From Yuanization to Emptiness: The Polarizing Rhythm of Cognitive Construction and Its Self-Deconstruction

Abstract

This essay proposes a general rhythmic model of how cognitive structures emerge and dissolve. The first moment of cognition is “yuanization” (元化): the inaugural establishment of a label, framework, or concept out of an undifferentiated field, whereby the world acquires a discernible structure for the first time. The second moment is “polarization” (极化), which comprises two sub-phases: first, a fixed content is made into the “pole” that covers everything; then this operation is abstracted into a formal procedure in which any content whatsoever can be polarized to cover everything. The third moment is “pluralization” (多元), wherein the excesses of polarization provoke the revolt of difference, and a single framework fractures into a multiplicity of competing frameworks. The fourth moment is “deconstruction” (解构), which subjects plurality itself to interrogation and dissolution, returning cognition to the nameless and the empty. This four-phase rhythm stands to the Buddhist doctrine of “arising, abiding, decaying, emptiness” (成住坏空) not in a relation of analogy, but of strict structural identity. The essay further argues that every cognitive framework—including “arising, abiding, decaying, emptiness” itself—is inescapably embedded in this rhythm. The criterion of a doctrine’s maturity lies not in whether it has constructed a perfect “arising,” but in whether, during its “abiding,” it has left a passage for its own “decay,” and whether, after its “emptiness,” it refrains from clinging to emptiness itself.

Keywords: yuanization; polarization; arising-abiding-decaying-emptiness; deconstruction; self-reflexivity; emptiness

I. Yuanization: Cutting the First Name Out of the Nameless

The first act of cognition is naming.

Before naming, the world is not a void, but rather an undivided mass of flowing, continuous, pre-categorical experience. Laozi says:

This line is usually read as a caution about the limits of language, but it also discloses the inaugural act of cognition: from the unspeakable Dao, a speakable “name” is forcibly carved out. This carving is yuanization.

The essence of yuanization lies not in “discovering” something, but in “establishing” something. It is not the finding of a lamp that already existed in the darkness; it is the lighting of the first lamp in the dark—whereby darkness is divided into “the place the lamp illuminates” and “the place it does not.” This division is a construction without precedent.

The Book of Genesis says: “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light” (Gen. 1:3). In Heidegger’s reading, this divine “saying” is nothing other than linguistic naming. In Greek philosophy, Heraclitus posits the logos (λόγος): the cosmos is for the first time conceived as a rational, intelligible order. When Thales declares that “all is water,” the proposition appears crude, but the crucial point is that he extracts “water” from its place among things and elevates it into the first “yuan”—the first principle that explains all things.

The philosophical import of yuanization is this: it is not a transition from nothing to something—for there is no pure nothing. It is a transition from the undifferentiated to the differentiated. In Buddhist terms, this is the arising of the discriminating mind (分别心). The Awakening of Faith in the Mahāyāna (大乘起信论) states:

What is here called “ignorance” is not stupidity but the primal division: the splitting of an originally seamless Dharma-realm into subject and object, this and that, name and reality.

Yuanization is the beginning of construction. Without it, cognition would be impossible. But yuanization simultaneously plants the seed of polarization: for once a “yuan” exists, it demands to be applied.

II. Polarization: From a Fixed Value Covering All Things to Any Value Covering All Things

Yuanization produces a label. The first step of polarization is to stick this label onto everything.

This gesture recurs throughout the history of philosophy. Thales says all is water; Anaximenes says all is air; Heraclitus says all is fire; Pythagoras says all is number; Parmenides says all is being. No sooner is a “yuan” established than it is pushed to its limit and made to explain everything. This is not accidental; it is the necessity of cognitive economy: if a framework works in some local domain, why not extend it to every domain? Pattern recognition inherently involves generalization.

But the deeper point of polarization lies not in the quarrel over whether “water” or “fire” should cover all things—that is a dispute over content. The deeper point lies in the second sub-phase: the discovery that the content does not matter, that what matters is the gesture of “covering all” itself. Polarization thereby leaps from fixed-value polarization to arbitrary-value polarization—any content whatsoever, once selected as the “pole,” can cover everything with the same structure.

This explains why human history has produced so many mutually incompatible “universal keys”: power, sexuality, economics, genes, structure, information, energy, Buddha-nature, Dao—each has been or is being polarized. Their contents are incompatible with one another, but the form of their polarization is identical.

Kant describes this mechanism with great acuity in the Critique of Pure Reason. He identifies what he calls a “natural illusion” of reason: the tendency to extend categories that are valid only within experience (such as causality) beyond experience, in order to explain the world as a whole, the soul, and God. Kant writes that human reason, driven by its own nature, inevitably oversteps the boundaries of experiential use.¹ This is precisely polarization: taking a framework with merely local validity and forcibly extending it to everything.

Zen Buddhism offers a devastating critique of this tendency. Huineng says: “Worldly people are deluded by attachment to form; others are deluded within by attachment to emptiness.” Attachment to form is clinging to a specific “pole”; attachment to emptiness is making “emptiness” itself into a new “pole”—arbitrary-value polarization. Nāgārjuna writes:

Emptiness was meant to deconstruct all views, but if emptiness itself becomes a view, a new label stuck onto everything, it is worse than the original attachment—for it masquerades as liberation.

The dialectical consequence of polarization is inevitable: it will encounter counterexamples, differences, and exceptions. When “all is water” meets fire, when “everything is sexuality” meets behaviors that have nothing to do with sex, when “all relations are power” meets unalloyed kindness, the framework begins to crack. The more thorough the polarization, the more violent the resistance it provokes.

III. Pluralization: The Revolt of Difference and the Beginning of Deconstruction

When a single framework can no longer swallow every difference, plurality appears.

Pluralization is not the simple negation of polarization; it is the backlash that necessarily follows when polarization is pushed too far. A framework driven to its extreme exposes its own boundaries. Kuhn describes this process in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: a paradigm (a “yuan”) is extended across the board during the period of “normal science” (polarization); but as anomalies accumulate, the paradigm enters crisis, and finally multiple competing paradigms coexist in the stage of “revolution.”²

The hallmark of this stage is that there is no longer a single truth, but a coexistence of multiple perspectives, frameworks, and labels. Each claims explanatory power, but none can fully dominate the others. This corresponds roughly to the postmodern “decentering.” Lyotard announces in The Postmodern Condition “incredulity toward metanarratives”—the grand narratives (polarized frameworks) have decayed, replaced by a plurality of “little narratives.”³

But plurality itself carries the danger of polarization. If “plurality” is made into a new “yuan”—if it becomes “everything is plural,” “all frameworks are equally valid,” “difference itself is absolute”—then plurality has become yet another label stuck onto everything. Derrida is keenly aware of this. His “différance” is not another grand term to be polarized, but a self-canceling concept. He writes that “différance is neither a word nor a concept.”⁴ Deconstruction is not the replacement of an old framework by a new one, but the perpetual marking of the limits of frameworks as such.

The value of plurality does not lie in providing more answers, but in rendering untenable the illusion that a single framework can cover everything. It is the beginning of deconstruction, not its completion.

IV. Deconstruction and Emptiness: The Open State After the Abolition of All Labels

The fourth step is the interrogation, generalization, and abolition of plurality itself.

If plurality is merely the coexistence of multiple “yuan,” it remains within the world of labels. What deconstruction seeks is not the selection of the correct label, but the exposure of the conditioned and provisional character of all labels. This is not nihilism—nihilism is still a “pole,” a polarized “nothing.” Genuine deconstruction leads to emptiness: not to nothingness, but to the open state in which all labels have been laid down.

Buddhist discussions of emptiness are here unsurpassed. Nāgārjuna writes:

Emptiness is not the negation of existence but the negation of svabhāva—the negation of any fixed, condition-independent essence. This coincides exactly with the argument of this essay: no framework possesses svabhāva; every framework is constructed (yuanized) and extended (polarized), and therefore every framework can be deconstructed.

But here the subtlest danger appears: if deconstruction itself becomes a new “yuan,” if “emptiness” becomes a new label stuck onto everything, if anti-framework becomes a framework, then the fourth step collapses back into the first and second. This is the difficulty indicated by the Zen saying “dwell in emptiness without clinging to emptiness.” Huangbo Xiyun says:

To grasp at the object “emptiness” is still to grasp at objects; to make “deconstruction” into a mind is still to grasp at mind. Both must be forgotten—one must not even cling to the act of deconstruction itself.

Here the limit of all deconstructive philosophy is exposed. Derrida ceaselessly invents new terms to avoid reification (différance, trace, supplement…), but every new term, once academicized, immediately becomes a new “yuan,” polarized and stuck onto everything. This is the permanent predicament of deconstruction: it can postpone the solidification of frameworks, but it can never fully exit the cycle of frameworks.

Yet it is precisely this predicament that points toward genuine maturity: not finding a way out of the cycle, but attaining freedom within the cycle. This means: being able to establish a framework when needed (arising), to use it freely (abiding), to break it deliberately (decay), and to lay it down when it is no longer needed (emptiness)—without being bound by the act of laying down itself.

V. Arising, Abiding, Decaying, Emptiness: Not Analogy, but Structural Identity

Buddhism summarizes the trajectory of all conditioned things (saṃskṛta-dharma) in four words: arising, abiding, decaying, emptiness (成住坏空).

The Abhidharmakośa repeatedly describes the cycle of the world from the eon of formation to the eon of emptiness.⁵ But arising-abiding-decaying-emptiness is far more than a cosmological timetable; it is a structural description of everything that depends on causes and conditions. Cognitive frameworks are no exception.

The “arising” of a cognitive framework is yuanization. Its “abiding” is polarization—its widespread application, consolidation, and assumption of self-evidence. Its “decaying” is the manifestation of plurality and difference—the accumulation of anomalies, the emergence of competing frameworks, the loss of self-evidence. Its “emptiness” is deconstruction and abolition—the laying down of the framework, the return to the nameless, undifferentiated open state.

This is not a literary analogy. Yuanization and arising, polarization and abiding, pluralization and decaying, deconstruction and emptiness—these pairs are identical in logical structure: all are phases of the movement from non-differentiation, to the establishment of differentiation, to the solidification of differentiation, to the dissolution of differentiation, to the return to non-differentiation. The only difference lies in the discursive systems employed: one speaks the vocabulary of epistemology, the other the vocabulary of Buddhism.

The four-phase model proposed in this essay is therefore itself subject to arising, abiding, decaying, and emptiness. It has already “arisen”—it has been written, named, constructed. It is in the initial phase of “abiding”—being read, discussed, perhaps applied. It will eventually “decay”—encounter counterexamples, encounter phenomena it cannot explain, encounter more effective frameworks. And it will eventually be “emptied”—laid down, forgotten, or renamed as something else.

VI. The Criterion of Maturity: Leaving a Passage for Decay Within Abiding

On the basis of the foregoing analysis, a criterion for the maturity of doctrines may be proposed.

Most doctrines direct their entire effort toward “arising” and “abiding.” They attempt to construct a perfect system (arising), and then to demonstrate that this system is eternal, universal, unshakeable (abiding). Plato’s theory of Forms, Hegel’s absolute spirit, Freud’s sexual instinct, Marx’s determination by productive forces—whatever their respective merits, they all tend structurally to exclude “decay” and “emptiness.” Such doctrines may acknowledge change, even their own “development,” but they typically absorb change into their own framework, digesting exceptions rather than allowing exceptions to destroy the framework.

Mature doctrines present a different posture.

First, they acknowledge that they are constructions, not final statements of absolute truth. Kant admits in the Preface to the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason that his critical philosophy does not establish a “science of sciences,” but merely demarcates the boundaries of reason’s legitimate use. Wittgenstein writes at the end of the Tractatus:

This is the mark of a mature doctrine: it leads you to a certain height, then instructs you to burn the ladder.

The Buddha’s teaching is no different. The Diamond Sutra says:

Even the Dharma itself—the raft used to cross the river—must eventually be left behind. The Buddha did not establish an “abiding” teaching; he established a teaching that knows it will be let go.

The criterion may therefore be stated as follows:

The maturity of a doctrine lies not in how perfectly it “arises” or how firmly it “abides,” but in whether, during its “abiding,” it has left a passage for its own “decay”; whether, in speaking the truth, it simultaneously indicates that this speaking is not the truth; whether, after its “emptiness,” it no longer clings to emptiness.

In the language of this essay: the maturity of a framework is proportional to its self-awareness of its own polarizing tendency. The more mature the framework, the less it fears its own dissolution. The less mature the framework, the more it treats dissolution as an enemy to be annihilated.

This is not relativism. Relativism is still a “pole”—polarized, it becomes “everything is relative,” which is self-contradictory: if everything is relative, then “everything is relative” is also relative, and therefore not absolute. True maturity is knowing when to use a framework and when to lay it down—without being troubled by the act of knowing itself.

Conclusion

Yuanization and polarization are the twin instincts of human cognition: we cannot not construct, and we cannot not extend. Pluralization and deconstruction are cognition’s self-corrective mechanisms: when extension goes too far, difference rebels, frameworks collapse, and all returns to emptiness.

This cycle has no end, and it needs none. It is the nature of consciousness.

The Daodejing says: “Returning is the movement of the Dao” (ch. 40).⁶ Construction must move toward its own opposite; polarization must meet deconstruction; arising must decay; abiding must empty. This is not tragedy, but Dao.

The Heart Sutra says:

Frameworks and the world are not opposed. Frameworks are the skeleton of the world; the world is the flesh of frameworks. When a framework, polarized to its extreme, collapses in ruins, what falls is not the world, but only the framework that had been mistaken for the world.

Then, in the empty place, a new “yuan” arises.

This is the breathing of cognition.

References

1. Laozi, Daodejing, chs. 1, 40.
2. Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, chs. 13, 24; trans. Kumarajiva (Chinese).
3. The Diamond Sutra (Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra), ch. 6.
4. The Heart Sutra (Prajñāpāramitā-hṛdaya Sūtra).
5. The Awakening of Faith in the Mahāyāna (Mahāyāna-śraddhotpāda Śāstra).
6. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
7. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness. London: Routledge, 1961.
8. Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 3rd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
9. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
10. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.