Relationalism of Wang Yangming
Discussion
Eric Schaetzle:
"Wang Yangming (who was not mentioned). One may be tempted, by such profound relationalism, to think this is nothing but the solipsism of an extreme skeptic. That would be a grave misunderstanding; these are not equivalent. Yangming wrote: "Separated from my clear intelligence, there will be no heaven, earth, spiritual beings, or myriad things, and separated from these, there will not be my clear intelligence... Why should it be that if my clear intelligence is gone they will all cease to exist? Consider the dead man. His spirit has drifted away and dispersed. Where are his heaven and earth and myriad things?" Here Yangming shows that relationality is primary and existence (as popularly understood) is secondary. This is echoed in another passage which is more subtle, showing that all knowledge is underwritten by relationships of interacting parts: "People today distinguish between knowledge and action and pursue them separately, believing that one must know before he can act. They will discuss and learn the business of knowledge first, they say, and wait till they truly know before they put their knowledge into practice. Consequently, to the last day of life, they will never act and also will never know. This doctrine of knowledge first and action later is not a minor disease and it did not come about only yesterday. My present advocacy of the unity of knowledge and action is precisely the medicine for that disease." That disease has continued today. The cultural zeitgeist of Western civilization for about the last half millenium has been afflicted by the presumption of an objectively knowable deterministic material fundament, one that must be graspable in principle. And accordingly, such grasping is preferably prerequisite to any decisive action taken. But this fundament does not exist, and the entire conceptual structure has the matter (as it were) entirely backwards. Recall that before Yangming, Zhuangzi famously said "Your life has a limit but knowledge has none. If you use what is limited to pursue what has no limit, you will be in danger." It is dangerous and foolish for a relative, and necessarily limited, perspective to pursue absolute objectivity, or claim to possess such a viewpoint. (cf. Ecclesiastes 1:18, 12:12, "Of making books there is no end and much study wearies the body.") Knowledge has lost none of it's importance, but our conceptual understanding of, and relationship to it, has become woefully confused making us vulnerable to the dangerous disease that both these sages warned us of. Knowledge, like facts, are relational. As Blaise Pascal noted, "man naturally cannot see everything"; there is no privileged "third person" perspective to acquire. "
(https://pedon.blogspot.com/2021/06/relationalism.html)