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Yin and Yang

Yin and Yang

The paired principles that generate the structural logic of the I Ching. Yin is the broken line, the receptive, the yielding, the dark, the cold, the feminine, the earthly; yang is the unbroken line, the creative, the firm, the bright, the warm, the masculine, the heavenly. Neither exists without the other; each transforms into the other at its extreme; and their mixings across six lines generate the sixty-four hexagrams.

Hellmut Wilhelm’s Change (1960) gives the structural account. The generative power of the book “is change. If heaven and earth did not change, this power could penetrate nowhere. The reciprocal influences of the five elements would come to a standstill and the alternations of the four seasons would cease” (H. Wilhelm 1960). Yin and yang are not static qualities but the two poles of a continuous transformation — yi, change itself, being the Yi Ching’s name.

Jung read yin and yang through the psychology of opposites. The conjunction of opposites, which European alchemy pursued through Sol and Luna, Chinese cosmology had already articulated in yin and yang. The convergence is not accidental. Jung’s reception of Richard Wilhelm’s translations — the I Ching, the Secret of the Golden Flower — was grounded in his recognition that Chinese thought had preserved a philosophical infrastructure (opposites as co-constitutive, change as primary) that European thought had lost with the Aristotelian hardening of contradiction.

For Seba the concept stands as the Eastern analogue of the Heraclitean enantiodromia — the principle that everything turns into its opposite, which the pre-Socratic Greeks articulated in fragment 88 (“the same thing in us is living and dead”) and which Chinese cosmology had already inscribed in the most primitive graphic of the broken and unbroken line.

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