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Introduction
This essay works from the hypothesis that the classical Chinese word wu ... can be interpreted both as ontic nonbeing and ontological nothingness1 and that it con- tributes to the generative process of things in liaison with the Dao .... On account of this, one would be justified in offering an objection to the claim made by Hegel that pure being is equal to pure nothing and that since the "nothing" can be thought of, imagined, or spoken, it therefore is.2 In Daoism the idea of a pure or absolute nothingness is not only tautological, it is downright illogical in that it focuses on things-in-themselves instead of the negatively creative potential of Dao. As Daoist cosmogony testifies to the generativist capability of ontological nothingness, I thus refer to it as meontology.3 In this way, wu can be understood as more than a simple metaphysical tool in that it becomes the very embryonic material from which Dao weaves together the myriad things of the universe and their realities. This fashioning of things, however, does not occur in isolation but in the pre-phenomenological state of non-differentiation that Daoism refers to as the One. Hence, if we wish to affirm our postulation that the ancestor of things locates itself within the One, we not only need to discover the particulars of this original Thing but unveil the process of be- coming for things in general.
Regarding the idea of becoming, Hegel took it to mean the following:
Becoming is the unseparatedness of being and nothing, not the unity which abstracts from being and nothing; but as the unity of being and nothing it is this determinate unity in which there is both being and nothing. But in so far as being and nothing, each unsepa- rated from its other, is, each is not. They are therefore in this unity but only as vanishing, sublated moments.4
Although fascinating in a limited sense, Hegel's theory of becoming as but a series of sublated moments of existence for a determinate object implies that the ancestor of said thing must also be determinate in nature. The freedom of such becoming is thus unidirectional and rigid and would be immediately disqualified by the Daoists as unnatural....