I Ching - the Metaphysics of Flux.

I must start by saying that my qualifications and authority on this topic amount to as near absolute zero as can be measured.

The I Ching is possibly over 5,000 years old. Makes Plato look recent. Translations from Chinese are wildly varied, and the this text consists of a series of gnomic aphorisms along with a highly variable collection commentaries on them, and commentaries on commentaries, of varying age and authority. I have even come across at least one complete rewrite from 'first principles'. In fact we are not dealing with one book at all; just as Western philosophy is said to be footnotes to Plato, so Chinese philosophy including Daoist and Confucian may be seen as footnotes to the I Ching. Commentaries develop it in the direction of politics, or psychology or ecology, or spirituality.

So feel free to use and link other variants, but here is a reputable if old fashioned translation to get you started. It is quite nice as a digitised document, because there are many reasonable orderings, and it is not something that one should really try and read the way one would read most philosophy books; it is highly ordered, but the order is not linear.

And here is Wilhelm's introduction, also worth a look. And now to philosophicate.

This oldest of digital worlds is in one sense very familiar, 0 & 1; male and female, and in another very strange indeed. Familiar, because there is a binary system of notation with positional significance. But strange, because it is not about substance but process. What is identified is never really a thing, but always a modality of change.

'Yin' (in Chinese philosophy) the passive female principle of the universe, characterized as female and sustaining and associated with earth, dark, and cold. from Chinese y?n ‘feminine’, ‘moon’, ‘shade’.

So definitions like this can be very misleading. Think of yin and yang as the endpoints of a pendulum, and then the 'essence' of 'the feminine' is its becoming male; because there is no other way to go.

Likewise, each hexagram, in its identity is a limit of movement in a particular direction, but because there are six possible individual changes, it is a limit in six dimensions, such that six 'changes' (of direction) are possible, and that's without considering that more than one aspect can be changing at once.

So we are considering a classification of dynamics, of where we're at rather than what we are. The times they are a-changing, and if you can classify the dynamics of your situation, you can make predictions, and better decisions. And that aspect of the I Ching is fairly central. Very often, one is told what the sage does when the times are thus, and what the sage does at on time can be very different if not opposite to what the sage does at another. Wisdom is also dynamic. This is in one sense trivial - at night the sage goes to bed, and in the morning the sage gets up, sort of thing. But it is also pragmatic in the way that western science is pragmatic: true iff useful.

What is most disconcerting in all this is that there is an inversion at a fundamental level. Everything seems horribly wooly; everything is metaphorical, as if the world entirely consists of zeitgeists. What the West regards as historical accident, is here the basic principle of being and order.

And yet, our physics, starting in a very different place also arrives in the end at a sort of process ontology of vibrations and probability. and I am by no means the only person to have made a connection between Eastern philosophy and Western physics.

I don't know where you are, dear reader. Are you already familiar with the I Ching, or is it all new? If it is new to you, I think you would do well to begin, with an experimental scepticism, to question the book as oracle, by way of practicing your open-mindedness, and familiarising yourself with the range and form of the texts. I have no expectation that you will come to believe in magic!

What I am more interested in is how an ancient way of thinking might shed a new light on our own concerns as philosophers of the West.

Phaedrus’ mistake, in my view, was that he placed Quality before everything, but he failed to understand that access to the contents of the mythos is enhanced by dialectic—essentially, the means to destroy the former divisions and create something better are already part of the mythos. I.e., Quality is primary because it is primary for the mythos. The ability of Aristotle to differentiate between science and dialectic is a refinement in the process of seeking truth, not a destruction of it.

https://archivehumanitas.files.wordpress.com/2019/02/ah.-a-critical-reading-of-r.p.-1-3.pdf

Again, if you haven't read Pirsig as well as I Ching, this will mean very little,But if you have, the linked article is worth a read. The I Ching is a work of the mythos, for all its analytical form, and Pirsig is very familiar with Eastern philosophy. If you have followed my previous, you will be familiar with the distinctive domains of physical, social and psychological, and in the West, these amount to more or less separate disciplines that are almost a priori, transcendental conditions of existence. The I Ching will have none of it! Always, it is the dynamics of a relationship and interplay between subject society and world such that the same condition infects them all. to make these analytical logos distinctions is to insist on not seeing the whole picture, 'therefore the sage does not do it.' You are the sage, because otherwise you would be the inferior man, and we don't want his input, do we?

Ok, I have rambled, I have linked, and if I have made a new connection for you somewhere, well tell me something interesting!