The world, then, is the efficient cause of itself. It is resolutely dynamic, autogenerative, self-organizing, and in a real sense, alive. This one world is constituted as a sea of ch’i —psychophysical energy that disposes itself in various concentrations, configurations, and perturbations. The intelligible pattern that can be discerned and mapped from each different perspective within the world is tao —a “pathway” that can, in varying degrees, be traced out to make one’s place and one’s context coherent. Tao is, at any given time, both what the world is, and how it is. In this tradition, there is no final distinction between some independent source of order, and what it orders. There is no determinative beginning or teleological end. The world and its order at any particular time is self-causing, “so-of-itself” (tzu-jan) . It is for this reason Confucius would say that “It is the person who extends order in the world (tao) , not order that extends the person.” Truth, beauty, and goodness as standards of order are not “givens”—they are historically emergent, something done, a cultural product.

The “two-world” order of classical Greece has given our tradition a theoretical basis for objectivity —the possibility of standing outside and taking a wholly external view of things. Objectivity allows us to decontextualize things as “objects” in our world. By contrast, in the “this world” of classical China, instead of starting abstractly from some underlying, unifying, and originating principle, we begin from our own specific place within the world. Without objectivity, “objects” dissolve into the flux and flow, and existence becomes a continuous, uninterrupted process. Each of us is invariably experiencing the world as one perspective within the context of many. Since there is only this world, we cannot get outside of it. From the always unique place one occupies within the continuum of classical China, one interprets the order of the world around one as contrastive “thises” and “thats”—“this person” and “that person”—more or less proximate to oneself. Since each and every person or thing or event in the field of existence is perceived from some position or other, and hence is continuous with the position that entertains it, each thing is related to and a condition of every other. All human relationships are continuous from ruler and subject to friend and friend, relating everyone as an extended “family.” Similarly, all “things,” like all members of a family, are correlated and interdependent. Every thing is what it is at the pleasure of everything else. Whatever can be predicated of one thing or one person is a function of a network of relationships, all of which conspire to give it its role and to constitute its place and its definition. A father is “this” good father by virtue of the quality of the relationships that locate him in this role and the deference of “these” children and “that” mother, who all sustain him in it.

Because all things are unique, there is no strict notion of identity in the sense of some self-same identical characteristic that makes all members of a class or category or species the same. For example, there is no essential defining feature—no divinely endowed soul, rational capacity, or natural locus of rights—that makes all human beings equal. In the absence of such equality that would make us essentially the same, the various relationships that define one thing in relation to another tend to be hierarchical and contrastive: bigger or smaller, more noble or more base, harder or softer, stronger or weaker, more senior or more junior. Change in the quality of relationships between things always occurs on a continuum as movement between such polar oppositions. The general and most basic language for articulating such correlations among things is metaphorical: In some particular aspect at some specific point in time, one person or thing is “overshadowed” by another; that is, made yin to another’s yang . Literally, yin means “shady” and yang means “sunny,” defining in the most general terms those contrasting and hierarchical relationships that constitute indwelling order and regularity.

It is important to recognize the interdependence and correlative character of the yin/yang kind of polar opposites, and to distinguish this contrastive tension from the dualistic opposition implicit in the vocabulary of the classical Greek world we explored above, where one primary member of a set such as Creator stands independent of and is more “real” than the world He creates. The implications of this difference between dualism and polar contrast are fundamental and pervasive.

In the classical Chinese model, knowledge is conceived somewhat differently. Form is not some permanent structure to be discovered behind a changing process, but a perceived intelligibility and continuity that can be mapped within the dynamic process itself. Spatial forms—or “things”—are temporal flows. “Things” and “events” are mutually shaping and being shaped, and exist as a dynamic calculus of contrasting foci emerging in tension with each other. Changing at varying degrees of speed and intensity, the tensions constitutive of things reveal a site-specific regularity and pattern, like currents in the water, sound waves in the air, or weather systems in the sky. Etymologically, the character ch’i —”the stuff of existence”—is probably acoustic, making “resonance” and “tensions” a particularly appropriate way of describing the relations that obtain among things. In contrast with the more static visual language of classical Greek thought typified by geometry, classical Chinese tends to favor a dynamic aural vocabulary, where wisdom is closely linked with communication—that keenness of hearing and those powers of oral persuasion that will enable one to encourage the most productive harmony out of relevant circumstances. Much of the key philosophic vocabulary suggests etymologically that the sage orchestrates communal harmony as a virtuoso in communicative action.

“Reason” is not a human faculty independent of experience that can discover the essences of things, but the palpable determinacy that pervades both the human experience and the world experienced. Reason is coherence—the pattern of things and functions. Rational explanation does not lie in the discovery of some antecedent agency or the isolation and disclosure of relevant causes, but in mapping out the local conditions that collaborate to sponsor any particular event or phenomenon. And these same conditions, once understood, can be manipulated to anticipate the next moment.

An important factor in classical Chinese “knowing” is comprehensiveness. Without an assumed separation between the source of order in the world and the world itself, causal agency is not so immediately construed in terms of relevant cause and effect. All conditions interrelate and collaborate in greater or lesser degree to constitute a particular event as a confluence of experiences. “Knowing” is thus being able to trace out and manipulate those conditions far or near that will come to affect the shifting configuration of one’s own place. There is a direct and immediate affinity between the human being and the natural world so that no firm distinction is made between natural and man-made conditions—they are all open to cultivation and manipulation. In fact, it is because of the fundamental continuity between the human pattern and the natural pattern that all of the conditions, human and otherwise, that define a situation such as battle can be brought into sharp focus. In the absence of a severe animate/inanimate dualism, the battlefield with its complex of conditions is very much alive.

The inventory of philosophical vocabulary used in classical China to define this kind of “knowing” tends to be one of tracing out, unraveling, penetrating, and getting through. Knowing entails “undoing” something, not in an analytic sense to discover what it essentially “is,” but to trace out the connections among its joints and sinews, to discern the patterns in things, and, on becoming fully aware of the changing shapes and conditions of things, to anticipate what will ensue from them. The underlying metaphor of “tracing a pattern” is implicit in the basic epistemic vocabulary of the tradition such as “to tread a pathway, a way” (tao) , “to trace out, coherence” (li) , “to figure, image, model” (hsiang) , “to unravel, to undo” (chieh) , “to penetrate” (t’ung) , “to break through” (ta) , “to name, to make a name, to inscribe” (ming) , “to ritualize” (li) , “to inscribe, markings, culture” (wen) , and so on. In contrast with its classical Greek counterpart where “knowing” assumes a mirroring correspondence between an idea and an objective world, this Chinese “knowing” is resolutely participatory and creative—“tracing” in both the sense of etching a pattern and of following it. To know is “to realize,” to “make real.” The path is not a “given,” but is made in the treading of it. Thus, one’s own actions are always a significant factor in the shaping of one’s world.

Because this emergent pattern invariably arises from within the process itself, the tension that establishes the line between one’s own focus and one’s field gives one a physical, psychological, social, and cosmological “skin”—a shape, a continuing, insistently particular identity. This dynamic pattern is reflexive in the sense that one’s own dispositions are implicate in and affect the shaping of one’s environment. One’s own “shape” is constantly being reconstrued in tension with what is most immediately pressing in upon one and vice versa.

To continue the “person” example from our discussion of the classical Greek world view, generally in classical Chinese philosophy a particular person is not a discrete individual defined in terms of some inherent nature familiar in recent liberal democratic theory, but is a configuration of constitutive roles and relationships: Yang Ta-wei’s father, An Loche’s teacher, Kao Ta-jen’s neighbor, a resident of Yung-ho village, and so on. These roles and relationships are dynamic, constantly being enacted, reinforced, and ideally deepened through the multiple levels of communal discourse: embodying (t’i) , ritualizing (li) speaking (yen), playing music (yüeh) and so on. Each of these levels of discourse is implicit in every other, so there is a sense in which a person can be fairly described as a nexus of specific patterns of discourse. By virtue of these specific roles and relationships, a person comes to occupy a place and posture in the context of family and community. The human being is not shaped by some given design that underlies natural and moral order in the cosmos and that stands as the ultimate objective of human growth and experience. Rather, the “purpose” of the human experience, if it can be so described, is more immediate: to coordinate the various ingredients that constitute one’s particular world here and now, and to negotiate the most productive harmony out of them. Simply put, it is to get the most out of what you’ve got here and now.

Creativity also has a different place in the classical Chinese world. Again, in gross terms, the preassigned design and ultimate purpose assumed in classical Western cosmology means that there is a large investment of creativity “up front” in the “birth” of a phenomenon—a condition reflected rather clearly in the preestablished “Ideas” of Plato, the “potentiality/actuality” distinction of Aristotle, or the Creator/creature dualism of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. For the classical Chinese world view, in the absence of an initial creative act that establishes a given design and a purpose governing change in the cosmos, the order and regularity of the world emerges from the productive juxtapositions of different things over the full compass of their existence. No two patterns are the same, and some dispositions are more fruitfully creative than others. For this reason, human knowledge is fundamentally performative—one “knows” a world not only passively in the sense of recognizing it, but also in the active shaping and “realizing” of it. It is the capacity to anticipate the patterned flow of circumstance, to encourage those dispositions most conducive to a productive harmony, and ultimately to participate in negotiating a world order that makes best advantage of its creative possibilities. Harmony is attained through the art of contextualizing.

Frances Arno Saphro (Ukrainian, 1877-1962) Art Deco Needlepoint Tapestry, 1935

At the centre of the petition against JBS is a perceived lack of transparency over its massive expansion plans in Nigeria. In the coming years, the meat company plans to invest $2.5bn in six giant meat-processing plants that are seen as a bridgehead to the fast-growing African market.

Civil society groups say there is scant information about whether JBS has assessed the social and environmental consequences of this plan, which would threaten smallholder farmers, domestic food security, land-use priorities, as well as locking in huge quantities of methane emissions. Methane is one of the most climate-destabilising greenhouse gases.