ACADEMIA Letters MIND IN NATURE: AN ARGUMENT FROM ONTO-GENERATIVE HERMENEUTICS Andrew Fuyarchuk, Presented at American Philosophical Association Conference I. INTRODUCTION Chung-ying Cheng urges us to think about the relation between the mind and other organisms when he writes, “I believe that we can construct some plausible framework of such as sort, such that the mind would emerge from organic matter.” [1] The answer might well depend on the “plausible framework.” Maybe that framework is evolutionary biology or better yet, maybe the sciences are but one prong of a binary opposition informed by onto-generative hermeneutics. Accordingly, the demand to creatively weave harmony among contesting forces increases with the distance between terms in a relation in just the same way that the pressure to live increases with the distance between an organism’s potential and environmental conditions. For this reason, it is best to explore how the mind emerges from nature through disciplines and cultural norms that are typically at odds. In this regard, the work of Sandra Wawrytko and So- Jeong Park is apt to consult because their method of interpretation is coordinate with the arc of Cheng’s onto-generative hermeneutics. [2] They contrast Western dualistic with Chinese non- dualistic aesthetics, and in so doing position Chinese aesthetics in an ameliorative relationship with Western thought. In other words, their contrast includes a critique of Western aesthetics that calls for a re-interpretation and ultimately a transformation along the lines prefgured in Chinese aesthetics. In agreement with Cheng’s ontology, the diferences they discern are propaedeutic to revealing if not common ground, then the fusion of opposites in an original repetition of pre-dualistic aesthetics. The end is in the beginning. Wawrytko and Park’s very approach to comparative aesthetics aims to operationalize Cheng’s onto-generative method Academia Letters, July 2021 Corresponding Author: Andrew Fuyarchuk, andrewfuyarchuk@gmail.com Citation: Fuyarchuk, A. (2021). MIND IN NATURE: AN ARGUMENT FROM ONTO-GENERATIVE HERMENEUTICS. Academia Letters, Article 2089. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL2089. 1 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0