The Logic of Fate: The Life-Saving Loop of Repentance in the Trajectories of Qi Huangong and Qing Mugong

This article is primarily devoted to the philosophy of history: the unique features of the traditional Chinese categorical vision of historical reality are demonstrated using the specific example of the fates of two great historical figures of Ancient China. The central point here is the categorical understanding of the effectiveness of certain existential strategies that determine human activity as a decisive factor in the historical process. In contrast to the radical hopelessness of Spengler’s fatalism, which leaves man with no chance of not only averting the sentence of fate, but even postponing its execution, traditional Chinese thought, which is more generous in this regard, insisted on the existence of strategies capable of freeing him (at least temporarily) from the snares of a seemingly predetermined fate. The proposed article examines one of such miraculous stratagems for overcoming/postponing the impending (according to the inexorably developing figure of fate) tragic ending. Such transcendence of the circumstances, evasion of one’s “karmic debt” require at first glance an unbearable (after all, the verdict of fate has already been passed: “this is who you are - you can’t run away from yourself!”) overcoming of oneself. Nevertheless, the latter is achieved thanks to the effect of self-applicability, when it is directed at the negative: for example, “sadness” (you 忧), being directed at itself (“to be sad about one’s sadness” you qi you 忧其忧), is capable of abolishing the original sadness.