The Strangeness of Others and the Critique of Social Structures Learning from Ames’s Yiduobufen

Building on our exemplars, new roads for feminism can be explored. But this also presents new challenges. Henry Rosemont’s and Roger Ames’ role ethics contests the assumption of an atomic individual in much of Western philosophy and emphasizes instead a relational self. In this way, Robin Wang points out, “a person should be understood in holistic, interdependent, holographic, and focus-field terms.” However, modern Western individualist thought was developed in the face of new problems—many of which were different in kind or practically non-existent in earlier history. Wang notes: “We…inhabit an alienated world in which human strangers, problematic social structures, the never-ending introduction of new technological devices, and planetary chaos are parts of our daily lives.” She then looks at how Ames’s emphasis on the Confucian idea “yiduo bu fen”, or “the inseparability of the one and the many”, may contribute to critiquing newly emerging social structures. Employing the same notion of ji 奇 (the ‘surprising’) used by Sigurðsson, Wang specifically looks at how Ames’s thought can strengthen feminist critiques today.