Intelligibility or Meaning: Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming on Cosmic Life

This essay makes the case for a distinction between cosmology and a philosophy of living-with by discussing a disagreement in Neo-Confucian discourse on the availability of the cosmos. Whereas, for Zhu Xi 朱熹, the myriad things are available to us through their underlying principles that account for their individuation and knowability, for Wang Yangming 王陽明, the myriad things are, primarily, available to us through their immediate significance. Thus, while, for Zhu Xi, cosmic life is irreducibly bound to its intelligibility, for Wang, cosmic life bears on the way things mean something to us. Such meaning is not explicable through cosmological theory—that is, through generative principles that are explanatory of the regularity and determinability of the myriad things. Yet it may be hinted at in descriptions of our encounters with both animate and inanimate things.