2025 Theses Doctoral

The Mind Medium: A Yin-Yang Philosophy of Mind and Media

Hao, Tenggeer

In this dissertation, I articulate a philosophy of mind and media with the key concepts of the Yijing (Book of Changes) paradigm by examining their re-mediation in modern and contemporary Chinese media practices and connecting them to western philosophical debates on media, mind, time, and space. I focus on the notion of xin (the heart-mind), as its unthinkability within modern empiricism underlies not only the marginalization of the Yijing paradigm but also a series of theoretical conundrums we face in understanding the relationships between mind and body, concept and perception, message and media, and finally, theory and text.

I argue that the mind is inherently cosmic rather than just individual in the Yijing paradigm by showing how space-time cannot be perceptually given without the conceptual mediation of the mind that is fundamentally yin-yang patterned. Perception turns out to be profoundly divinatory, much more extraordinary than Yijing divination is ordinary. The cosmic mind is therefore the condition of possibility of media, accounting for the intelligibility of media as a meta-medium. Methodologically, this profoundly creative philosophy of the Yijing reveals text interpretation to be a divinatory art of co-creation with the cosmic mind.

On the one hand, each of the four chapters of this dissertation theorizes an intermedial dynamic in the work of a modern or contemporary Chinese writer, photographer, or filmmaker. Chapter 1 examines film and literature in considering Lu Xun’s conception of literature as what he calls, “the voice of the mind.” Chapter 2 engages Lang Jingshan’s application of the theories of traditional Chinese painting in the technological medium of photography and considers his work as photographic cosmology. Chapter 3 looks into the interplay of theatre and fiction film in Chen Kaige’s cinema and conceive them as cinematic metaphysics. Chapter 4 investigates how the intermedial play between music, digital image, documentary image, and mystical elements of martial arts in Jia Zhangke’s fiction films constitutes a cinematic reconciliation between epistemology and ethics.

On the other hand, each of the four chapters focuses on a key concept of the Yijing paradigm and examines how their re-mediation in modern and contemporary Chinese media practices resonates with pre-modern Chinese philosophers’ elaborations on them. Chapter 1 shows that xin (the hear-mind), manifesting in Lu Xun’s works as the first-person narrator, is a conceptual medium necessary for space-time and therefore the medium of all media in space-time. Examining Lang Jingshan’s manual for composing a yin-yang micro-cosmos within a photograph,

Chapter 2 demonstrates the materiality of media to be the vitality of qi (vital energy). Teasing out the yin-yang interplay of the real with the virtual in Chen Kaige’s films, Chapter 3 argues that the spatiality of the media involves the entanglement of the physical with the metaphysical. Articulating the five-phases theory of time in Jia Zhangke’s realist cinema, Chapter 4 shows how this realism is in fact celestial in a Yijing sense and the temporality of media is the yin-yang dynamic of the epistemologically real and the ethically good. Explaining the concepts of “pre-heaven,” (xian tian), “aligning and orienting” (jing-ying), “supra-formal” (xing er shang), “change-transformation” (bian-hua), and “cosmic resonance” (gan-ying) along the way, these four chapter together constitute a yin-yang philosophy of mind and media.