Creating Instead of Criticising: Rethinking Philosophy of Feng Shui - Feng Shui London UK • The Capital Feng Shui Consultant

“Those who criticise without creating, those who are content to defend the vanished concept without being able to give it the forces it needs to return to life, are the plague of philosophy. All these debaters and communicators are inspired by ressentiment.”
—What is Philosophy?

In Deleuze and Guattari’s eyes, philosophy stagnates when reduced to mere defence or reanimation of dead dogmas. They urge philosophers to create concepts, not just reflect upon or preserve them. This principle of creative production, as opposed to rote reproduction, stands as a vital challenge to anyone working with tradition, especially those of us immersed in ancient systems like feng shui.

As a practising feng shui consultant and a PhD researcher in environmental psychology, this resonates deeply with my personal and academic journey. Feng shui is often discussed through its classical philosophical principles – chi, yin and yang, five elements, bagua, and intricate calendar cycles. But is there a risk in treating these ideas as fixed artefacts, immune to the creative forces that keep a tradition alive?

Philosophical Creation and the Living Nature of Feng Shui

Deleuze’s distinction between creative thinking and static reflection can reformulate how we approach feng shui today. Classical feng shui concepts were themselves products of creative synthesis by thinkers responding to their contexts—a process of invention far removed from static dogmatism.

When critique becomes sterile – when we repeat ancient prescriptions without re-examining, adapting, or revitalising them – we do a disservice to the living flow of the tradition and to those whom it serves. Such practices risk falling into ressentiment: defending forms for their own sake, neglecting the energy and dynamism required for meaningful transformation.

Chi, Yin-Yang, Five Elements and Bagua: Creative Re-engagement

The principle of creation not mere criticism challenges me to engage with chi, yin-yang, five elements, and the bagua model as dynamic frameworks, not as static formulae. For instance:

Chi (Qi): Rather than defining chi as a mere fixed “energy,” I see it as a metaphor for the flow, exchange, and relationality manifest in environmental psychology, adaptable through creative inquiry and measurement. Read more about chi/qi
Yin and Yang: These are not just opposites but a cycle of dynamic processes – always changing, always negotiating boundaries. Contemporary spatial arrangement must reflect this perpetual exchange, as supported by empirical research in environmental responses to design.
Five Elements and Bagua: Both serve as symbolic languages to map and harmonise environments, but they require adaptation to context, culture, and scientific insight. Creating new mappings or correspondences is part of a living, evolving feng shui practice. More about bagua models

The Time Dimension: Classical and Contemporary Perspectives

One challenge for modern feng shui research is engaging with time – not as a static factor but as a living context. The classical tradition tracks cosmic cycles, seasonal changes, and daily rhythms; modern approaches must re-examine these relationships in light of psychology and environmental change.

For example, the Chinese sexagenary cycle (60-year periods) and annual adjustments to energy flows invite not mindless repetition but active interpretation. Insights from environmental psychology and empirical studies increasingly show how time – through light cycles, seasonality, and change – affects well-being and behaviour.

Personal Practice: Toward a Philosophy of Creation in Feng Shui

In my own practice and research, these reflections prompt several guiding questions:

How can classical feng shui concepts be re-lived, re-examined, or even recreated for our time, without simply repeating inherited dogma?
Am I defending tradition for its own sake, or infusing it with new life through evidence-based inquiry and empirical validation?
Are my critiques generative – leading to new concepts, models or metrics for harmonisation – or merely reactive?

The challenge, as Deleuze and Guattari warn, is to resist being the “plague of philosophy” and instead become an agent for creation, not only in abstract theorisation, but in everyday practice and empirical research.

For those practising feng shui, especially at the intersection of tradition and science, this principle is liberating – a call to harmonise evidence, creativity, and reflective practice. Rather than defending vanished concepts or repeating formulas, we are invited to create, revitalise, and reimagine feng shui as a living field, one where ancient wisdom and contemporary insight coalesce.

To integrate Deleuzean philosophy with feng shui concepts, one needs to move beyond viewing feng shui as a static set of rules or metaphysical dogmas and instead approach it as a vibrant process open to creation, becoming, and multiplicity. Deleuze’s key ideas– assemblage, rhizome, immanence, and concept creation – provide a rich theoretical toolkit for reimagining feng shui as a dynamic, adaptive, and creative field, rather than a rigid tradition frozen in antiquity. Read more: Deleuze, Chance and the Living Space: Radical Questions for Spiritual Environmental Practice

How to integrate Deleuzean philosophy with feng shui concepts

Assemblage and Rhizome: The Space of Connections
Deleuze’s notion of assemblage (agencement) resonates with the traditional feng shui emphasis on interconnectedness between people, architecture, and the environment. Instead of seeing a space as simply arranged according to pre-given cosmological formulas, one can understand a living environment as an emergent assemblage – constantly forming new relationships among elements such as chi, inhabitants, material objects, and even temporal flows.

The rhizome, which resists hierarchical structure and promotes multiplicity and connectivity, offers a model for how feng shui energies might spread in non-linear, adaptive patterns. This invites practitioners to consider not only the “classical” flows of qi but also how energies, influences, and patterns emerge uniquely in each case, resisting formulaic interpretation.

Concept Creation: The Becoming of Traditional Ideas
Feng shui’s core ideas – chi, yin-yang, the five elements, bagua – traditionally risk ossification. Deleuzean philosophy advocates treating these not as dogmas but as tools for creative concept production. For example, “chi” becomes a site of continual redefinition, an opportunity for new empirical and experiential exploration – much as Deleuze insists concepts must be created for new problems, not merely repeated or nostalgically defended.

Bagua, instead of a rigid grid to be imposed, can be framed as a compositional device for experimenting with how environments and inhabitants co-constitute value and meaning, producing unforeseen results and encounters.

Immanence and Non-Dualism
Deleuze’s philosophy of immanence dovetails with non-dualistic perspectives found in Daoism and classical feng shui. Instead of understanding phenomena through fixed binaries or transcendent schemas, both traditions urge us to perceive life, space, and time as constituted by flows, gradients, and processes inseparable from one another.

Movement, Chance, and Temporal Becoming
Deleuze and his interpreters underscore movement and chance as sources of novelty and transformation within spatial systems. Applying this to feng shui, time is not merely a mechanistic ticking of cycles but a field of opportunity for the emergence of new harmonies and creative interventions — a way of reading both the present and the unfolding possible futures of a space.

Academic and Practical Implications
Recent academic works show how Deleuzean thinking can enrich both the theory and application of feng shui, for instance:

Reimagining high-rise architecture not as fixed vertical “towers” but as assemblages that accommodate varied flows and temporary assemblages of life, echoing feng shui’s own emphasis on harmony.
Using Deleuze’s model of concept creation to revitalise the empirical study of feng shui: rather than defending or rejecting traditional concepts, scholars and practitioners produce new assemblages and models attuned to specific empirical and cultural contexts.

Conclusion
Integrating Deleuzean philosophy and feng shui involves a rigorous commitment to creative experimentation, an openness to multiplicity, and an ongoing responsibility to remake, rethink, and revitalise both theory and practice. Such an approach is not only philosophically rigorous but can also make feng shui newly relevant in contemporary contexts – bridging East and West, tradition and innovation, theory and lived experience.