Image Abstraction and Analogical Correlation as a Meta-Epistemological Structure: A Proof of Universal Necessity

Philosophical anthropology has long defined the essence of human being through tool use, social cooperation, and linguistic symbols. However, these supposed defining traits either have embryonic counterparts in the animal kingdom or are derivative outcomes themselves, each presupposing a more primordial cognitive structure whose own conditions of possibility have seldom been examined. This paper attempts to demonstrate that this repeatedly presupposed yet unnamed primordial structure is precisely what classical Chinese philosophy calls quxiang bilei (image abstraction and analogical correlation). It is not merely one mode of cognition among others, but the meta-epistemological structure that renders all cognition possible. Its fourfold procedure—image abstraction, analogical correlation, verification, and feedback—constitutes the logically indispensable condition for any cognitive act whatsoever. The argument unfolds in six steps. First, it distinguishes two levels of inquiry into human origins: the empirical-temporal and the logical-transcendental, clarifying both the theoretical contribution and the implicit presuppositions of Engels’s proposition that “labor created man itself.” Second, employing a strict transcendental reductio ad absurdum without recourse to empirical examples, it demonstrates the universal necessity of the fourfold procedure. Third, taking the Zhou Yi (I Ching) as a paradigm, it shows that classical Chinese thought represents the earliest and most exemplary conscious formalization of this meta-cognitive structure, and sketches its evolutionary progression from lower to higher cognitive levels against the evidence of Paleolithic archaeological relics. Fourth, it engages in an in-depth dialogue with Kant, Hume, and Heidegger, attempting to address several long-debated core problems in Western epistemology. Finally, it phenomenologically clarifies the Dao as the logical remainder of image abstraction, and strictly distinguishes between the operational dimension and the existential dimension of quxiang bilei. This article is the first in a series of research projects aimed at laying a solid logical foundation for the whole theoretical system. Subsequent papers will launch a systematic dialogue between Chinese and Western epistemological traditions and explore the theoretical implications of this model in the philosophy of artificial intelligence.