ABSTRACT
The cosmological thinking embodied in the Yijing, as we saw at the end of the last chapter, often seems remote from modern ways of thinking. Nevertheless, in recent years Chinese speculation about the natural world has evoked some serious and productive responses in various fields of Western thought. To put this in wider perspective, Western cosmological and metaphysical thinking has at various times in its history displayed an inclination to draw on earlier traditions, sometimes of non-European origin, as a way of reflecting on and challenging prevailing ways of thought and of helping to stimulate radical changes. Thus, early Christianity drew on Plato, mediaeval philosophy drew on Aristotle, the Renaissance thinkers turned to the Hermetic tradition and the Jewish Kabbala, early modern science revisited Greek atomism and Hellenistic thought and the Romantics returned to earlier esoteric and gnostic traditions. In recent times Daoism has begun to play a similar, if more modest, role in attempts to rationalise and make acceptable fundamental changes in ways of thinking about nature, the cosmos and the place of human life within it. Certainly, as a notorious philosophy of detachment and mystical reflection, Daoism seems an unlikely contender for such a role, yet it has proved a strange attractor for certain contemporary thinkers seeking to move beyond older mechanistic paradigms and to forge new alliances between recent developments in science and some alternative metaphysical ways of thinking.
