A New Name for an Old Way of Thinking with Roger Ames

The classical Greeks give us a concept of substance that guarantees a permanent and unchanging subject as the substratum for the human experience. Roger Ames argues that in the Yijing or "Book of Changes" we find a stark alternative to this ontology which reflects a holistic, organic, and ecological worldview. This cosmology begins from “living” itself as the motive force behind change, and gives us a world of boundless “becomings:” not “things” that are, but “events” that are happening, a contrast between an ontological conception of human “beings” and a process conception of what Ames calls human “becomings.” 

Roger Ames is the Humanities Chair Professor at Peking University in Beijing and also Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. He's the author and co-author of many books including his study of ancient Chinese political thought, "The Art of Rulership" and "Confucian Role Ethics: A Vocabulary".