ABSTRACT
This chapter revisits debates in the 1960s and 1970s regarding the prospect of interpreting the Neo-Confucian ‘heart-mind’ teachings of Wang Yangming and his controversial student Wang Ji (Wang Longxi) as forms of existentialism. Using Sartre as a counterpoint, it traces the existential dimensions operative in their works and then offers a structural-existential interpretation of the roles of generative nothingness, negational linguistic strategies, the empty heart-mind, and pre-reflective reflexive awareness in Wang Ji’s discourse. He analyses this originary relational self-awareness as natural, ethical, and beyond good and evil, justifying individual freedom and dissenting truth. After examining charges by critics that this position is antinomian, nihilistic, and subversive, I conclude by considering how Wang Ji’s relational individualism and explanation of the continuity of awareness, action, and world in the incipient moment offers an alternative response to the existential condition of alienation that differs from paradigmatic varieties of existentialism.
