Chung-Ying Cheng: Creativity, Onto-Generative Hermeneutics, and the Yijing

The hermeneutical dimensions of Chinese philosophy from the Changes of Zhou (the Zhouyi) through its Confucian, Daoist, and contemporary developments have been a creative inspirational source and guiding intellectual thread in the thought of Chung-ying Cheng. Cheng's extensive engagement with the Classic of Changes (the Yijing??), its role in the formation of the Chinese philosophical tradition and its comparative interconnections with occidental philosophies, has disclosed its deep hermeneutical orientation. The Yijing encompasses processes of empirical observation, empathetic feeling, and self-reflection in the generation of images, or prototypical models that are form-objects or process-events, which performatively enact a comprehensive ontological and situationally appropriate understanding of nature, society, and one self. I examine three issues in outline arising from Cheng's works in this situation: (1) to what extent Chinese philosophy is hermeneutical with respect to (2) modern European understandings of hermeneutics, and (3) the possibility of the distinctive onto-generative hermeneutics that has been articulated for over forty years in the context of Chinese and Western thought in Cheng's prolific works concerning the Yijing.