Un, deux, trois - Les différentes modalités de l'Un et sa dynamique

Résumé En

Altogether monist and pluralist, the Chinese have attempted to conciliate these two attitudes. It led them to ponder the interconnections, the conjunctions and the interpenetrations of one system with the other. Its result has been a dynamic conception of the unity of the world on its way toward multiplicity, i.e. a metaphysical, undetermined and homogeneous "One," which is also a "One" producing multiplicity, and is thus the foundation of duality. Duality manifests Unity and is its underling, like Yin to Yang. On the contrary, the Three, a complex entity and realm of the mixed, transcends that duality and is bent toward recovering an original unity embodied in Man and in Center. Both act as mediators between Unity and Duality. In the attempt to combine these two contradictory notions, some thinkers, according to their own idiosyncrasies, have been tempted to concede more or less importance to one or the other of these two notions (although they did not acknowledge it and claimed to equate them). Such is the case of thinkers, like Zhu Xi, who disclose in some aspects of their theories a tendency toward dualism and an opposite tendency toward absolute monism, with a Yang supremacy on Yin, detrimental to the balance of the duality Yin/Yang.