A Brief Discussion of One Aspect of the Shangtong Idea

In his "Lectures on the History of Philosophy," Hegel once commented that the characteristic of Eastern philosophy lies in that it only recognizes as real the singular ding-an-sich (entity in itself). If an individuality, or a singular entity, stands in opposition to the ontological entity that exists in itself and spontaneously acts in itself (i.e., the philosophical category known as ding-an-sich), then it cannot have any value in itself, and cannot attain any value at all. However, at the same time that the individual entity unites with the ding-an-sich, this individual entity ceases to be an entity, as a subject, and disappears into nonconsciousness. This viewpoint appears to be an understanding of the Chinese cultural traditional mode of thought that was almost universally held by all Western thinkers of the time. A similar point of view seems to be held by the British writer Samuel Taylor Coleridge in an essay that he wrote on the linguistic styles of various genre of literature. In Coleridge's case...