Chinese Qi-Naturalism and Liberal Naturalism

The notion of qi (commonly translated as cosmic energy or material force) plays a central role in Chinese philosophy. Both Confucianism and Daoism build their philosophical systems on this notion. Qi is the primary constituent of all concrete things and it contains two forms: yin and yang, which can be interpreted as negative and positive energy in today's terminology. The cosmology championed by Chinese philosophers and astronomers takes the original state of the Universe to be a vacuous, formless state of qi, seething with energy. This cosmology has a naturalistic spirit in that it does not posit any supernatural, transcendent realm prior to the original cosmic state, and yet it has not been accepted into the naturalist camp for the lack of any working reduction between qi-terminology and contemporary physical terms. This paper argues that the currently dominant scientific naturalism is too narrow to be an apt theory of nature, and a more appropriate conception of naturalism is liberal naturalism. Liberal naturalism acknowledges other forms of explanation of the world as naturalistic, even if those explanations are not reducible to physicalistic terms. Under this more liberal conception of naturalism, this paper further presents a legitimate qi-naturalism by explicating the development of qi-cosmology in Chinese intellectual history.