with contemporary enactivist cognitive theories, which posit that cognition is fundamentally concrete, relational, and sensible—the situated thought of living, feeling beings. “Broadly stated, to claim that cognition is enactive is to claim that it essentially depends on the activity of the cognizer,”Footnote18 and this, moreover, entails that “A cognitive being’s world is not a pre-specified, external realm … but a relational domain enacted or brought forth by that being’s autonomous agency and mode of coupling with the environment.”Footnote19 Yang also stresses that this interactive engagement is both cognitive and affective—rational and sensible—as well as conative: “Within the processes of the unfolding of affairs, the body and mind, reason and emotion, and knowing and acting conjoin with one another” in “concrete existence” (Yang’s article below, “Humanity Existing Through Affairs,” §I). In this, the philosophy of affairs resonates closely with the more robust “4E” paradigm of cognition as enacted, embodied, embedded, and extended. That outlook, like Yang’s, understands the world as not simply “out there,” so to speak, but rather as a product of how we actively relate to other beings in ways shaped by the conditions of our own being.
These enactivist components of the philosophy of affairs integrate closely with the manner in which it establishes the reality of the “actual” enacted world of meaning. The embodied, relational, sensible, concrete nature of subjective being and cognition ties it to objective components of the world. (This is argued in contradistinction to the less tethered phenomenological emphasis on the subjective mind, which remains at a remove from objective reality.) In the philosophy of affairs, moreover, the enacted nature of all meaning bridges fact and value by placing the reality of our knowledge of things out there and of truths of practical, normative knowledge, or morality, on common ground.
Yang tells us we not only imbue value on things by drawing them into our “affairs” and the world that is actual for us. We also actualize ourselves through participation and creation in this actual world.
The process of accomplishing oneself first entails developing oneself out of the primordial form of being by imparting social characteristics to oneself so that one may become a social being.Footnote20
In possessing this capacity for world-creation and self-creation we are distinct from other animals and all other beings.
Animals never develop out of the primordial form of being (Nature in-itself) and thus cannot but be what they were. Human being, on the other hand, is able to overcome what she was or develop out of the primordial form of being (Nature in-itself) and become what she wasn’t (a social being).Footnote21
And not only do we have this distinctive capacity; we have many forms of it.
The multiplicity of relations of human being to the world fundamentally determines that there must be a multiplicity of expressive forms of meaning. In other words, the multiplicity of forms of meaning originates from the multiple dimensions of the process of accomplishing oneself and accomplishing things.Footnote22
When Yang tells us here that we relate to the world in a variety of ways, he means also that we have a variety of capacities for meaning-making, for creating meaning through engaging with things in the world. Through these various capacities we make our world; at the same time, and being also parts of our world, these various capacities make us. They are “the manifestation of the essential powers of human being in the process of knowing and reforming the self and the world.”Footnote23
Fundamentally embodied, these capacities are partly biological (as Chomsky famously emphasizes), at least as formal capacities like the ability for language. Yang points out that they are also historically developed, as is clear with the actual, substantive uses of words, meanings, and linguistic structures that human cultures continuously innovate and adapt. The capacities by which we engage with the world center on knowing, and any subject’s knowing is founded on “the knowledge that has matured and piled up in the historical process of humanizing being”—the “cognitive achievements” and “cognitive accomplishments” of humans (together) over time, which are embodied, expressed, and actualized in human practice.Footnote24 Since they arise in and through actual practice, lived and felt human activity, these human capacities even “unify sensibility and reason as well as the non-rational and rational.”Footnote25 They are cognitive and conceptual, but inherently tied to sensible and practical human experience.
Yang gives a specific description of the practical reason by which we enact affairs and shape the world. It has three components, or “principles”: those of rightness, goodness, and effectiveness. The principle of rightness is formal. It tells us to act in line with our values and norms. The principle of goodness is substantive. It orients our values and norms toward the satisfaction of human needs. The principle of effectiveness is a matter of the means and methods of pursuing the right and good. It instructs us to do so in light of objective facts, most importantly the inherent properties and laws of the things (see below, “Humanity Existing Through Affairs,” §III). This, Yang tells us, is the composition of the normative knowledge by which we shape the world.
For any given situation, then, we can see how not only factual but also normative ideas will have truth values relative to that situation. Since the world of meaning is a world of defined objects and values, of rules and limits, of distinctions and categories, knowledge is composed of norms as well as facts. Our particular ways of making meaning, in other words, structure how we understand, engage with, and thereby shape the world.
Concrete humanism
This has broader, substantive practical implications. By telling us to look to the dynamic, complex practices of human life and the creation of meaning therein, rather than to the logic of language or the experiential nature of the mind or the objective properties of things, the philosophy of “affairs” instructs us to critically evaluate, endorse, and guide our action by conceptions of right and wrong, good and bad, ascertained through concrete reference to this world. We must focus on actual humans and their diverse empirical, substantive, particular conditions—what we might call actual states of affairs and the human conditions therein. In this way, Yang’s is a philosophy of not just humanism but of empirical humanism—a concrete humanism.
Concrete humanism sees the abstract values and principles that shape and direct human life as also grounded in human life. They arise from concrete—situated, historical, individual and communal, felt and lived—practice and experience. Particular ideals, principles, and values are products of human meaning-making, which is itself a process embedded in concrete life. The realm of philosophy in this picture becomes one of living beings creatively cogitating in their engagement with and navigation of the world, pursuing their ends but also deciding—figuring out, within the context of their particular lives—what those ends are. Looking at things this way tells us we should determine our ends by looking to the concrete interactions of human affairs and the particular lives of people therein. This can lead to very different moral conclusions than reasoning from transcendent powers, authorities, or first principles.
We can contrast this concrete humanism to, for example, Tu Weiming’s “spiritual humanism.” Drawing more exclusively on Confucianism, Tu offers an “anthropocosmic” ideal that takes a decidedly nonconcrete conception of humanity as its guide. He tells us that “to argue … that Confucius was exclusively concerned with the living person here and now … is a gross mistake.”Footnote26 Rather, Confucius strove “to provide a transcendental anchorage for human civilization” by teaching that human culture is “sanctioned and sponsored by the mandate of heaven,” a view “predicated on a deep-rooted faith in the continuation of human culture not only as an historical fact but also as the unfolding of a transcendent reality.”Footnote27 Sometimes Yang’s humanism sounds akin to Tu’s, as where he writes that “the meaning of ultimate being (the way of Nature as a whole) is actualized in the process of one’s being”; however, Yang makes sure to qualify this statement by rejecting any version of this “that suspends one’s own being in the reverence of some transcendent being.”Footnote28 He insists that we turn always to the concrete. We must keep in mind that “meaning takes shape through one’s cognizing and practicing, whose historical content is accomplishing oneself and accomplishing things, which constitutes the real source of meaning.”Footnote29 It is this historical self-creation and involvement with the actual world that “makes the ultimate concern at the level of the way of Nature as a whole concretize within the historical process of one’s own being.”Footnote30 The divergence between Tu’s spiritual humanism and Yang’s concrete humanism appears diametric: One understands actual human life as transcendentally sanctioned; the other sees transcendental sanction as a form of meaning created within concrete actual human life.
Describing his “concrete metaphysics,” Yang advocated “grasping the being of the world within the being of humans.”Footnote31 But while emphasizing the essential role of humans in meaning-making and thereby creating the “actual world,” Yang is careful to also acknowledge the independent existence of things. Things exist in an original state of being outside of human engagement with them, and the properties of that independent existence delimit—and are foundational to—the meaning that humans then bestow on things in engaging with them. Many philosophical outlooks, however, overemphasize human meaning-making to the point of obscuring this. They insufficiently recognize the independent existence of things-in-themselves. Yang charges pragmatism, for example, with this.Footnote32 Yang’s differentiation here of the existence of things in their original state from their incorporation into “actual world” of human meaning is another part of the “concrete” component of concrete humanism. The objects themselves exist prior to and independent of human meaning, while their meaning is created through and exists for actual subjects living in concert with other subjects and objects.
This corrects not only non-Eastern thinking such as pragmatist philosophy but also errant views within Chinese tradition itself. Principal targets of criticism are the various Confucians who conflate “things” and “affairs.” This was a major part of much mainstream Chinese philosophy. As Hu Shi writes,
Both the Sung and the Ming philosophers agreed on one point. Both Chu Hsi and Wang Yang-ming agreed that the word wuh (things) meant “affairs” (sze [shi]). This humanistic interpretation of one word has determined the whole nature and scope of modern Chinese philosophy. It has limited philosophy to the realm of “affairs” and relations.Footnote33
As a result, Hu tells us, Chinese thinkers “confined themselves to the problems of moral and political philosophy,” and “it is surely no exaggeration to say that the nature of the method of philosophy has been one of the most important causes” of “the absence of scientific learning in China.”Footnote34 The conflation of things into affairs, under this and Yang’s accounts, failed to adequately account for the objective being of things outside of human affairs. Yang’s distinction of affairs from things and careful delineation of the relation between the two, given in the essays that follow, corrects this critical shortcoming of neo-Confucian philosophy.
The yin of Yang
In conclusion, let us point out that Professor Yang here is doing something a bit different from most philosophy: He builds broad philosophy that itself means to guide more specific philosophical inquiry. He offers a concrete humanist framework through which to approach further substantive questions. One way of thinking about this is in terms of there being two sides to philosophy, that of specific inquiry into its major issues of knowing, being, and value and that of the necessary broader framework by which we approach those issues. Getting this framework right allows us to more effectively and accurately direct the more specific inquiry and organize the fruits of that inquiry into a comprehensive understanding.
We can put this in the traditional Chinese terms of yin and yang. The phrase fu yin bao yang, carrying yin and embracing yang, captures the idea nicely, in that “yang” components, as specific objects of philosophical inquiry, fundamentally rely on “yin” factors—the essential background elements needed for any such inquiry. As Robin R. Wang explains, while embracing yang involves “confronting what is in front and seeing what is present,”
Fuyin (負陰) refers to things that are not confronted but still carried along. It is carrying something unseen or non-present. … The fuyin always predicates a set of situations, a unique way to get a hold of the world. … Taken together, fuyin and baoyang reflect awareness of two elements: the hidden underlying order and the explicit goal in front of us.Footnote35
While much philosophy looks to “the explicit goal in front of us,” Yang takes a broader view that takes account of the “underlying order” for that inquiry.
Wang identifies a “natural tendency” for us to focus on yang and points to much traditional Chinese thought—yinyang thought—that seeks to correct this by recognizing the inseparability of the two and drawing our attention to the crucial role of yin background factors. “If the world is unfolded as an explicit order, as yang, … it is always enfolded in an implicit order, as yin, the background.”Footnote36 She notes also the “power of growing and nourishment below the surface” that essentially supports the yang developments we tend to focus on.Footnote37 Yin factors may get less attention, but they are no less important. As the Huangdi Neijing tells us, “Yang gives straightness while yin is the master.”Footnote38 We might see the philosophy of affairs finally directing us toward yin factors when philosophers have predominantly attended to yang elements. This attention to the yin context is particularly valuable in providing “a concrete way of interacting with particulars by tracing out their broader networks,” helping us better draw connections among substantive philosophical issues and viewing them in relation to broader patterns and more fundamental sources of meaning-making.Footnote39 The wider view and context offered by attending to the yin context, moreover, helps us better understand the nature and implications of yang elements—certain substantive philosophical views, arguments, and debates—within those connections.
Most philosophy is yang; Yang’s philosophy works on yin, the background that nourishes the seeds of more exclusively yang philosophy. As gardeners of our lives, we must attend to the background factors—the soil, the moisture, the shade—in which the seeds grow. We cannot attempt merely to adjudicate good seeds from bad ones, good plants from bad ones, independent of the yin factors of their context. Yet that is exactly what most of contemporary discourse attempts to do—and what it asks us to do. Can we determine that lying is wrong through the proper application of a CI-procedure?Footnote40 Can we determine whether to turn the trolley or not through reflective interpretation of our intuitions?Footnote41 The philosophy of affairs turns a light on the context within which we ask these questions, and it provides a framework for understanding the nature of the questions themselves. It places them within the setting of humans, our concrete practices, and the historically formed social consciousness through which individuals bestow meaning on—and normatively appraise and regulate—those practices.
Notes
1 Liangjian Liu, “Yang Guorong and His Concrete Metaphysics,” Contemporary Chinese Thought 43 (4) (2012): 3–4; see also the biography of his scholarly career in Yang Guorong, Philosophical Horizons: Metaphysical Investigation in Chinese Philosophy (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2019), pp. x–xii.
2 English translations of Yang’s work on concrete metaphysics include Yang Guorong, “An Outline of Concrete Metaphysics,” Contemporary Chinese Thought 43 (1) (2011): 43–59; “Metaphysics,” Contemporary Chinese Thought 43 (4) (2012): 7–26; “Morality and Human Existence From the Perspective of Moral Metaphysics,” Contemporary Chinese Thought 43 (4) (2012): 27–50; “The Maturation of the Self and the Refinement of Things,” Contemporary Chinese Thought 43 (4) (2012): 51–85; and The Mutual Cultivation of Self and Things: A Contemporary Chinese Philosophy of the Meaning of Being (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2016).
3 For summary discussion of the distinction, see Yang Xiao, “‘Chinese’ Philosophy or ‘The-Chinese-Language’ Philosophy?” Journal of Confucian Philosophy and Culture 33 (2020): 140–155.
4 Yang Guorong, The Mutual Cultivation of Self and Things, p. 17.
5 Yang Guorong, Lunli yu cunzai (Ethics and Existence) (Beijing: Peking University Press, 2011), p. 73.
6 Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness (Oxford, 2001); Judith Jarvis Thomson, Normativity (Chicago: Open Court, 2008). Particularly interesting in connection with Yang’s theory of goodness is also Judith Jarvis Thomson’s earlier “On Some Ways in Which a Thing Can Be Good,” Social Philosophy and Policy 9 (2) (1992): 96–117.
7 P. T. Geach, “Good and Evil,” Analysis 17 (2) (1956): 33–42.
8 Judith Jarvis Thomson, “The Right and the Good,” Journal of Philosophy 94 (6) (1997): 273.
9 Richard J. Arneson, “Good, Period,” Analysis 70 (4) (2010): 731–744.
10 Richard N. Boyd, “How to be a Moral Realist,” in Essays on Moral Realism, ed. Geoffrey Sayre-McCord (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 181–228; David O. Brink, Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989); T. M. Scanlon, Being Realistic About Reasons (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014).
11 Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness, p. 3.
12 Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness, p. 4.
13 Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness, p. 24.
14 This line of argument is also developed by Rosalind Husthouse’s virtue ethics, and some contemporary philosophers see traditional Chinese virtue ethics as succeeding where Hursthouse (and Foot) fall short—in the descriptions of human nature that ground their theories of human goodness. See Yong Huang, “Two Dilemmas in Virtue Ethics and How Zhu Xi’s Neo-Confucianism Avoids Them,” Journal of Philosophical Research 36 (2011): 247–281; “Zhu Xi and the Fact/Value Debate: How to Derive Ought From Is,” Kai-chiu Ng and Yong Huang, eds., Dao Companion to ZHU Xi’s Philosophy (Cham: Springer, 2020), pp. 809–829.
15 Noam Chomsky, Problems of Knowledge and Freedom: Russell Lectures (Bertrand Russell Memorial Lectures) (New York: Harper Collins, 1972).
16 Noam Chomsky, Problems of Knowledge and Freedom, p. 13.
17 Noam Chomsky, Problems of Knowledge and Freedom, p. 25.
18 Dave Ward and Mog Stapleton, “Es Are Good: Cognition as Enacted, Embodied, Embedded, Affective and Extended,” in Consciousness in Interaction: The Role of the Natural and Social Context in Shaping Consciousness, ed. Fabio Paglieri (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2012), p. 90.
19 Evan Thompson, “Sensorimotor Subjectivity and the Enactive Approach to Experience,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 4 (4): 407; quoted in Dave Ward and Mog Stapleton, “Es Are Good,” p. 91.
20 Yang Guorong, The Mutual Cultivation of Self and Things, p. 5.
21 Yang Guorong, The Mutual Cultivation of Self and Things, pp. 5–6.
22 Yang Guorong, The Mutual Cultivation of Self and Things, p. 11.
23 Yang Guorong, The Mutual Cultivation of Self and Things, p. 14.
24 Yang Guorong, The Mutual Cultivation of Self and Things, p. 14.
25 Yang Guorong, The Mutual Cultivation of Self and Things, p. 15.
26 Tu Wei-Ming, Way, Learning, and Politics: Essays on the Confucian Intellectual (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), p. 1.
27 Tu Wei-Ming, Way, Learning, and Politics, p. 2.
28 Yang Guorong, The Mutual Cultivation of Self and Things, p. 9.
29 Yang Guorong, The Mutual Cultivation of Self and Things, p. 10.
30 Yang Guorong, The Mutual Cultivation of Self and Things, p. 10.
31 Yang Guorong, “An Outline of a Concrete Metaphysics,” p. 43.
32 Yang Guorong, “An Outline of a Concrete Metaphysics,” p. 46.
33 Hu Shi [as Hu Shih], The Development of the Logical Method in Ancient China (Shanghai: The Oriental Book Company, 1922), pp. 4–5.
34 Hu Shi, The Development of the Logical Method in Ancient China, p. 5.
35 Robin R. Wang, Yinyang: The Way of Heaven and Earth in Chinese Thought and Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 145.
36 Robin R. Wang, Yinyang, p. 146.
37 Robin R. Wang, Yinyang, pp. 146–147.
38 Trans. Robin R. Wang, Yinyang, p. 146.
39 Robin R. Wang, Yinyang, p. 148.
40 John Rawls, Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, ed. Barbara Herman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 167–72.
41 Philippa Foot, “The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of Double Effect,” in Virtues and Vices: And Other Essays in Moral Philosophy (Oxford, UK: Oxford, 2002), p. 23; Judith Jarvis Thomson, “The Trolley Problem,” Yale Journal 94 (May 1985): 1395–1415; Michael J. Sandel, Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), pp. 21–23; F. M. Kamm, The Trolley Problem Mysteries (Oxford, UK: Oxford, 2015).