Song-Ming Hylomorphism and the Dignity of Matter

Metaphysics & Epistemology
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Hello friends. Sorry to have been gone for a while. Sadly, it has been mostly for unfortunate reasons. I’ll try to get back to my PMs at some point.

Anyhow, while I’ve been gone, I’ve been continuing to study Song-Ming Era Neo-Confucian thought. This is an interesting period because in a number of ways it is very close to classical Western metaphysics, but with a different set of emphases and new twists on the principles of form/matter (Qi/Li).

For the Chinese though, form is not necessarily prior to matter (although it often is later in the tradition). More importantly though, Qi is not just sheer potency, but also “vital stuff.” Or, to put it more precisely, the very receptivity of sheer potency is itself vital. This is important, because I think the classical tradition, particularly in its modern form, where it is responding to voluntarism, is too quick to equate matter/potency with either nothingness, or evil/sin itself. Certainly, it is important to show that defining freedom in terms of potentiality is deeply flawed, but the tradition can err when potency is completely removed from our view of freedom.

So, let me lay out my thoughts on how I think Neo-Confucian thought offers a useful corrective to this tendency:

The Vital Role of Matter

In both frameworks, reality requires two co-constitutive principles: one that structures and determines (form/Li), and one that receives and enables (matter/Qi). Yet the traditions diverge in an important way. Western thought has often been tempted, in part due to its Platonic inheritance, to treat potency, matter, and multiplicity in purely negative terms. These are often presented as deficiencies to be overcome. The “slide toward matter/multiplicity” if often associated with sin and moral disorder (including by yours truly). This association is not without its merits, but it has to be seriously caveated. The Confucian tradition is a bit of an antidote here, because it insists on the positive and irreducible value of Qi (broadly speaking of course, it is a very diverse tradition).

This is, I would argue, a genuine correction, even from within the classical Western view itself. Potency is not merely the absence of actuality; it is also the condition for receptivity, and so for creaturely flourishing in its distinctively creaturely mode (just consider how noesis and the unclouded nous is receptive, e.g., “thy will be done.” Patristic “clouded nous” and Chinese “turbid Qi” share some close similarities.)

Potency is what allows creatures to be oriented beyond themselves—to receive form, being, and goodness from beyond themselves—and thus to participate in something greater than their own isolated actuality. Indeed, it is the very incompleteness of the creature that opens it to what lies above it, and which allows it to transcend its own finitude (e.g., in Plato’s psychology). If the creature could be wholly actualized (and thus at rest) as a sort of solipsistic, stand-alone unity, then the creature would not be moved beyond itself in pursuit of what is “truly best” and “really true.”

Potency is also what allows creatures to fit together, and to receive being from one another (as gift). This is why Zhang Zai refers to the same principle of potency as both “supreme void” and “supreme harmony;” the receptivity of void allows it to receive and join differences together. Without this receptivity, creatures could not “fit together” into a harmonious cosmos in which the greatness of each is inseparable from, and enhanced by, its openness to others.

Here is an example one of my texts on Confucian metaphysics uses. Consider Lego blocks. On their own, without “fitting together,” they can only be arranged into a disjoint heap. However, due to the void at the center of each, they can be fit together into all sorts of arrangements. The heap (lack of Li/form) is impotent, but so too is Li without receptive Qi (matter). The cosmos requires genuine receptivity if it is to be more than a heap of self-enclosed actualities.

This is sort of like how, on Christian and Muslim interpretations, Aristotle’s “great-souled man” must become capable of receiving goods graciously, and not only of bestowing them. Aristotle’s version is too self-enclosed. It misses that it is good to enable others to do good for us. The Good is diffusive, and makes the other better.

God as Pure Actuality

This, however, does not mean that God somehow “lacks” by not possessing potentiality. Divine actuality is analogous to creaturely actuality. They are not univocal concepts. Creaturely act is never pure act; it is always act received in potency, always composite, and so always oriented beyond itself.

In the Christian context, we might say that the composite nature of creatures, and the presence of potency, is not a flaw, but rather a reflection of the communal life of the Holy Trinity. Within the Trinity, the Divine Persons are giving and receiving love. Material existence, in its entirety (encompassing both actuality and potentiality), reflects this reality. These relations are not signs of incompleteness but of superabundant relational fullness. Creaturely receptivity (potency), then, is an image, not of divine potentiality, but of divine love—the infinite self-openness that is God’s inner life. The creaturely act-potency composite reflects the giving and receiving that is eternal in God, and which is now expressed in finite, temporal, material form.

Co-equal Principles

Rightly understood, then, act and potency are coequal in creaturely being, even if act is always explanatorily and ontologically prior. Just as a cause is prior to its effect, yet is only fully actual as a cause in virtue of having an effect, so form is prior to matter, and yet is only creaturely form in virtue of informing real potentiality. To elevate act entirely above potency in creatures, i.e., to treat the material, the receptive, and the multiple as defects rather than perfections of a different order, is to misread both creation and the Fall. Evil is not the slide toward matter or multiplicity per se, but must be primarily defined as a deviation from a creature’s telos. A creaturely telos essentially includes receptivity, embodiment, and the capacity to receive being from others (as gift, e.g. in the thought of Ferdinand Ulrich) however. While it is true that a defective being will always be less fully actualized, it’s important to keep in mind that it’s perfection still includes this openness.

Thus, the capacity for sin is not a positive power, i.e., a valuable, brute freedom to choose among equally real alternatives (as it is in the voluntarist account that has so shaped modern secular thought). It is rather the shadow cast by the genuine goodness of creaturely self-transcendence. That is, sin and error are possible because the ends of creatures (and world history) lies outside them, and they must propel themselves beyond their own finitude to become “moving images of the divine.” Because creatures are open in this way, they can also suffer from disorder, directing their will away from its proper end. The Fall then is not the actualization of a choice-worthy power (i.e., the “power to sin” is not a good per se), but rather the misdirection of ends. Potency is good; but its goodness is inseparable from its orientation toward the Good. If this orientation is not maintained, it also allows for vice and evil.

Or at least, those were some ideas I had about how the one tradition might helpfully inform the other. I’ve had a bunch but not real time to type them up.

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@Count_Timothy_von_Icarus

Welcome back — I’m genuinely sorry to hear things have been rough for you lately. Your OP is very rich, and I appreciate you taking the time to write it. I have only a basic familiarity with Confucianism and had always been under the impression that it was somewhat indifferent to metaphysics and theology. I find it fascinating to discover that this is (apparently) not the case.

I think you’re exactly right that potency has been undertreated in the Western tradition. The Lego block analogy is actually quite good — void as the condition for composability, not just as privation. There’s a structural insight there that I think maps onto something important: that receptivity is not merely “less being” but is itself a distinctive mode of perfection, one without which no composite being could be oriented beyond itself or receive from others.

This resonates strongly with something I’ve been thinking about for a long time regarding the relationship between potency and “non-reductive emergence”. If you think about how higher-order patterns arise in nature — how chemical bonding arises from quantum constraints, or how cellular organization arises from biochemistry, or how conscious agency arises from neural dynamics — in every case the higher level doesn’t just actualize something latent in the lower. It requires a kind of openness or underdetermination at the lower level that allows new intelligible patterns to consolidate. The lower level has to be, in a sense, more than what it currently is — not in the sense of containing the higher form in potentia as a pre-packaged blueprint, but in the sense of being genuinely receptive to organization from beyond its own current state of determination.

It seems like Zhang Zai’s “supreme void / supreme harmony” pairing is getting at something similar, and its also what I think the best reading of Aristotelian-Thomistic potency yields when you strip away the Platonic “residue”. Potency isn’t the mere absence of form; it’s the positive capacity for being-informed, and that capacity is itself a perfection — or at least a necessary condition for the kind of perfection that composite beings can have.

I’m curious about the “coequal” language. You say act and potency are “coequal in creaturely being, even if act is always explanatorily and ontologically prior.” I actually think this is well put, but I wonder if it’s taken to imply complete symmetry. In the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition the relationship is asymmetric in an important way: potency is for the sake of act, not the reverse. Receptivity is good precisely because of what it receives. The void in the Lego block is valuable because of the structures it enables, not in isolation. This asymmetry doesn’t undermine the goodness of potency but underwrites it: potency is good insofar as it is ordered to act, and the goodness of receptivity is founded on the goodness of what it can receive.

I’m guessing you’d actually agree with this, since you say “its goodness is inseperable from its orientation toward the Good.” But then the question becomes: does the Neo-Confucian tradition have the resources to articulate this asymmetry clearly, or does the emphasis on the vitality of Qi sometimes tip over into treating matter as an independent source of value? I’m genuinely asking — I don’t know the tradition well enough to say.

On the point about sin and the Fall: I think your framing is quite strong. The idea that sin is the misdirection of a genuinely good self-transcendence, rather than the actualization of a “power to sin,” seems exactly right. The voluntarist picture — where freedom just is the power to choose among alternatives, and sin is the exercise of that power in the wrong direction — treats potency as a kind of brute indeterminacy that grounds libertarian choice. But on the classical view, freedom is fundamentally the capacity for self-determination toward the good, and the “capacity for sin” is, as you say, a shadow of that genuine orientation, not a positive feature of the will.

One thing I’d add: this has implications for how we think about moral development and virtue more broadly. If potency/receptivity is genuinely good, then the virtuous person is not someone who has eliminated all potency (that would be a kind of Stoic self-enclosure), but someone whose potency is rightly ordered — whose receptivity is attuned to what is truly worth receiving. And this is where the connection to the “clouded nous” / “turbid Qi” parallel becomes, perhaps, really illuminating. In both traditions, the problem isn’t that we’re receptive, but that our receptivity has become disordered — we’re open to the wrong things, or open in the wrong way, or our capacity for receiving form has been occluded by habitual misdirection.

The parallel between patristic “clouded nous” and Neo-Confucian “turbid Qi” is fascinating and I’d love to hear more about how that plays out in the Song-Ming thinkers. Do they have anything analogous to the distinction between nature and grace — i.e., between the creature’s natural capacity for receptivity and some further, gratuitous elevation of that capacity?

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I’ll respond to the rest in a bit (great thoughts), but I should probably clarify this because I was in the dark about it too. From what I understand that is indeed more true for the earlier Confucian tradition. However, “Neo-Confucianism” emerges around 1100 (so 1,500 years after Confucius), and they are very interested in metaphysics and philosophy of mind, and have taken in a lot on from the influence from Buddhism, Indian thought (indirectly often), and Taoism (Taoism itself also changes dramatically as I understand it).

So, this is more “medieval” Chinese thought, and it’s interesting how closely it mimics contemporary Latin, Byzantine, and Islamic thought despite being a world away.

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Hello - I’m finding this discussion very interesting. I’m far from being a specialist but fascinated to consider and contrast these traditions, particularly regarding ‘receptivity’. What are we receiving, how, from where/whom and to what end.
I tend to see individuals as holistic and distinct, with potentials shaped by context rather than by a fixed teleology. Not sure how this works with the clever Lego analogy.
What is it we are trying to make with combined humans or elements - a picture of perfection, the Cosmos? Sounds a bit like the Borg in Star Trek?
I don’t see humans or life as ordered towards a divine single perfection.
The idea of ‘receptivity’ being distorted makes intuitive sense to me, whether framed as ‘clouded nous’ or ‘turbid Qi’.
I’m interested in the question about whether Neo-Confucian thinkers distinguish between natural receptivity and any kind of elevated or transformed receptivity - something like the nature/grace distinction.
I need clarity re meaning of li and qui. From Cult of Confucius
Qi - One of the more recognizable words from Confucianism, qui refers to the vital psychophysical stuff, or pneuma, present in everyone. Zhu Xi believed that everything in the world was composed of qi and li (principle). Principle governs the universe and maintains order, but is moderated by qi. When people make immoral choices, it is because their qi obscures their perfect moral nature. As such, the goal of moral self-cultivation is to cultivate one’s qi so that it is clear and balanced.
Returning to being and becoming. Goethe’s rephrasing of John’s prologue — to ‘In the beginning was the deed’ — has always stayed with me, not because I think becoming precedes being, but because it highlights how lived engagement often reveals more than abstract formulation. Action is a fundamental force of existence rather than any word, divine or otherwise. John 1:1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
Thanks Count and others- it helps me to read, reflect and contribute carefully and clearly.(supposedly staves off cognitive decline!?)

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I’ve been exploring some more, in Song-Ming Confucianism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) especially mental development, self-monitoring and virtue. How we relate to self and others. I agree with EVQ: ‘this has implications for how we think about moral development and virtue more broadly.’

The clouded ‘nous’ where our receptivity or perception of (spiritual) reality is not clear. I don’t know if I have understood this correctly. I look forward to input.
Debates on Knowledge, as discussed in SEP article: 4.1. How much were/are the authoritative Confucian classics necessary for proper self-development compared to our natural ethical capacities. World-knowledge. How we relate in reality. ‘Knowledge and action’ are united.(Wang Yangming).

Self-monitoring: Our innate biases can be too strong and therefore there is a need for li - reverential attention to rules.

From Section 4:2 Mental discipline. ‘Due in part to the influence of Buddhism, Confucians in the Song-Ming period were interested in the many ways in which subtle or hard-to-detect psychological dispositions and phenomena can hamper our ability to apprehend things clearly and correctly’.
Techniques were developed to quieten the mind - ‘overcoming the self’.

Debates include: ‘Wang Yangming - who thought it indispensable for the work of improving one’s character and state of heartmind’ v ‘Zhu Xi - self-monitoring becomes unnecessary if we fully realize or embody reverential attention’.

Moving on to Section 5:Virtues.
The “Five Constant Virtues” or “Five Constants” (Wuchang 五常) were humaneness (ren 仁, sometimes translated as “benevolence” or “Goodness”), righteousness (yi 義), ritual propriety (li 禮, sometimes simply “propriety”), wisdom (zhi 智), and faithfulness (xin 信)'.
Li - is ritualistic with implications for social protocol and prospects. A kind of ‘class’ system where people are assessed for posts.
This seems linked to the ‘oneness’ of humaneness, but is it? Do religious rituals bring harmony to all? Do we each participate equally and correctly participate or relate in ‘a larger system of mutual life-generativity’?
Isn’t this all about politics and power…still prevalently patriarchal?

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@Amity — I’ve been reading through the same article. It seems like a good place to start, though I’ve only just begun to work my way through it.

You raised some good questions in your post. While I’m obviously in no place to speak on behalf of the Confucian tradition, I’d like sketch how some of these questions look from within the Western tradition and note where I think there might be alignment — while flagging that I could be wrong about the Confucian side.

On the “clouded nous”: I think you’ve basically understood the concept correctly, at least as it functions in the Christian patristic context. The nous is not just the intellect in the narrow modern sense but something more like the whole person’s capacity for receptive awareness — awareness of reality, of the good, and (for the fathers) of God. When the fathers say the nous is “clouded,” they mean this capacity has been obscured by disordered habits and attachments. Not destroyed, but covered over, so that we no longer perceive clearly. My impression is that “turbid Qi” in the Neo-Confucian context is doing something structurally similar — the basic substance is good but has become murky in ways that prevent principle (Li) from being clearly manifested through it. But I’d want to be cautious about pressing the parallel too far, because the underlying metaphysical commitments seem different and I haven’t worked through the details by any means.

The debate you raise between Wang Yangming and Zhu Xi — roughly, whether moral development is primarily about clearing away obstructions to an innate capacity, or about sustained external discipline through study and reverential attention — maps onto a tension that runs deep in Western thought as well. In the Western context, I’d say the honest answer is probably “both, in a specific order.” The innate capacity is real, but it doesn’t operate in a vaccum. We’re social, embodied creatures, and our moral perception is shaped for better and worse by the practices and communal forms we’re embedded in. Discipline and formation aren’t opposed to innate moral capacity; they’re part of how that capacity gets trained and brought to fruition. But external discipline without interior transformation is empty conformity. Whether the Neo-Confucian thinkers would frame the relationship in quite this way, I’m honestly not sure.

Your question about li (ritual propriety) and power is, I think, the most important one you’ve raised. Again, I don’t know enough about the internal debates within Confucianism to say how the tradition itself addresses this tension. But I can say how the issue looks from the Western side, because it maps onto a distinction I think is really crucial: the distinction between social legitimacy and genuine moral goodness. These are not the same thing, and conflating them is one of the most persistent temptations in any tradition that takes communal practice seriously.

From the Western side, I’d put it like this. There is a genuine insight in the idea that moral life is not just a matter of private intention but requires concrete, embodied, communal forms of expression — that how we actually treat each other in practice partly constitutes what it means to live well together. But — and this is where your skepticism is well placed — you need some independent standard by which to assess whether a given set of rituals and social forms actually serves human flourishing, or whether it’s just entrenching the interests of whoever happens to be on top. Patriarchal structures can be deeply “harmonious” from a certain vantage point and still be profoundly unjust. The resources for critique have to come from somewhere beyond social convention itself — from something like the genuine good of persons, or the demands of justice, or (in explicitly theological terms) from the transcendent Good that judges all human arrangements.

My tentative sense is that the Confucian tradition has some resources for this kind of critique — ren (humaneness) seems like it could function as a standard that transcends any particular social arrangement — but whether those resources are robust enough to do the work, and whether they’ve historically been deployed in that way, are questions I genuinely don’t know the answer to yet. So I think your instinct to keep pressing the “politics and power” question is a good one, and its one I’d want to keep asking as I continue working through this material.

Hopefully @Count_Timothy_von_Icarus will weigh in at some point. I’m really curious to see what he has to say.

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As a last note on this, I’ve seen some opinion to the effect that the reception of Chinese thought in the West has been a bit like the reception of Buddhism, in that the elements of the very diverse tradition that become prominent in the West tend to be those that are most consistent with its metaphysics. At the same time, on the Chinese end, there was a pretty serious repression of schools of thought that didn’t hew to the suppositions of Marxism in the 20th century, which has only slowly relaxed, and that has also shaped things.

I think that make sense, although I also think it’s a lot easier to explain if you flip the direction of the explanation. When form is in some sense prior (as it is in the pre-modern West, and tends to be in Neo-Confucian though, although less absolutely), there is already something to receive. The problem with the directional flip of materialism is that now we seem to either be getting something from nothing if anything new emerges, or it has to have been their the whole time. “Materialism” is tricky though, because materialism could only become a metaphysics by positing that matter is not, at the limit, sheer potentiality. Instead, specific actualities were ascribed to matter itself (e.g., extension, local motion, etc.), while the rest of the cosmos (universals, quiddity, value, etc.) is then displaced to the “mind/subjective” side of the ledger. This actually just replicates the same problem though. How do reasons, value, quiddity, etc. end up “in here” if they don’t already exist (at least virtually) “out there.”

I don’t think this is easily resolved. Partly, this is because it seems to me that materialism/physicalism, in its long history, is full of Cartesian homunculi and charges of Cartesian homunculi. People want to avoid them, but they keep accidentally replicating them as they dance around this issue. Likewise, I am not sure if physicalism with “strongly emergent mind” isn’t just a form of dualism. Afterall, what ever is strongly emergent is in some sense sui generis and irreducible. But at the same time, I think you can keep most of the intuitions associated with “naturalism” with a “top-down” direction flip.

Plus, to my mind, it is easier to explain finite being as a contraction/specification of infinite being, although I know many will disagree.

I agree. Although, perhaps it is a qualified perfection. Receptivity is a perfection when it is ordered to the right things. To be receptive to the wrong things is a problem. I suppose this is another way in which some “shaping actuality” is in a sense prior to potency per se.

I don’t really know the tradition well enough to say yet unfortunately. They do seem to have a strong framework for considering normativity, a sort of teleology that in some ways seems to cross the natural versus social/artificial divide more easily. However, they have some pretty significant disagreements. Also, some thinkers (I have a hard time with names because they are both new to me and spelled differently in different texts) think the goal of self-cultivation is to actually remove Li. Since Li is what gives any structure, and the sage is receptive to the Tao, the goal is remove all turbidity. I can see the influence of earlier Taoism here. However, I think this is a pretty problematic position, and doesn’t really sit well with the Confucian tradition’s strong virtue epistemology. Surely the sage isn’t just impartially receptive, but also able to filter what they receive.

That said, I can see how this conclusion makes more sense in a metaphysical register because they build on the idea of Indra’s Net and the same moon being fully “in” but reflected differently in each “pool” (being). In this, their hylomorphism is actually more like Saint Maximos and Byzantine thought (Logos/logoi) than Aristotle, but their ontology is much more “flat” and immanent, and so more like Aristotle in that sense.

To your question though, in general it seems like Li is the primary grounding of value, while Qi determines individuation. But Qi is important to value because the Confucians really want to hold on to the idea that certain people (particularly family) are due particular respect, and Qi individuates us so that we can have relations like father/son. In classical Chinese thought, there are a lot of challenges to this sort of partiality.

Great point. I think that’s right, and it actually reminds me of these lectures on von Balthasar I have been listening too. Balthasar puts a heavy focus on the spiritual life and praxis because he sees theology as having become too self-enclosed as a sort of logical system. The diagnosis is basically of a theology that is in a way too actual (but in the wrong ways). Or we might say, for true theology to be fully actual is for it to be receptive. As Evagrios famously put it: If you are a theologian, you will pray truly; and if you pray truly, you are a theologian.

I have seen hints with Tianli (the Heavenly Principle) and the Luminous Mind concept, or the use of the Buddha Nature concept, but I am not really sure how analogous they are. Taiji, the Supreme Ultimate, the one from which the many arise is perhaps closer, but I need to track down the thinkers who focus on that more. Introductions didn’t really get into this and the other texts I’ve had the time to read were more specialist stuff on mereology. It does not seem to be a major factor but something might show up in some thinkers, particularly because I know they had plenty of contact with Islam later. In general though, it seems like their cosmology tends to be much more immanent.

However, there is a similarity, more to Patristic thought than the modern nature versus grace distinction, in that the sage is attempting in a way to become more natural by restoring Li already present in all things. In a way, this seems to lack to externality of grace, but it might not depending on how the Supreme Ultimate is interpreted.

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Me too, I’m still learning here. AI (who is not always reliable, but I asked all the big ones) tells me there is a decent analogy here to late Platonism perhaps more than Christianity, but with a less “vertical” ontology. It gave me some sources, but I haven’t had time to check them out. That makes sense with the books I have read though, although they caution that the tradition is quite diverse. I get the picture that it is in someways more diverse than say, Western Scholasticism as a whole.

Basically, I don’t want to misread things by looking to analogs too much, but it helps to have a comparison case that is somewhat analogous. This is how I studied Islamic thought, but that’s a lot easier because it is quite similar to Latin and Byzantine thought it a lot of ways.

Receptivity is in a way becoming more what one is, especially in later views were Li is more obviously prior and what makes things what they are. But unlike in the West, there are figures (generally earlier it seems) who put Qi prior.

These terms don’t have a clear genesis like Aristotle. Their metaphysical usage evolves over a longer time scale, and then gets read back into the earlier classics.

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In a sense, yes, but not in the sense of modern Western constructivism. Aristotle also had it that politics was the architectonic science of practical reason, because it deals with the highest level, most diffuse good that man engages in. Individual virtue exists in the context of the polis. Chinese thought in general tends to be similar here. We can speak of “the Good” in terms of what lies prior to man, but the human good is always filtered through the polity/community and various social relations.

There can be no strong dichotomy, just like many thinkers deny that it makes much sense to speak of “nature versus nurture,” because they are inextricably linked and one gets neither without the other.

So, politics and power can itself be analyzed according to their conformity to virtue, and virtue might look different from era to era, or culture to culture, but its basis is prior to culture and history.

In terms of it being patriarchal, I’m not sure. Certainly in some of its formulations, but that is true for many thinkers, and yet patriarchy is not really essential to their thought as a sort of organizing pillar. Many of the most influential women in philosophy in the 20th century were engaged in Aristotleian retrieval projects, but this hardly made them anti-feminist. I think it’s a bit of a historical accident that feminism (more as a political movement) has become so bound up in anti-essentialism. Arguably, something like care ethics makes more sense, if it doesn’t require, a sort of teleological framing. There is a pretty common conflation of bad conservative essentialist arguments with essentialism though. However, one can reject sexism, racism, etc. in the form of essentialism just as easily as an essentialist. People can simply be wrong about natures.

This is perhaps more relevant today, because the new “race realists” (who also tend to be “sex realists”) and “hyper racists” are themselves hyper nominalists who appeal to “usefulness” and empiricism. The “nu/alt” right is not really traditionalist at all in this sense. When they appeal to biology, they generally do so only as “empirical data,” which can then be usefully leveraged by the strong to fulfill their desires.

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Thanks — this discussion helps me see the metaphysical side a little more clearly.
When I mentioned ‘patriarchal’ I meant it in the historical Confucian sense: the lineage system, generational hierarchy. How the ritualistic concept of Li was normative order and integral to those structures. What I’m still trying to understand is how Li (as moral pattern) and Qi (as individuation) actually interact with social reality — how Neo‑Confucian metaphysics sits alongside any hierarchical system.
Your point about essentialism is useful. Many 20th‑century women philosophers working in broadly Aristotelian or virtue‑ethical mode Anscombe, Foot, Murdoch — show that a metaphysics of nature or form doesn’t automatically carry patriarchal politics with it. I wasn’t thinking of them being anti-feminist - indeed, some female philosophers didn’t care for the label ‘feminist’ but still probably had some joy at making their voices heard above the prominently male cadre.
As far as I understand, Confucianism was criticised for its gendered family system and its entanglement with political authority.
Reformers re‑read Li as a universal moral principle rather than a blueprint for fixed roles, and Qi as an individual morality rather than some kind of destiny. That shift seems to open self‑cultivation to everyone, not just those in an advantaged position within the old patrilineal order.
I’m also interested in the role of ‘sage’.
In the older world, sage-hood appears to have been imagined through a very specific social lens — male, embedded in generational authority. Once Li becomes universal and Qi becomes each person’s moral capacity, sagehood becomes an ethical ideal open to anyone. I’m still trying to get a sense of how far that reinterpretation actually shifts assumptions about hierarchy, power, and who is seen — or sees themselves — as capable of full self‑realisation.

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Mary Midgley (1919-2018) also played with Lego!
‘…She also lamented the atomised vision that stops us seeing the world and the intellectual disciplines which reveal it as parts of a larger whole. Specialisation splinters our sense of ourselves, and divides human knowledge into gated communities, said Midgley. Like fixing a car, understanding means taking something apart, and crucially, then putting it back together . The atomised worldview is a fantasy, she argued, which fuels the destruction of human potential and the natural world: “People are different to Lego,” as she put it.’

A lovely read: Mary Midgley (1919-2018) | Issue 140 | Philosophy Now
It links with the previous mention of female philosophers.
‘…She also met lifelong friends Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe, and Philippa Foot at Somerville. These four – imaginatively known as ‘the Quartet’ – became the first group of prominent female philosophers in Britain. This was helped by the more inclusive role given to women during the war: “In normal times a lot of good female thinking is wasted because it simply doesn’t get heard,” Midgley later wrote.’

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I am not sure it is helpful to compare ‘the West’ in this way. What does it consist of? I think the difficulty lies in attempted connections across cultures and millennia. Problems with definitions of concepts, roles and function.
So, to begin with, I’d like to focus on the concept of Li.
As such, I hope that this paper might provide some clarity: Li in the “Analects”: Training in Moral Comptence and the Question of Flexibility on JSTOR

The author presents 3 stages of moral cultivation, showing the changing role and meaning of Li. The significance in education, from 1.novice rote-learning - adherence to appropriate role models. 2.active exploration/inquiry - practising and testing moral principles 3. mature reflection - using principles in meaningful social interaction.
The stages are described separately for clarity. However, they are ‘continuous; the progression…is fluid and may not be distinguishable.’
I haven’t read it all yet.
My thoughts are that this resembles the learning and playing of music. We need to know the basics, practice and then we can let go. Jazz, jive and jump? Make new connections - experimentation can, of course, just happen naturally. Give a child a metal lid and a stick. Drum away…
Even if what is created is not ‘perfect’ or according to socio-cultural taste, what of it? Is this all about aesthetics? What sounds ‘good’ or ‘in harmony’?
If ‘receptivity’ is being or ‘becoming more what one is’, how does that relate to ‘divine perfection’ or a particular model of moral philosophy?
The essay concludes: ‘The Analects is part of a living and ongoing tradition…morality is understood as a living phenomenon, with moral progress being initiated by critically self-aware and ethically sensitive persons.’

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Yeah, I think we’re largely in agreement here, and you’ve stated the core problem with materialism more crisply than I did.

I’d just want to add one nuance to the “direction flip” point. I completely agree that form’s priority makes emergence intelligible in a way that pure bottom-up materialism can’t. If there’s nothing to receive — if there’s no prior intelligibility ordering things toward higher integration — then emergence really does look like magic, and you’re stuck either with brute emergence (which is just a label for the mystery) or with pan-proto-whatever-ism (which smuggles the higher level back into the lower level in disguise). The classical direction, where act is prior to potency and form is prior to matter, avoids both of these because the intelligibility doesn’t have to come from nowhere. It’s already operative, and lower-level potency is receptive to it rather than generative of it.

But I’d want to resist the implication that recognizing the priority of form makes the bottom-up direction of explanation dispensible. The empirical sciences give us genuine insight into how higher-order forms are realized in lower-level potency — the specific conditions under which new levels of organization consolidate, the constraints that have to be in place, the dynamics by which they stabilize. These are real explanatory achievements, not just placeholders waiting for the top-down story to arrive. What they can’t do, and here I think you’re exactly right, is account for the intelligibility of what emerges. The sciences describe the conditions and the process; they don’t explain why there is something intelligible to emerge at all, or why the universe is the kind of thing in which ascending levels of complexity and interiority arise with statistical regularity rather than being freak accidents.

So I think the right picture is genuinely bilateral — form is explanatorily prior, but potency’s contribution is irreducible. And this is actually where I think the work of someone like Terry Deacon could be helpful. His whole project is, in a sense, trying to give a rigorous account of how “absential” constraints at lower levels provide the conditions for higher-order organization, without pretending that the lower level contains the higher level in miniature. He’s not a classical metaphysician by any stretch, but his instinct is sound: you need to take the receptive, underdetermined dimension of nature seriously as doing real constitutive work, even if it can’t do that work on its own.

Your point about materialism’s Cartesian homunculi is spot on. The pattern is remarkably persistent: displace everything normative and qualitative into the “subjective” side, then spend centuries trying to get it back out again. And each attempt to get it back out just recreates the split at a different level — now it’s “representations” that somehow refer to the world, or “information” that somehow means something, or “functions” that somehow have normative force. The homunculus keeps reappearing because the original move of stripping intelligibility from nature and relocating it in the mind was the real mistake. Once you’ve done that, no amount of clever reconstruction can put Humpty Dumpty back together.

On strongly emergent mind being “just a form of dualism” — I think that’s basically correct, and it’s a point that doesn’t get made often enough. If mind is genuinely sui generis and irreducable to physical dynamics, then in what sense is the position “physicalist”? The label is doing no work at that point. You’ve conceded the substance of the dualist claim while retaining the branding. I suppose the idea is that mind is still “dependent on” or “realized by” the physical, but dependence and realization are precisely the relationships that need cashing out, and the standard physicalist accounts of those relationships (supervenience, functional realization) all presuppose that the higher level is in principle explicable in terms of the lower. If strong emergence denies exactly that, the physicalist framework isn’t explaining mind — it’s just housing it.

That said, I think the classical picture also has work to do here. Its not enough to say “form is prior” and leave it at that. The question of how, concretely, rational consciousness arises from — and remains dependent on — neural dynamics is a legitimate one, and the classical tradition needs to engage it rather than treating the priority of form as a conversation-stopper. But that’s a longer discussion.

A few thoughts on this, though I’ll leave some of the Neo-Confucian specifics aside since we’re both still finding our feet there.

The point about some thinkers wanting to remove Li entirely is really interesting, and I think your instinct that its problematic is correct — at least from where we’re standing. If Li is what gives structure and determination, then “removing Li” to become purely receptive to the Tao sounds like it collapses back into treating potency as self-sufficiently good, which is exactly the mistake we were trying to avoid. Pure receptivity without any structuring principle isn’t wisdom; it’s formlessness. The sage has to be receptive, yes, but receptive as a determinate being with cultivated capacities for discrimination. Otherwise you can’t distinguish between genuine openness to the Tao and mere passivity. I can see the Taoist influence you’re pointing to, and the tension with the Confucian virtue epistemology seems real — you can’t have a robust account of the sage’s practical wisdom while simultaneously saying the goal is to dissolve all the structuring principles that make discrimination possible.

This connects to something I think is quite important about the relationship between receptivity and judgment that often gets lost. Receptivity is not the absence of activity. Genuine receptivity — the kind that actually takes in what is there to be received — requires trained capacities, habits of attention, cultivated dispositions. The “unclouded nous” of the fathers isn’t a blank slate; it’s a nous that has been formed so thoroughly that it can receive without distortion. Receptivity at its best is a kind of achievement, not a starting condition. So the idea that you get there by stripping away all form seems exactly backwards.

Your Balthasar point is wonderful and I think it actually captures the whole thrust of this thread better than anything else we’ve said. The idea that theology (or the theologian) can become “too actual in the wrong ways” — too systematized, too self-enclosed, too determined by its own internal logic — such that it loses the receptive dimension that is constitutive of its proper actuality… that’s the Evagrius quote in metaphysical dress. True theological understanding just is a mode of receptivity — prayer, attentiveness, openness to what exceeds the system. And if that’s right, then the potency we’ve been talking about isn’t just a metaphysical feature of creatures in general; it shows up concretely in the intellectual and spiritual life as the difference between a living understanding and a dead one.

I think this also helps clarify the nature/grace question, even if we can’t resolve how the Confucian tradition handles it. From the Western side, the crucial point is that the receptivity involved in, say, genuine theological understanding or the life of prayer isn’t just natural receptivity operating at peak efficiency. It involves an elevation — a gratuitous opening-up of capacities that nature on its own doesn’t achieve. The creature’s natural potency is real and good, but there is a further receptivity that is itself a gift. The Patristic framing you mention — becoming “more natural” by restoring what is already present — gets at something real, but I think it needs supplementing with the gratuity dimension, otherwise you risk collapsing grace into nature’s self-realization. Whether the Neo-Confucian framework, with its more immanent cosmology, can accomodate something like this is an open question. My tentative guess is that the resources are thinner there, but I’d want to know more before saying that with any confidence.

The Maximos parallel is suggestive, by the way. The Logos/logoi structure does seem closer to what you’re describing than straight Aristotelian hylomorphism, precisely because it builds in a participatory dimension from the start — each particular logos participates in the one Logos, the way each pool reflects the one moon. But as you note, Maximos has a much stronger sense of transcendence than the Neo-Confucians seem to. The question is whether that transcendence is doing essential philosophical work or whether its a theological addition that could, in principle, be bracketed. I suspect its doing essential work but, again, that’s another long conversation.

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Thank you. This is such an enjoyable and clear discussion to follow. I’d like to add a little related to human ‘elevation’ and the comparison between nature/grace.
From what I’ve read, I understand Neo‑Confucian ‘gifts’ as natural, relational, pedagogical, including the spiritual, not thin.
They work through the shared human world — words, teaching, dialogue, moral practice — rather than through any transcendent bestowal. That’s a difference in kind, not a deficiency. So, it isn’t clear to me what having ‘thinner resources’ is meant to capture here.
Are we comparing quantity, or the absence of a supernatural giver, or something else ? I may be misunderstanding, so I’m happy to be corrected.

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That’s a fair question, and I think I was unclear. Let me try to say more precisely what I meant.

I’m not saying the Neo-Confucian tradition is deficient in its account of moral and spiritual formation through natural, relational, pedagogical means. From what I can tell — and again, I’m still learning — it’s actually quite rich on that front, arguably richer than a lot of Western philosophy in its attention to the concrete practices of self-cultivation. So “thinner resources” was a poor choice of phrase if it suggested a general deficiency.

What I was getting at is something more specific. In the Western theological tradition — particularly in the Patristic and Thomistic streams — there’s a claim that the full flourishing creatures are called to exceeds what natural capacities can achieve on their own, even when those capacities are operating at their best and in ideal communal conditions. Grace, on this view, isn’t just good teaching or wise community or disciplined practice, even though it ordinarily works through all of those things. It’s a further gift that elevates the creature’s receptive capacity itself — opens up a mode of receiving that the creature couldn’t have generated from within its own natural endowment.

Now, you could absolutely respond: “that’s just a specifically Christian theological commitment, and the absence of it in another tradition isn’t a lack — it’s a different framework with different commitments.” And that’s a perfectly reasonable position. The question of whether the nature/grace distinction tracks something real or is an artifact of a particular theological grammar is genuinely debatable. I wasn’t trying to settle that question, just to flag that if you think something like gratuity is philosophically necessary — if you think the creature’s orientation toward its ultimate end can’t be fully accounted for in terms of natural capacities and their development — then you’d want to ask whether a given framework has the conceptual space to accomodate that. And my tentative impression is that a strongly immanent cosmology has less room for it. But “less room” is a philosophical assessment from within my own commitments, not a neutral evaluation, and I should have been more upfront about that.

Does that help clarify?

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Thank you - that does help. I’ve been unsure what ‘the West’ or ‘Western tradition’ was meant to cover: a philosophical contrast between material and spiritual, or the religious nature/grace framework.
For me, the Neo-Confucian ‘gifts’ are as explained, within an immanent cosmology. The Christian idea of supernatural elevation by grace sits within a different metaphysical framework rather than a richer set of resources.
And yes - we’re all still learning.

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It reminds me of Christ’s words:

The eye is the lamp of the body; so then, if your eye is healtht your whole body will be full of light.

But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. So if the light that is in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!

  • Matthew 6:22-23

Now to be healthy is not to be “nothing in particular,” but to have an “eye” that receives in a particular way. There is a need for actuality here, as we should hardly see better with no eyes at all. This is precisely the error of the “view from nowhere,” when it claims that the way things really are is as they are seen with no eyes at all (or none in particular). This is incoherent.

However, there is a long tradition, running from Dionysius the Areopagite, through Saint Maximos, to the Cloud of Unknowing, Saint Theresa of Avila, etc. of trying to move beyond all conceptual images, to the “darkness above the light.” This is indeed an emptying, a movement into a “cloud of unknowing.” We could consider the same sort of move in the Late Platonists’ Ladder of Virtues, where the purificatory virtues must like prior to the contemplative ones (just as in Christian praxis praktikos lies prior to theoria, and theoria, determinate, actualized knowledge, lies prior to theology, ascent beyond conceptual images). The need for preparation (or self-cultivation in the Chinese tradition) makes less sense if we simply need to tear down everything.

Still, it is often stressed that “letting go” is crucial here (“dying to self”) and so this could be seen as the culling of malformed actuality to make room for greater receptivity, a sort of “healthy,” properly ordered, “second potency.”

St. Maximos gives us some tools here, particularly the distinction between logos and tropos—the former being the principle or rational form of a thing, the latter the mode of its existence. The ascent through the virtues via praktikos/theoria/theology doesn’t strip away the logoi of the virtues; it transforms their tropos. The saint who enters the divine darkness isn’t being emptied of prudence, justice, charity, etc. Rather, these are somehow recapitulated, not abandoned. This is why Maximos insists, pace certain Origenist tendencies, that the telos of man (and of contemplation) involves a genuine deification of the whole person rather than the soul’s escape from particularity (or “matter”). This is then a deification of man as creature, and if theosis includes the creaturely essence, which includes potency, then the receptivity must be deified to?

I think this is a real tension in mystical writing though. Dante’s Commedia keeps the individual and history in focus right up to the climax, with individuals forming a beatific community in the Celestial Rose. By contrast, in Attar’s Conference of the Birds, the thirty birds come to realize they are determinations of a single unity, and are more absorbed into God. I think Dante does a better job than most keeping this line here, perhaps because he had the Trinity as a community of love in focus.

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@Count_Timothy_von_Icarus – this is beautifully articulated. It’s impressive and delightful to read.

The Matthew passage is a really nice illustration. A healthy eye is not “no eye in particular” — it’s a specifically well-functioning eye, one whose determinate structure is precisely what enables it to receive light rather than distort it. And you’re right that this maps directly onto the critique of the “view from nowhere”: the idea that genuine objectivity requires stripping away all perspective is incoherent, because perspective is the organ of reception. No eye, no light. The question is never “how do we see with no eyes” but “how do we get our eyes working properly.”

But then the apophatic tradition seems to complicate this, and I think your resolution through Maximos is exactly the right move. The “cloud of unknowing” tradition isn’t asking us to become formless; it’s asking us to undergo a transformation in the mode of our knowing. And the logos/tropos distinction gives you the precise conceptual tool for articulating that. The logoi — the intelligible principles of the virtues, of the creature’s own nature — aren’t abandoned in the ascent. Their tropos is transformed. Prudence doesn’t evaporate in the divine darkness; it’s recapitulated at a higher mode of existence. So the “emptying” is real, but what gets emptied is the creature’s habitual mode of grasping and self-enclosure, not the determinate form that makes the creature what it is. That’s the difference between genuine apophaticism and mere dissolution.

I think your phrase “second potency” captures something important here. There’s a first potency — the creature’s natural openness to being formed. Then there’s the actualization of that potency through the virtues and practical wisdom. But then, at the threshold of genuine contemplative ascent, there needs to be a further opening up, a new receptivity that isn’t just the original potency reasserting itself but is something achieved through and beyond the actualization of the virtues. It’s potency on the far side of act, if that makes sense. And this connects back to the gratuity point we were discussing with Amity — this “second potency” isn’t something the creature generates from its own resources. It’s a capacity that has to be given.

Your point about Maximos insisting that theosis involves the whole person — not the soul’s escape from particularity or matter — is crucial, and it ties the whole thread together. If potency/receptivity is genuinely good (your original thesis), and if the creature’s telos involves deification of the creature as creature (Maximos’s point), then receptivity itself must be part of what is deified. The creaturely composite of act and potency isn’t a ladder you kick away once you’ve climbed it; its the very thing that gets transfigured. Which means the Neo-Confucian thinkers who wanted to strip away Li entirely were, from this vantage point, making a mistake analogous to the Origenist one Maximos was resisting — treating particularity and determination as obstacles rather than as the medium of divinization.

Your contrast between Dante/Attar contrast is beautifully drawn. I think you’re right that the Trinitarian theology is doing essential work in Dante’s case. If the ultimate reality is itself a community of distinct persons in mutual self-giving, then the preservation of individual identity in beatitude isn’t a concession to creaturely limitation — it’s a participation in the very structure of the divine life. Absorption dissolves the relational structure that love requires. Dante’s Celestial Rose preserves it. And this circles back to the original point about potency: the receptive, relational dimension of creaturely being isn’t transcended in the eschaton but perfected. The individuals in the Rose are more themselves, not less, precisely because they are more fully open to one another and to God.

Whether there are resources in the Neo-Confucian tradition for something like this — deification of the whole person including the receptive dimension, without collapsing into absorption — I’d be very curious to know as we both continue digging into it. The “flat” ontology you mentioned earlier might make it harder to maintain the distinction, but I could be wrong about that.

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These last two posts are fascinating to read. The questions you’re now exploring move into territory I’m not really equipped to take further, and my own comments were coming from a more modest, philosophical angle. I’ll step back here with interest from the sidelines.

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It’s an interesting question, because many advocates for strictly immanent ontologies, nominalism, etc. stress that their system is supposed to protect the value and freedom of the individual. I’m not sure if they are always successful though. In the case of more recent thought, I think there is a very real tendency to collapse towards an unacknowledged voluntarism (the elevation of potency over actuality). Yet even in Aristotle’s Ethics, the ideal is a kind of self-sufficient contemplative actuality (an imitation of the Prime Mover). But this creates an awkward asymmetry, since the highest human activity is modeled on something that is essentially non-receptive, and which has no real relation to what is below it (eros leading up, but no agape moving down). The indifference of the perfect being seems like itself a flaw, but at any rate it is also even more clearly not ideal for man.

I guess the problem is that the dialectic of actuality and potency cannot be resolved in any sort of higher end in a strictly “flat” ontology.