The Philosophy of Affairs

Abstract

Yang Guorong is a contemporary philosopher with little need for introduction—and not only because he has been introduced here before. 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.” 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. 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