Draws on two different but strikingly similar streams in our world tradition to argue for the contemporary philosophical relevance of ""culture."".

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
  • Historical Reconstruction of Wen
  • The Contemporary Relevance of Cassirer and Confucianism
  • Existing Literature on Wen
  • Outline of Chapters
• 1 Humanism and Language: Cassirer and the Xici (系辞)
  • Xici: Humanism and Language (Wen 文)
  • Cassirer: Humanism and Language/Symbol-making
  • Naive Realism versus Symbolic Idealism
  • Six Characteristic Corollaries of Naive Realism
  • From Substance to Function
  • Cassirer’s Account of Functionalism
  • The Six Characteristics in History
  • Holism and Structuralism: Points 1, 2, 3, and 4
  • Language and Freedom: Points 5 and 6
  • Cassirer’s Linguistic Turn
  • Nature, Organism, and Ziran (自然)
• 2 Li Xiang Yi Jin Yi (立象以尽意): Giving (Symbolic) Form to Phenomena
  • Xiang (象) in the Xici
  • Symbols and Reality
  • Xici 2.2
  • Symbolic Pregnancy
  • Symbolic Pregnancy and Xici 2.2
  • Tian Ren He Yi (天人合一) and Symbolic Idealism
  • Symbolic Idealism and the Zhongyong (中庸)
  • The Universal and the Particular
  • Goethe’s Archetypal Phenomena (Urphänomene)
  • Language: The Concrete Universal
  • The Linguistic Turn of the Xici
• 3 Shi Yan Zhi (诗言志): Giving (Poetic) Form to Qing (情)
  • Knowing Others: Shi Yan Zhi (诗言志)
  • Aesthetic Forms and Morality
  • Giving Form to Emotions
  • Yijing (意境): The Benevolent Continuity of Man and Nature
  • The Aesthetic Education of Man
  • Conclusion
• 4 Wen Yi Zai Dao (文以载道): Giving (Linguistic) Form to Dao
  • The Philosophical Significance of Wen
  • Wen (文), Li (理), and Xiang (象)
  • The Canonization of Wen as the Trigrams
  • The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons (文心雕龙) and “The Origins of Wen” (文原)
  • The Boundedness of Spirit and Form
• 5 Zhi You Wen Ye (质犹文也): Giving (Human) Form to the Self
  • Wen in the Analects
  • Freedom and Form
  • Ancient Wen Graphs
  • Wen, Bildung, and the Aesthetic Education of Man
  • Cassirer’s Aesthetic Individual
  • In Defense of Culture
• 6 Wu Yi Wu Wen (物一无文): Organic Harmony
  • Cassirer and “Harmony in Contrariety” between the Symbolic Forms
  • The Dogma of Substance versus (Critical Idealist) Unity as Function
  • Leibniz and Organism
  • Cassirer’s Interpretation of Goethe’s Idealistic Morphology
  • Humboldt and Language
  • Herder and History
  • Needham, Whitehead, and Correlative Cosmology
  • Organicist Thinking in Confucianism
  • The Continuation of Life
  • Harmony and Mutual Responsiveness (ganying 感应)
  • Symbolic Forms for a New Humanity
  • Organic Harmony as an Ethics in Cassirer’s Oeuvre
  • Culture and Harmony
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1 Definitions of Wen
• Appendix 2 A Brief History of Wen
• Appendix 3 Partial Translation of Song Lian’s “The Origins of Wen” (Wenyuan 文原)
• Glossary
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index