Welke intellectuele verschuiving hebben we nodig in een tijd van planetaire risico’s? Inspiratie uit symbiose in de levenswetenschappen en het begrip Gongsheng/Kyōsei
What Intellectual Shift Do We Need in a Time of Planetary Risks? Inspirations from Symbiosis in Life Sciences and the Notion of Gongsheng/Kyōsei
Bing Song
Context and Inquiry
We live in an age of crises, some of which are planetary in scope and existential in nature. These include extreme social and political divisions, the looming global economic recession, lingering pandemics, climate change- induced extreme weathers and natural disasters, and more recently nuclear war threats in the ongoing hot war in Europe. So far, very few globally coordinated and effective efforts have been taken to address them.
Worse still, a zero-sum mentality continues to shape and drive the “great power” contests, and as such, trade and financial sanctions, weaponization of currency, ideology and technology have taken the center stage of global geopolitics of late. We continue to lead our lives as if we were all indepen- dent and self-contained entities, with clear boundaries between “us” and“them.” We firmly believe in unconstrained human agency with which we freely define and redefine who we are and take action or inaction as we see fit to advance narrowly conceived personal, group or national agendas. Recognizing the increasingly deteriorating planetary condition, the co- editors and contributors to this book would like to contend with this framework of segregated thinking and put forward different perspectives on the accepted notions about what counts as an individual, whether our perceived self-sufficiency can withstand challenge, and how we are related to each other and to the rest of nature. In the process, we hope to tap into intellectual resources of the East and West, humanities and sciences, and identify globally shared ideas, which may guide humanity to reset our self- perception, our relationship with “others,” and help us better understand and address planetary scale challenges.
To that end, we would like to introduce the notion of gongsheng or kyōsei (共生 in both written Chinese and Japanese kanji), which has been used in China and Japan to translate the ubiquitous biological phenomenon of “symbiosis” discussed in life sciences. It has also been broadly used in social, economic and political contexts to refer to the conception of the world as consisting of mutually embedded, co-existent and co-becoming entities. So, what is symbiosis and what is gongsheng/kyōsei? How are they related to each other? What are the philosophical origins of gongsheng/kyōsei in the East Asian context? What implications can we draw for novel thinking about planetary challenges we face, and how can they inspire new thinking and action in dealing with the rapidly deteriorating planetary condition?
B. Song (B )
Berggruen Institute China Center, Beijing, China
e-mail: songbing@berggruen.org
© The Author(s) 2024
B. Song and Y. Zhan (eds.), Gongsheng Across Contexts,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-7325-5_1
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mystiek & filosofie 