Spirit, Qi, and the Multitude by Lee Hyo-Dong;

Author:Lee, Hyo-Dong;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: -
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2011-09-09T16:00:00+00:00

Change, Way, and Spirit: A Neo-Confucian Trinity in Conversation with the Chaosmos and Tehom

So far in this book, I have examined the Daoist and Confucian notion of psychophysical energy, tracing the various ways in which the nondualistic, equalizing, emancipatory, and holistic potentials of that notion have been shackled and domesticated by its being placed in the lower pole of the hierarchical binaries, whether the other, higher pole be the Way, Heaven, pattern, or the Great Ultimate. At the same time, my tracking of the “adventures” of the idea of psychophysical energy has shown, I hope, the resilience of the idea whose indomitable subversive potentials keep showing themselves creatively when put in dialogue with kindred yet disparate spirits in the theological and philosophical constellations of the modern or late-modern Western world. The Nongmunian panentheism of transcendent body, the rough contours of which I have sketched in this chapter and the previous one in dialogue with Whitehead and Deleuze, is the latest incarnation of that resilience.

At this point I would like to return to the original trinitarian problematique from which the odyssey was launched, and ask: Can the “adventures” of the nondualistic, holistic, and liberating idea of psycho-physical energy, which I have followed, offer a way of constructing a pneumatocentric trinitarian theology that does justice to the originary biblical insight about God who is the liminal Spirit of creation, hovering back and forth between one and many, ideal and material, mind and body, and divine and creaturely? In answering this question, I would like first to take up the triadic formulation of the Great Ultimate offered by Yulgok (which was inspired by the well-known, earlier triadic formulation of the operations of Heaven put forward by Cheng Hao): “‘The Great Ultimate’ is also merely a forced name. Its substance is called Change (易 yeok/yi); its pattern is called the Way (道 do/dao); and its function is called Spirit (神 sin/shen).”41 Yulgok, of course, interprets the Great Ultimate as metaphysical pattern (li), and therefore treats the triadic formulation merely as a different way of construing the essentially dyadic substance-function structure of pattern’s operations. For him, Spirit as the Great Ultimate’s function refers to the immanence of pattern or the Way in each individual thing-event that constitutes its normative measure (“that which it ought to be”), while Change as the Great Ultimate’s substance designates pattern or the Way as the transcendent ontological ground of each thing-event (“that whereby it is”).42 In other words, Change as substance and Spirit as function refer to the dyadic modes of the Way’s creative movement, one quiescent and receptive and the other dynamic and active. As Yulgok—contra Toegye—denies pattern’s own dynamism, the dipolar movement back and forth between the substance of the Great Ultimate and its function, that is, between Change and Spirit, certainly involves psychophysical energy. Yet in his formulation psycho-physical energy takes on a silent, subordinate role, serving as the vehicle and source of power for pattern’s wondrous “spiritual” function of individuating itself and constituting the normative measures of the myriad thing-events.

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