The Invitation to Co-becoming

This chapter offers an exploration of the ideas contained in the “Thinking Global Co-Becoming” open invitation. It begins with a rumination on the meaning of the notion of “invitation,” understood as a non-coercive call for collaboration, one grounded in an East Asian tradition of thought in which “people are received as learners, not pursued as pupils” (Book of Rites). It goes on to examine the challenges in building a genuinely plural approach to social difference, one which does not resort to some foundational sense of unity-in-difference such as God or the notion of absolute truth. It argues that co-becoming is possible only by developing an approach to diversity that refuses to ground the many in the one (i.e., to ground diversity in a singular, pre-existing, and totalizing spiritual or moral framework). Rather, co-becoming can emerge by developing the capacity to “walk two roads,” a self-reflexive practice of dynamic mediation between different viewpoints and orientations. Such dynamic relationality is presented to us particularly powerfully within works of Daoist thought such as Zhuangzi and Laozi, though it has an important antecedent in the Book of Changes, the foremost of the classical Chinese texts. Such texts present to us not a logic of self-interested being but one of correlative growth. The invitation is thus an important opportunity to rethink global ethics by bringing into this conversation East Asian philosophical traditions which have heretofore been largely absent from the global conversation regarding modernity and its burdens. Such East Asian philosophical traditions can provide us resources to think more deeply about foundational questions related to co-becoming, including the questions of good and evil, milieu, and the nature of social identity.