New
Materialism

A parable of a mythical emperor named Hundun (literally 'chaos') as recounted by Taoist philosopher Zhuang Zi (370-287 BCE):

There were two emperors who frequently entered the territory of emperor Hundun, and Hundun treated them very generously. They discussed how they could repay his kindness. ‘All men,’ they said, ‘have seven openings so they can see, hear, eat, and breathe. But Hundun alone doesn’t have any. Let’s try boring him some.’ Every day they bored another hole, and on the seventh day Hundun died.

When we conceive things, including our bodies, not as unitary, complete wholes but as an endlessly creative matter evolving in time, then they are in a state like Hundun's. Intelligence is assigned the task of contemplating this endlessly creative matter, organizing the unorganized, speaking the unspeakable, trying to capture the continuity which is nothing but the evolution of life. This is the moment when the opening of the holes (rationale, intelligence) causes an irreversible differentiation. Zhuang Zi pronounces the tragic death of Hundun, leaving the readers in their own journey of finding the Hundun moment in life. Yet something within creativity always exceeds the limit of capture, hence in the material tone of language we hear － in what we understand (mostly narrowly) of onomatopoeia － we are connected with the sheer emergence of the thing before it is captured in the signifying structure of language.

Keywords: creativity, process, materiality, language
Synonyms: material process
Antonyms: bifurcation, binarization
Hyponyms: intelligence, language