| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Yung Sik Kim. The Natural Philosophy of Chu Hsi (1130–1200). (Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society Held at Philadelphia for Promoting Useful Knowledge, number 235.) Philadelphia, Pa.: American Philosophical Society. 2000. Pp. xii, 380. $30.00.

Known as the great synthesizer of neo-Confucian philosophy, Chu Hsi provided a comprehensive understanding of the world, from its personal and moral to cosmic and natural dimensions. Like other Sung philosophers, he expressed many of his views in commentaries, letters, and conversations. Yung Sik Kim's study brings together Chu's dispersed ideas and describes the system of concepts and categories that Chu assumed but did not present systematically. Limiting his aim, Kim focuses specifically on the natural or cosmic dimensions. 1

Strictly speaking, and as Kim recognizes, Chu Hsi did not have a natural philosophy. Unlike Western thinkers, Chinese thinkers did not distinguish sharply between culture and nature, animate and inanimate objects, or matter and spirit (or mind). For Chu Hsi and neo-Confucian philosophers, the cosmos was a continuum constituted of ch'i (configurations of energy), ordered by means of li (patterns, principles), and characterized by constant change. Although moral, social, and political issues were Chu's primary philosophical concern, they were not separate from his ideas about the cosmos, for the li of particular things and affairs were all interrelated and were manifestations of the one li of the cosmos. Specific concepts, such as li and ch'i, applied to all spheres of activity, human or otherwise. . . .

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