Publication Details

Abstract

The concepts of ’being’ and ’becoming-extincting’ have been considered as two most basic metaphisical categories in philosophy that are intended to capture two fundamental characters or aspects of the world: the term ’being’ is intended to denote the stable, regular, definite, unchanging aspect or layer of existing things, while the term ’becoming-extincting’ is intended to denote the unstable, irregular, indefinite, changing aspect of layer of existing things. However, it has been a highly controversial issue how to look at the relation between these two fundamental characters of the world and thus between the two categories of being and becoming-extincting: Which one is more fundamental? There have been two basic tendencies. One (’becoming-extincting-over-being approach’) is to maintain overwhelming priority of becoming-extincting over being, while the other (’being-over-becoming-extincting approach’) is to champion overwhelming priority of being over becoming-extincting. In this paper its author intends to present a third approach to this perennial metaphysical issues based on, and through his interpretive elaboration of the Yin-Yang metaphysical vision of the ancient Chinese Classical Book Yi-Jing (I Ching).