Ontological theorizing constitutes a set of second order relations that lock in the very systems that they describe while never being able to explain the plurality of dimensions of the human experience to begin with. Vote Neg instead for a Zoetological paradigm of analysis, a first order understanding of becoming which creates growth, understanding, and well-being.

I think the answer to these questions turns on two very different ways of understanding relationality, namely the doctrines of first and second order relationality. The term ‘ontology’ as “the science of being per se or in itself” gives us a doctrine of external, second order relations. Ontology was introduced into our philosophical vocabulary as a new term for an old way of thinking at the beginning of the seventeenth century by two German philosophers.1 For the classical Greeks, “the science of being per se” (to on he on) was posited as their “first philosophy” with all of its implications for metaphysics, epistemology, logic, ethics, philosophy of religion, and so on. Ontology is that branch of metaphysics that seeks to classify and explain the things that exist, with its underlying assumption that there are unchanging substances or essences internal to things that are available to us to classify them as this and not that. Ontology privileges “being per se” with its categorical language and its “substance” and “attribute” dualism, giving us a grammar of substances as property-bearers and properties that are borne, respectively. Such ontological thinking animates Plato’s pursuit of formal, “real” definitions in his quest for certainty (that is, definitions not of words but of what really is), and underlies Aristotle’s taxonomical science of knowing “what is what.” For these classical Greek philosophers, only what is real and is thus true can be the proper object of knowledge, giving us a logic of the changeless. Corollary to ontology is causal thinking, formal definitions, and, important for David’s question, a doctrine of external, second order relationality in which relations conjoin discrete and self-sufficient things, such as human “beings.” As the contemporary philosopher Zhao Tingyang 趙汀陽 avers, this kind of substance ontology defining the real things that constitute the content of an orderly and structured cosmos provides a “dictionary” kind of explanation of the world, seeking to set up an accurate understanding of the limits of all things. In simple terms, it determines “what is what,” and all concepts are footnotes to “being” or “is.”2 In the Book of Changes, we find a vocabulary making explicit cosmological assumptions that stand in stark contrast to this substance ontology and that brings with it a doctrine of first order, constitutive relations. This alternative “first philosophy” has prompted me to create the neologism “zoetology,” with the Greek zoe- “life” and -logia “discourse,” as my own new term for an old way of thinking that we might translate into modern Chinese as shengshenglun 生生論: “the art of living.” The starting point in this zoetological cosmology, then, is that nothing does anything by itself; association is a fact. Since the very nature of life is associative and transactional, the vocabulary appealed to in defining Confucian cosmology is irreducibly dyadic and collateral: always multiple, never one. And further, it is the nature of life itself that it seeks to optimize the available conditions for its continuing growth, where such growth has a persistent existential and thus intentional aspect. “Life” is the productive correlation between organism and environment that gives rise to correlative, relational, ecological thinking that many of our best sinologists (Marcel Granet, David Keightley, Tang Junyi, K. C. Chang, A. C. Graham, and many others) would ascribe to the earliest semblances of Chinese cosmology as a dominant way of thinking. I would argue that an understanding of zoetology as “the art of living” in expressing what is most basic in the Confucian cosmology is essential to an explanation of the assumed coincidence that obtains among all of the various dimensions of the human experience in Confucian philosophy: aesthetics, education, family life, morality, politics, religion, and so on. That is, all that is beautiful, intelligent, loving, good, just, and sacred in the human experience returns us to nothing more than those modalities of human conduct that strengthen the root and conduce to growth in all of our first order familial, communal, cultural, and ecological relations. Everything is at once what it is for itself, for its specific context, and for the unsummed totality. Thus, there are always correlative yinyang 陰陽 aspects within any vital process of change, describing the focal identity that makes something uniquely what it is and, by virtue of the activity within its vital relations, what it is becoming. Turning to the human experience specifically, persons are not defined in terms of limitation, self-sufficiency, and independence, but ecologically by the vital growth they experience in their intercourse with other persons and their worlds. Given the primacy of a first order, lived relationality that gives persons their focal identities, and given the unbounded nature of such relations, any particular person is holographic in existing at the pleasure of everything else. The zoetological question of why such persons exist is explained by the regimen of cultivating their relations to live their roles most productively in family and community, and what they have come to mean for each other. And the necessity in ontology of defining “what is what” is replaced by the correlative possibilities each person affords everything else for its growth, revision, and redefinition. Important to an understanding of this vocabulary is the gestalt shift from the Greek noun-dominated thinking with human “beings” and their world of essential “things” to the Confucian gerundive assumptions about the always eventful nature of human “becomings” living their lives within their unbounded natural, social, and cultural ecologies. I would only add that, true to the cosmological postulate of “continuity in change” (biantong 變通) advanced in the Book of Changes, zoetological thinking is more fundamental than the distinctions we might want to make between evolving Confucian and Daoist philosophies, and even a decidedly Chinese form of Buddhist philosophy. The claim that Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism are “three teachings as one” (sanjiaoweiyi 三教為一) reflects this different, evolving, and yet continuous worldview. Corollary to zoetology is correlative thinking and its production of paronomastic correlations in which things constituted by their first order relations are thus defined by their vital associations. In such ecological thinking, the “where” and the “when” in the relations of something gives you its “what.” Zhao Tingyang suggests that in contrast to the dictionary definition afforded by Greek ontology, the Confucian cosmology provides . . . an explanation of the “grammar” of the world, striving for a coordinated understanding of the relationships—between heaven and humankind, humankind and things, and humans and humans—by which all doings are generated, with a special emphasis on the mutuality of relationships, and the compatibility of all things.3 But is this understanding of first order, constitutive relationality really “part of original Confucian thought?” The Analects is the first and primary reference for the philosophical definition of ren 仁 that I would translate as “consummate person/conduct,” and it is for this reason that it has come to be associated most closely with the person of Confucius himself. Confucius’ creative investment of new meaning in ren is borne out when its infrequent and unexceptional usage in the earlier texts is compared with over a hundred occurrences in the Analects in more than ten percent of its passages: that is, some 58 of the 499 sections. The fact that Confucius is asked so often what he means by ren would suggest that he, too, is inventing a neologism in using this otherwise obscure term for his own purposes, and thus that those in conversation with him are not entirely comfortable in their understanding of it. No one can do or become ren by themselves. Ren is not an essential endowed potential, but what one is able to make of oneself given the interface between one’s initial conditions and one’s natural, social, and cultural environments. It is the entire, irreducibly social person: renzhe renye 仁者人也. Ren does not reference individual persons independent of family relations, but is rather the cultivated cognitive, aesthetic, moral, and religious sensibilities of entire persons as these qualities are best expressed in their ritualized roles and relationships. Given that ren as it is developed in the Analects denotes the qualitative transformation of particular persons, it is made further ambiguous because it must be understood relative to the specific concrete conditions of those persons in their first order, constitutive relations. There is no formula, no template, no ideal. Like a work of art, it is a process of disclosure rather than closure, resisting fixed definition and replication. We find that insight into the nature of consummate conduct is provided through a cluster of modal, irreducibly relational terms such as ren itself, that is, in the way, manner, or mode something is done rather than by stipulating any specific actions themselves. Indeed, such modalities are resistant to general prescription in defining the substance of exemplary conduct, and are often brought into focus by an appeal to specific historical episodes and concrete exemplars. From the very beginning, ren has been closely aligned with achieving ritual propriety first in family roles and then, by extension, in those relations that locate persons in their communities. As Analects 12.1 declares, “The disciplining of one’s person and the refinement made possible by aspiring to propriety in one’s roles and relations is the substance of becoming consummate” (克己復禮爲仁). This social dimension of ren is central. Ren happens within a “field of selves,” the sum of significant relationships that comes to constitute one as a resolutely intra-subjective person. Ren is not only intellectual, but affective and physical as well: one’s expressed feelings and passions, one’s posture and comportment, gestures, and bodily communication. Ren is something done, an aesthetic project, a hard-won accomplishment. The human being is not something we are; it is something that we do and become, and either we do it together or not at all. Or perhaps said more clearly, our narratives and our persons—that is, ren as both person and conduct—are one and the same thing. John Dewey makes a similar point in resisting the fallacy of decontextualizing and essentializing one element such as “human nature” or human “being” within the continuity of experience, and then in the best effort to overcome this post hoc diremption, making this element foundational and causal: The reality is the growth-process itself; childhood and adulthood are phases of a continuity. . . . The real existence is the history in its entirety, the history just as what it is. The operations of splitting it up into two parts and then having to unite them again by appeal to causative power are equally arbitrary and gratuitous.4 Not the actualization of a singular “human being,” but the growth and refinement of interdependent “human becomings” (always plural), is perhaps the best way to understand and express the processional, emergent, and irreducibly social nature of what it means to become ren. And such an understanding of ren is certainly part of original Confucian thought. In a section in Human Becomings titled “Ren 仁 as a Way of Saying ‘Role Ethics’ in the Confucian Canons,” I argue that this holistic, normative, role-based, and narrative meaning of ren allows us to claim that ren itself is one clear way that role ethics is being referenced in classical Confucianism. Is such a way of thinking about becoming a person true and useful? One strength of Confucian role ethics is that it is radically empirical. Unlike ontological thinking that begins from abstract and speculative, causal assumptions that define the human “being” and its purposes, Confucian role ethics begins from and is theorized out of our immediate experience. Given the primacy of practice, all theorizing, as itself an intrinsic feature of practical activity, is meliorative in the sense of being an attempt to make both the form and the performance of these same practices more intelligent and productive. The mutual entailment of the subjective and objective, self and world, theory and practice in first order, constitutive relationality as aspectual distinctions within immediate experience is a fact, making this resolutely empirical understanding of such experience resistant to exclusive, dualistic categories of any kind. Again, this ren or irreducibly relational way of thinking about becoming persons is useful in the sense that it alerts us to our interdependence while at the same time discouraging zero-sum thinking. It encourages an awareness that if my neighbor does better, I do better. I can only be a good teacher if I have a good student, and the challenges of a good student will make me a better teacher. I would certainly want to argue that zoetology with its first order relationality is both true and useful as an ecological and inclusive way of thinking about the human experience. Such an understanding of ren entails a shift in our thinking about what it means to be “individuals” as persons, corporations, or nation states, taking the discourse away from a fictive autonomy and equality, and redirecting it to the empirically compelling aspiration to relational equity, that is, the affordance of having different interests and yet being deserving of full consideration. Such a sense of relational equity by activating our differences from each other to make a difference for each other and for the well-being of all leads us in the direction of an achieved diversity as the substance of human flourishing.