Generativities: Western Philosophy, Chinese Painting, and the Yijing

According to the historical de"nition of philosophy among Western philosophers from Hegel to his anti-historical critics Levinas, Derrida, and Rorty, non-Western peoples have many intellectual practices but in a crucial sense they lack “philosophy.” !is absence meant for Hegel the want of a non-pictorial and abstract, cognitive, conceptual thinking; for later thinkers such as Levinas, Derrida, and Rorty—following a line of thinking in Heidegger that the “other beginning” can only arise in confrontation with the "rst Greek beginning—it concerns the question of a Greek origin that they seek to question and decenter that nevertheless remains the source of all that can be properly called philosophy. Even the pluralizing of this origin in marking the di$erence between Athens and Jerusalem, by distinguishing Greek rationality and Jewish prophetic justice, deepens the privilege. Levinas could accordingly remark in an interview: “I always say—but under my breath—that the Bible and the Greeks present the only serious issues in human life; everything else is dancing.”2 Levinas and Hegel come to an GENERATIVITIES: WESTERN PHILOSOPHY, CHINESE PAINTING, AND THE YIJING