Challenges for a Globalizing Philosophy and a Globalizing Writer, Composing, 12/07/2018

Back in March, I published a review at SERRC of Bryan Van Norden’s book Taking Back Philosophy. I thought it was a pretty good review, and that Van Norden had written a pretty good book.

It’s a straight-up polemic – a political pamphlet for the university sector. The language is direct, but you can tell how deep the knowledge roiling in the background of this fascinating book goes. Van Norden has some of the most comprehensive knowledge of ancient and contemporary Chinese and other East Asian philosophical works as anyone I've encountered in my professional life.

When there are always too many things to read.

Only my old supervisor Barry Allen has knowledge that rivals Van Norden’s. His two recent books on Chinese philosophy, Vanishing Into Things and Striking Beauty, provide a history of the philosophical vectors of development across Chinese and Indian cultures.

Of course, I say this because I myself haven’t gotten to know very many Asian people who themselves are experts in the history of Asian traditions of philosophy. Or any, really.

My own review offered a few directions to anyone who has any expertise or experience in the Western tradition of philosophy – and no others. I gave a summary of my own knowledge of Asian philosophy, and the ideas in Chinese traditions that offers some crackling synergies with my own work.

The process-focussed ontologies and ethics of Daoist traditions offer a lot of profundity and depth to Western process thinking. Western traditions tend to keep process thinking in a minoritarian, obscured position. So a tradition where process thinking is mainstream and a subject of centuries of commentary can offer Western process thinking a lot.

I’m working now on another review for SERRC, on my colleague Raphael Sassower’s book The Quest for Prosperity. It’s a complex argument on behalf of communitarian approaches to economic, moral, political, and ethical matters.

A Chinese Daoist funeral service. Complex philosophies that have
grown out of thousands of years of culture, intellectual work,
religion, and engagement with the world.

I took a lot of notes on Sassower’s book, so I’ll be rolling through a few of those ideas as riffs on the blog for the next while. This is going to be a bit weird because I haven’t written the actual review yet.

I have the outline, which is based on a bunch of those notes that I took as I was reading the book. So I was of two minds for a while about whether I’d even mention Sassower’s book on the blog at all.

Ultimately, I decided that I would. Two reasons why.

First reason. The review is going to be a unified 2,000-word composition discussing a core concept of Sassower’s book – his communitarian vision of prosperity as a network of friendship.

The blog doesn’t do that. My cousin Hulk Stuart MacLean has described my blog as a profound act of improvisation, like the improvisations he plays with his colleagues as jazz musicians. He’s right. I’ve written blog posts where I haven’t even known where it was going to end, and ended in a totally different place than it began. That’s in less than 500 words.

Second reason. When I was reading The Quest For Prosperity, I had no idea what I was going to write about in this review. So I was taking notes on everything I found interesting as I was reading it. That’s what you’re going to see over the next while. Much more weird than what you’ll see at SERRC in a couple of weeks.

I’m Many Different Readers Myself, A History Boy, 01/03/2016

This cover is my copy.

Yesterday was the last post I had based on my notes reading Empire. I started Multitude a while ago, but I don't quite want to share that yet. I've also, in the spare moments I can get for it, been re-reading Soul Mountain.

I’ve mentioned Gao Xingjian on the blog before. I don’t know that I really got into much of my history with him. It’s a pretty simple story, really. One day when I was 17, I remember reading that a Chinese author had won the Nobel Prize for Literature for the first time.

His name was Gao Xingjian, and his most impressive, imposing, and inspiring large work was the novel/memoir Soul Mountain. Or Lingshan as the Chinese goes. So later that week, I went to my local Chapters and bought a softcover copy of the English translation.

Later that summer, I read it, entranced. At the time, I had just decided that I wanted to develop my fiction writing abilities and eventually publish novels. That this was something I wanted to do with my life.* And I had read James Joyce’s Ulysses earlier that year, which left me fascinated with how writing could play with subjectivity.

* Two books out already, plus a play produced and developing a couple of movies. Not bad.

This struck me most plainly about Soul Mountain when I first read it. It’s composed of short chapters. Some unfold normally, from a realistic first-person perspective. But many chapters, especially in the first half of the book, are more impressionistic. 

They’re sparse descriptions of the physical environment, as if that’s no longer important. Instead, most of the writing is a biting back-and-forth conversation, written in second-person, between you and she. Most of these conversations are aggressive, lovers wounding each other.

Our author as a young man, wandering Sichuan and
Yunnan on an existential journey into the twisting
depths of his own mind. And to avoid the police.

Those formal innovations made the most impact on me initially. When I read Soul Mountain for the second time shortly after moving to Ontario, its formal quirks stood out for me again. I think it made me feel at home as I was building myself a new home for the first time.**

** Very unpatriotic of me as a Newfoundlander to say that a Chinese novel made me feel at home. Well, too bad for the patriots of my old country. Patriotism is just a gauche self-deception you share with a few million neighbours.

The third time, which I’m in the middle of now, is a very different experience. Yes, I see the formal experimentation. But I see more easily that Soul Mountain isn’t just an exercise in the depiction of subjectivity. It’s about the psychology of loneliness.

When Gao writes his intense chapters, ‘you’ is how you refer to yourself when you’re talking to yourself because there has been no one else to talk to for so long. And ‘she’ is the imagined amalgam of all the women that Gao has ever done wrong in his life. 

And when he’s relating some event that happened to him in casual style, he speaks from the ordinary first person because he doesn't crave company anymore. He’s with people. He doesn’t have to have these disorienting cyclones of conversations with imagined selves and lovers. 

• • •

A more recent photo of Gao, taken now that he lives in
France.

A curiosity I realized reading it now for the third time. Soul Mountain is written (in English) in the present tense. It made me think that having made such an impact on me, it influenced my decision to write almost all of Under the Trees, Eaten in the present tense. 

It wasn’t a conscious homage or anything. I didn’t even think of Gao at all when I was writing that novel. It was more like, I didn’t think writing Under the Trees, Eaten in the present tense was a big deal. The style just seemed normal to me.

• • •

I also now understand how incredibly different it must be to engage with Soul Mountain in the original Chinese, if only because I’ve read about how experimental it is with the Chinese language itself.

Gao wrote in colloquial Han Chinese, as well as in the dialects of ethnic minorities in Sichuan, and in classical dialects and registers. Its explicitly political content in this case – how the Chinese state suppressed the cultural traditions of ethnic minorities – becomes clear in the very words of the novel.

Many of the later chapters I didn’t really like when I first read it because they seemed focussed on folk singers and old men from traditions I didn’t understand. I wanted to see more perspectival gymnastics when I was 17.

A priest of the religion common to the
ethnic minorities of Yunnan, China, which
Gao observed throughout his long walk in
the 1980s.

But now, my sensibility has changed. I can more easily see the real human tragedy in stories like Gao’s encounter with an old folk singer who used to perform religious rituals before the government cracked down on local worship.

Gao goes with the old man on a comically long journey down narrowing, increasingly decrepit roads until they reach his village in the middle of the night. The old man's demonstrations of the old rituals draws a crowd until his performance for the sake of a visitor depending to be an anthropologist is another ritual. The community comes together again.

And then the town’s government and army representative comes to shut down the performance because the old man never got the proper permit to perform the ritual. On top of that, the singer suffers one last indignity – the officer is his oldest son.

I think I’ve become a better reader, writer, and person for knowing to engage with these stories of lost and oppressed cultures instead.

Get Real I: Clashes of Four Civilizations, Research Time, 14/10/2015

When I’m reading a book that was epically influential on mainstream politics – like Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History – I find the ignored chapters to have some of the more interesting stuff. Today, I want to talk about his less rosy predictions about future politics – his own take on the clash of civilizations.

About two-thirds of the way into The End of History, there are a few chapters on what his theory means for international relations theory. How will states relate to each other in a world that’s inevitably rolling toward universal capitalist liberal democracy? 

It’s a critique of realist IR theory, that war, suspicion, and power games are the inevitable way states relate to each other. International institutions are only really useful as dispute-settling arenas, and diplomacy is the job of working out compromises between great powers to avoid mutually devastating war.

Fukuyama's book never anticipated that China would
become a global power and the leader among Asia's
authoritarian states. He concentrated more on
Singapore as the key example. But China has made
the world bipolar (for now) again, and its leader Xi
Jinping rules not by straight Confucian principles, but
with ideas from the Legalist schools like Shang Yang's
writings. An innovator in authoritarianism.

Fukuyama thinks that the spread of democracy will change this, because pressure from the people will drive their leaders to peace. It’s the kind of optimism Fukuyama is famous for.

But he also considers a very pessimistic possible future. In this scenario, capitalism successfully spreads throughout the world, but economic freedom doesn’t carry democratic political culture with it. Instead, the world breaks down into three blocs, according to their cultural heritages that resist democracy.

1) There’s the West, with its cultural heritage of liberalism (and the liberatory drive that animated socialist and social democratic movements, though Fukuyama underplays these). This is straight-up liberal democracy.

2) The Islamic world, which Fukuyama describes in simplistic (and borderline racist) terms as fundamentalist. If Fukuyama had any deep knowledge of Muslim cultural heritage, he’d talk about the traditional union of social, political, religious, and state concerns through the concept of the unified community of all Muslims.

Islam’s first wave of expansion was as an empire, and its Prophet Muhammad was the political leader of this empire as well as a religious leader. The legitimacy of contemporary Arab monarchies – especially the most brutal ones like Saudi Arabia – are rooted in their embrace and export of their favoured branch of Islam.

3) Asian authoritarianism. Fukuyama discusses this as East Asia’s Confucian heritage. It’s a political culture that privileges group and community loyalty and deference to established authority over individual assertion and liberties. You can be a business leader, and a powerful one. But a top priority must always be loyalty to your country’s leaders.

It's easy to laugh at Vladimir Putin from a place like
Canada. But he's made Russia one of the most
dangerous and unpredictable states and armies in
the world. And world maps let us forget this, but
Russia is the state along our northern border.

If we want to carry Fukuyama’s analysis into our current world, you can add a fourth great power bloc to the two resisters of democracy.

4) Russia’s Czarist Petty Imperialism, which has been resurrected under Vladimir Putin. He’s returned to the power games of occupying territory along border states to subjugate them into obedience. 

We never stood up to him over the annexation of Georgian territory, and now he’s done the same with Crimea and Donbas in Ukraine. And he’s threatening Sweden and the Baltic states to leave their pro-European stances. Putin hasn’t brought Russia back to communism. He revived the Great Game of the 19th century instead.

In the 21st century, it looked as though Fukuyama’s more pessimistic picture of the future – which he didn’t even endorse in The End of History because he was so certain of democracy’s triumph – came true. 

But there’s one problem in the mix, which I kept coming back to last week.

The Arab Spring happened. Why? To be continued . . . 

Thought Needs New Ideas and Wild Collisions, Research Time, 01/05/2015

I mentioned a while ago that I finished Barry Allen's book about ancient and medieval Chinese philosophy, Vanishing Into Things. His conclusion was as concise, complex, and modestly ambitious as any of his own major works that I've read.* It reminded me of how lucky I feel to have had him as a supervisor and worked with him so closely for four years. It also reminded me of why we worked so well together.

* Or even just his lecture courses. I thought his closing lecture in the third-level Nietzsche course, for which I was once his teaching assistant a few years ago, was one of the most artful summations of four months of talks as I've ever heard.

Barry started his book with a gripe about how comparative philosophy is usually done in academic settings. I think some of the best writing is in part motivated by gripes, because they create something to push away from. It’s how I treated H. P. Lovecraft in the writing of my own sci-fi debut. 

But a gripe can’t consume your writing. Otherwise, you stay reactive, making an entirely negative critique without even gestures to an alternative. and the scope of your thinking remains small. It’s a kind of petty, spiteful nihilism in writing. 

Remarkable men from three different civilizations meet
and their conversation will begin a vibrant new
tradition.

Barry’s gripe with standard comparative philosophy is a different kind of small thinking that he found quite common in the field, according to his introduction. It’s a smallness of ambition in engaging with the philosophical traditions of another culture. Whether through a misplaced post-colonial ceding of space to the other, or a colonial treatment of the examined tradition as a fossilized museum piece, they both do the same thing. 

Chinese philosophy is described and interpreted without genuinely engaging in the conceptual conversations that come when traditions with very different fundamental presumptions have collided throughout history. Such cultural collisions have historically been the most philosophically fertile in our history. Barry describes one such collision as having resulted in Zen Buddhism itself. I think of the centuries-long engagement of Arab philosophy with the Greek classics in the Abbasid Empire as another example.

But the modern manners of comparative philosophy that describes without engagement achieve the same result as the colonial encounter of dominance that makes taxidermy of the tradition: it’s treated without life. Engaging with the Chinese tradition as living philosophy would dialogue with these works to create new philosophical concepts and arguments.

Barry ends Vanishing Into Things by sketching where a living Western engagement with Chinese philosophy can go. The traditions that began in ancient China constitute a 2,000 year heritage of understanding the world as process, primary flux, becoming as prior to being and static identity. 

China’s tradition offers just as many variations on thinking in terms of becoming as the Western tradition does with terms of being. What's more, it's a philosophical tradition of primal becoming that never had to overcome a mainstream that ontologically prioritized being. 

Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, John Dewey, and Gilles Deleuze all developed fascinating and complex philosophies that prioritized becoming as the primary nature of reality. But they all had to set their philosophies as reactions to more than 2,000 years of tradition that understood stability and the static as the essence of what is. 

At many points throughout his book, Barry describes how a given Chinese thinker or school may resemble a famous Western thinker, but how the Western -ism just didn't fit. The character of a Western approach to a process way of thinking had to strain so hard against concepts of the static that it heightened the intensity of arguments that a parallel Chinese thinker would never have had to make. 

No one around the Chinese philosopher would ever have asked the questions that a Westerner would. Only when the traditions came into contact could those questions be posed and the new creative time begin. To understand and engage with such a different way of thinking as a colleague, they'd all have to create a ton of new concepts. And that’s what philosophy is.

Inspired by the Original Wu II: Creative Philosophy Is About Thinking Differently, Composing, 21/04/2015

Continued from last week . . . Here’s the short version of what I’m thinking of doing with Sunzi’s Art of War for the Utopias project. I literally thought of this idea on a subway Friday morning, so it won’t be very well-developed or investigated, barely even thought about beyond the initial notion that it sounds like a cool idea. This is an idea so raw, it smells funny.

The United States, for example, has not been very good
at waging war without relying on brute force.

Sunzi stresses the centrality of deception for war. By deceiving and tricking your enemy, you can minimize the human and material cost of war by enormous measures. It’s a way of managing conflict using intelligence and interventions in the initial conditions of phenomena before they grow out of control. The powers of individuals working together, applying their individual ingenuities and skills to a common goal, is the centre: generals, spies, soldiers, technicians, and citizenry all contributing individually.

The general remains central in Sunzi’s own text, appropriate for the authoritarian political traditions of ancient China. But the importance of ingenuity and intelligence to succeeding in conflict offers an alternative, and probably more successful, model of global conflict and intervention. The American government could certainly learn that there are many more subtle methods to undercutting your enemies than the blunt force of economic sanctions and bombing campaigns.

Bouncing ideas of Sunzi off of a philosophical exploration of the First World War would, according to many conversations I’ve had about academic rigour, never fly. Jünger, to take an example that I’ll visit in detail soon, never had any detailed engagement with Sunzi’s writing, and himself had little intellectual engagement with Clausewitz, being only an ordinary soldier. But this is, perhaps one advantage to coming from outside the university system. 

Be aware that I’m not trying to excuse actual sloppiness in scholarship. I actually see Barry Allen as doing something similar with Vanishing Into Things, where comparative philosophy becomes not about historical influence or conceptual cataloguing alone, but seeing if some interesting new concept can emerge from the collision of thoughtful readings of texts that are otherwise alien to each other.

Barry’s third chapter is a dialogue of Sunzi’s with Clausewitz’s thought, with just the framework I’ve described. There’s no historical evidence that Clausewitz ever read Sunzi himself, and if he did, he probably would have found it irrelevant frippery, what with all the Chinese scholar’s talk of intelligence and deception when only physical force and the brutality of character to finish the job is needed for war. He plays the texts off each other to see what we can learn.

Alan Sokal with the best descriptive caption he could get.

I see Steve Fuller offering a similar philosophical technique in the closing section of his Knowledge: The Philosophical Quest in History.* I’ll talk about this in more detail on Friday when we publish our last dialogue on the blog. But it has to do with his last word (even though it’s never the last word as long as someone keeps trying to have it) on the Sokal Hoax.

* Given how much Barry couldn’t stand Steve’s book, I think he’d understand my impish smirk when I identify something in common between his thinking and Fuller’s. I have some pretty serious issues with the content of Fuller's philosophy, although I find much to admire in his method and approach, broadly conceived. More details on Friday.

Essentially, his critique of Alan Sokal’s largely successful denunciation of humanities scholars trying to discuss scientific ideas in the context of humanities scholarship, is that Sokal didn’t understand the audience that the humanities is written for. Philosophers in the intellectual circles of cultural studies who gave political readings of scientific concepts weren’t talking to the scientists themselves, but trying to craft more populist versions of the essential concepts of new scientific principles. 

Let me put it this way. How many actual physicists in the 18th century literally thought of the universe as a clock? Probably not many, and none of the good physicists. But the clockwork image of the universe dominated the popular philosophy of the post-Newton era. It inspired the ontology of mechanical determinism. The cultural studies model was trying to craft the same broadly applicable popularly-aimed intellectual concepts for the modern sciences like quantum physics.

Here’s a cheat code for my own work. Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity does the same kind of thing, crafting politically actionable, popularly understandable (if still a little intellectual and pretentious) conceptions of core concepts in ecological science.

It’s as if I’m saying to the reader, “Here is a different way of thinking than we’re generally accustomed to. Let’s consider its meaning, implications, and capacities, and see if there’s anything we can learn from it to adapt to the situation we face here and now.” This is philosophical creativity.

Inspired by the Original Wu I: A Humanity Forged in War, Research Time, 20/04/2015

I like accidental discoveries. Ideas that I come across completely unexpectedly that reveal a blank space in how I conceive of a problem or issue that turn out to be critical. I had a moment like that read Barry Allen’s new book on ancient and medieval Chinese philosophy. 

What could modern humanity learn from the military
philosophers of ancient China?

As I’ve written before, the Utopias project is going to involve a philosophical analysis of the concept of the mass man as it arose through the First World War. This is why Ernst Jünger and Filippo Marinetti’s writings will be so important to setting up the book’s central problem: they were central thinkers of the mass man. The First World War spurred rapid philosophical development of a literal end to individuality. This is totalitarian politics. 

I’ve been reading Barry’s book largely for pleasure, not really thinking of the philosophers of ancient China as any figures who’d have to do directly with this project that focusses its energy almost entirely on the last century or so. But in his chapter on Sunzi and The Art of War, Barry developed a fascinating idea that could be a pivot point in the entire analysis of the philosophy of mass man.

The most influential set of ideas on the development of military policy, arms manufacture, and martial strategy in the First World War era was that of Carl von Clausewitz, Prussian general and author of On War. I had not at first thought of Clausewitz himself as a source of philosophical ideas. Whenever I encountered him in reading or teaching, it was always as a strategist, never a philosopher. So I always thought his work was a guidebook of the details of military strategy.

Frankly, I also never thought of the military as being a place that typically produced a philosophical mind-set. At least not until this year. Having such an insightful teacher in my communications program with a lifelong military history opened my mind quite a bit about some of my presumptions. Like a lot of lifelong self-identified leftists, I think I’ve let my systematic and institutional problems with the military bleed into more personal scales. That’s quite a mistake.

Here’s a summary of Barry’s analysis. Writing in the 1830s, Clausewitz described war as a place where, because all knowledge was uncertain, knowledge was useless. Spies, espionage, any attempt to gain knowledge of the enemy other than the most basic reconnaissance of positions in the immediate area, were useless because they were less reliable than absolutely certain.

Apparently not enough, as the First World War forged a
conception of humanity as masses, units subsumed
into a collective identity, interchangeable, expendable.

What mattered in war was the moral fortitude to overcome your enemy through overpowering him in brute force. The side with more artillery, slogging through the blood and terror for longer, would win. Barry writes of him, “Do not prepare your calculations. Prepare your battalions. It is force, not knowledge that wins wars.”

There are no men in this vision of war, only numbers. Individuals only matter insofar as they’re counted in a collection of forces,* no more important as people than an individual bullet matters to the smooth operation of a machine gun. It may as well be any bullet as long as it kills an enemy soldier or otherwise damages enemy forces. It may as well be any infantryman too.

* The importance of counting as one of a collection in his ontology, and the direct political expression of this idea is at the root of my suspicion of Alain Badiou’s thought. But that’s a complicated fight for another day, and may not even fit into the scope of the Utopias manuscript itself. Badiou's is simultaneously too big and complicated a philosophy and too narrow and niche a figure to spend much time in Utopias in direct argument with him.

Here is the mass man, the essentially totalitarian conception of the individual. Hannah Arendt saw it explicitly, the vision of humanity as shaped by total war.

And perhaps, I thought, sitting on the subway early on a Friday morning, Sunzi himself could offer a hand at crafting the solution to truly overcome the philosophical spectre of totalitarianism whose destructive reaction haunts us so profoundly. . . . To be continued (if not tomorrow, then in three or so years)

Dreaming Out of Stereotypes, Research Time, 14/04/2015

Can you write a book about historical Chinese philosophy and not mention the single most famous (to white people) passage of Daoist thought? I guess not, because Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream shows up on page 88 of Barry Allen’s Vanishing Into Things. 

Am I a butterfly or am I a person? Is that the right
question?

Zhuangzi had a dream that he was a butterfly. Then he woke up and discovered that he was a man. But it was equally possible, says Zhuangzi, that he was actually a butterfly dreaming that he was a man. At this point, we walk away, amazed at the mystical confusions into which the Chinese have sent us. That’s how all Chinese people think, or so the stereotypes of our popular culture would have us believe, in unsolvable riddles and self-contradictory puzzles to empty our minds. 

I think the first time I heard Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream was in a fairly shitty movie, where a token Magical Yellow Man tells the virtuous white male protagonist this story. Its pop culture version always sounds emptily profound, the pretentious meaninglessness that spews from the mouths of barely literate hippies who read a couple of passages from the Zhuangzi or the Daodejing in between a bong hit and not showering during a busy day of trying to grow flowers in their dreadlocks.

Barry’s treatment of the passage occurs in a discussion of Daoist skepticism, comparing it with the central works of skeptical philosophy in the tradition’s Roman Empire period, those of Sextus Empiricus. Dreams are a recurring element in skeptical philosophy, whether in Descartes’ Meditations or Linklater’s Waking Life. The usual question is if and how you can tell that you aren’t dreaming.

A question sets the conditions of your thinking. Those conditions are what you’d have to include in your response for it to be a sensible answer. Working through and investigating a question guides the kinds of priorities you will have in thought. When I ask “How can you tell that you aren’t dreaming?” we inquire about the truth of what we know, or conceived more broadly, whether the world that we now experience is the true world. We think in terms of an either/or: truth or illusion.

Zhuangzi’s question seems to fit in this kind of framework. Am I Zhuangzi who dreamt of being a butterfly, or am I a butterfly to dreams of being Zhuangzi? Which of these is true, or real? How am I to decide which is real? What should I look for to discover which of these is the real world, and how am I to look for it?

A profoundly insulting mistake when reading the
philosophy or literature of another culture's past is the
failure to understand that culture as a living entity, and
take it instead as a set of static contexts with a unique
and absolute essence.

Barry provides an answer that makes for solid history of philosophy here. I say this because it’s clear that he’s read the entire Zhuangzi, and is reading this more cryptic lesson of the butterfly in the context of an earlier passage that also touches on the particular meaning of what a dream is.

What I think is important in comparative philosophy* is maintaining the cultural context of the thinkers you’re writing about without treating that foreign culture like a museum piece, as if it was an unvarying set of norms and presumptions instead of a living, fluctuating, messy culture. That means being careful about when you start your comparison of a concept in one culture’s philosophical tradition to your own. The problem with most Western accounts of Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream is that they take the conception of what a dream is from the Western tradition.

* And I could be wildly off base in what I think because I haven’t really studied much comparative philosophy at all. 

This earlier passage is a story about a student of Kongzi who describe how we can become lost in our dreams. When dreams consume us, we don’t really know anything, instead flitting about interpretations of the world which themselves are dreams. Then the student describes how, after countless generations, a sage appears among the culture and leads a great awakening. 

To wake from a dream is to shift the style and focus of your life from petty concerns to profound questions and journeys. It’s an ethical transformation of life itself. One culture and history comes to an end, and another begins. 

Live in the Now II: To Find the Perfect Way (or Wu Wei), Research Time, 09/04/2015

Continued from last post . . . In the era of the foundational Confucians – Kongzi, Mengzi, and Xunzi – the origin of Chinese civilization was already more myth than history. The Xia Dynasty was treated as a union of both, a mythical time when the empire’s rulers had fantastic powers, an intuitive grasp of the ritual that channelled Qi, the fundamental force of material becoming, to lead a society and house souls of perfect harmony.

I’ll import my own engagement with the foundational Western myths to engage with this idea. One major concept in Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity is a critique of what I (and a few others) call an Edenic way of thinking about nature. 

A scene from my personal favourite retelling of the
myth of Eden.

The Western myth of Eden conceives of the origin point of the world as a place of perfection, where humanity’s forebears lived in an intimate relationship with God. This is a time without history because genuine becoming is unnecessary. The Western myth conceives of the beginning of history as a fall (or rather a Fall, as it was a categorical transformation) from divine intimacy. 

Some interpretations of the myth of Eden conceive of the Fall as a product of rebellion against the order of God, and some specify this rebellion as the discovery or formulation of the knowledge required to rebel against God’s order (or God’s orders, depending on how authoritarian your conception of God might be). 

Aside from moronic Biblical literalists, no one really believes that Eden was a specific place in the world. It’s more often conceptualized precisely as a myth, a story to tell about humanity’s relationship with the divine. 

The Xia Dynasty is different. This was a real political epoch in the history of China, a real imperial line and government. Little direct record of it survives, but Xia is one of the foundational origin points for human civilization as it exists today. Xia ranks with Ur, Egypt, the Inca Empire, and the Abrahamic era of the tribes of Israel, to name just a few of the ancient genesis points of modern agricultural humanity.

Yet Barry’s book describes the foundational Confucian philosophers writing about the Xia Dynasty as if it had been a living Eden. Xia was an epoch when people were naturally in tune with the flow of the world’s generative energy, able to channel the productive forces of existence without resistance, producing a society in perfect harmony. Ritual emerged already perfected in the Xia era, humanity had since fallen from that perfection, and the task of Confucian philosophy was to restore the knowledge and practice of ritual to its perfect state.

So far, so Eden. But Barry raises an argument which, on the face of it, appears devastating for the conception of Xia as a harmonious society thanks to ritual’s perfect practice. It is a non-issue because Xunzi would conceive the problem of origins precisely as myth instead of history.

I can conceive of Eden as a perfect state of humanity because the Fall is a categorical transformation ontologically. The nature of humanity’s existence was different in the Edenic state of communion with God. But there was historical continuity between the period the Confucians idealized and their own time.

The Xia Dynasty was a historical forerunner to the era of Chinese civilization where Confucian philosophy developed. There is no ontological break between the people of the Xia era and that of the Warring States. Just a thousand years of history of which we, and the Confucians themselves, have sketchy knowledge.

The critique is, in essence, the question of who taught the people of Xia-era China the perfect rituals. The wisdom of a sage could not have developed spontaneously in a perfect form if the people of Xia were ontologically continuous with the people of Xunzi’s era or ours. Human nature, according to Xunzi, tends to pettiness and short-sighted selfishness. The last thing that could develop spontaneously among humanity is the wisdom of the sage. So the singularity of the Xia appears impossible.

Xunzi’s answer is literally as I described it at the beginning of this two-part post. The sketchy past of the Xia Dynasty provides a blank space in the popular sense of history into which you can throw in whatever you want. If you want to romanticize the Xia Dynasty as a period of perfect cultural and political harmony, you can. It’s not like there’s any evidence to contradict you.

The Western segregation of Eden from living humanity in its essence keeps us from conceiving of a genuine permanent solution to the Fall without the direct intervention of God on this plane of existence or another. 

You can imagine a historically and ontologically continuous culture with your own as having achieved the ideals that you want your own society to meet. Porting the ideals of perfect ritual and harmonious society to the Xia makes the goals of Confucian philosophy concrete. Because we can imagine this real society in our ancient past as having achieved such a difficult task, we understand the achievement as within our power.

So it doesn’t matter what the real circumstances of the Xia Dynasty were. The myth of the Xia is powerful because it’s a narrative of people who made themselves supermen. So the myth can guide our own work in our own era to build a better society.

Live in the Now I: The Past Was Perfection, Research Time, 08/04/2015

When I was looking around some popular accounts of Chinese history (yes, Wikipedia) to learn some basic facts about the period when Kongzi, Mengzi, and Mozi were writing, I discovered something fascinating and perplexing. And I don’t often consider myself perplexed.

Both the Confucian writers and all their rivals looked back with awe on the Xia Dynasty. This was a centuries-long period of unsurpassed peace and harmony at all levels of Chinese society, running from about 2200 BC to 1766 BC. Achieving the ideal social existence of the Xia era is the long-term goal of Confucian philosophy. 

One popular image of ancient China is the terracotta
warriors, built to protect an Emperor in his after-life.
But the Xia Dynasty began more than 2000 years
before this ancient army was crafted. China's origin is
an era we know only through archaeology and myth.

But this political epoch also creates a kind of null space in Chinese history, or at least the Chinese cultural self-conception. There’s apparently very little archaeological evidence of what life in the Xia era was like, and some skeptical movements have appeared in China’s archaeological circles about its existence. Kongzi himself lived more than a thousand years after the end of the Xia Dynasty. The origin of Chinese civilization is shrouded in unsolvable mystery.

My old supervisor Barry Allen’s book about Chinese philosophy, Vanishing Into Things, has a wonderful passage about how to treat this mystery. It occurs in an account of the works and ideas of Xunzi, the foundational Confucian philosopher who treated the question of China’s origins with the most nuanced eye, as brushing off anyone who questioned it and asserting that there was nothing to see here, folks. 

This gets pretty complicated, and I may actually spread this over two posts.* The explanation of how to handle the problem of China’s origins in the Xia Dynasty civilization comes up in the context of justifying ceremonial ritual. Ritual is the centrepiece of Confucian political and personal practice, the art of statecraft and character. It’s a training process to reach the ideal perfection of character that the spiritual and political leaders of the Xia era achieved.

* I already numbered the title and gave it a sub-head. You can tell by now that I’m handling this over two posts. 

Why ritual has this power to perfect character and society lies in the metaphysics of Qi. Qi isn’t actually a mystical concept, despite how all the racialized images of Chinese culture in Western media depict Qi as the sacred force that magical Shaolin wizards channel with their kung fu powers so David Carradine can cook frittatas with his mind.

The philosopher Mengzi actually did a lot of the basic work building the metaphysics of Qi, and Barry describes it without any of the unfortunate mysterian bullshit that most of us have come to associate with the term. And it doesn’t have anything to do with furniture design either. Man, this racism is making me angry.

But about Mengzi. As Barry describes Mengzi’s concept, Qi is simply the qualitative energy of existence. It’s the same conception as becoming, except understood not in such an abstract term, but as a determined flow. All dynamic qualities express Qi, and so are themselves Qi, but no finite expressions completely exhaust the potential of Qi. Qi is movement itself understood as material. 

Qi flows through movements that can take any form, but in all its contexts of expression, there is an optimal pattern of force and flow for Qi. Ritual is learning to move yourself, including both your body and your mind, to express Qi most optimally. Confucian ritual is about learning how to move in any situation to express Qi most smoothly, to let it flow through you and your world without any resistance.

And ritual is hard. Really hard. Most people don’t even come close to the ideal of perfecting ceremonial ritual to the point of channelling Qi without resistance. Yet there’s a curious paradox here, which is where my thinking returns to Barry’s account of Xunzi.

Say Kongzi was the first great Confucian for conceiving of ritual, order, and harmony as the guiding ideal for society. Say Mengzi became the second great Confucian for understanding the metaphysics of ritual. Say Xunzi became the third great Confucian for showing how to teach and how not to teach ritual and the philosophy of ritual.

The core of Xunzi’s lesson about the nature and purpose of ritual for daily life, at least as Barry presents it, revolves around this question of the origins of our knowledge of ritual. Particularly the historical singularity of the Xia Dynasty, how we understand its heritage, its reality, and even whether it was real at all. Or even if it needs to be. . . To be continued.

Reason Is Love in Ancient China, Research Time, 07/04/2015

Confucianism does seem to be quite an authoritarian philosophy. But Barry’s book goes farther than most of the introductions, whether formal or informal, to ancient Chinese thought in discussing some of the contemporary rivals to Kongzi’s ideas. They all seemed focussed on challenging Kongzi over what was the best way to build a virtuous person and world.

A young Steven Moffat holds one
of his multiple Hugo Awards in a
curious illustration of the
philosophy of Mozi.

Mozi is the most interesting opponent of Confucian thinking. Mohist schools taught benevolence over all else, the impartial care of everyone for everyone. The world could be perfectly harmonious if we stopped ranking our love for our intimate family, companions, and friends with an intensity above our love for everyone else in the world.

But this was a peculiar benevolence for us Westerners, not just because of its utopian flavour that makes it sound like the perfect communism of universal brotherhood. We're accustomed to treating benevolent actions as primarily sentimental. People's feelings motivate them to be kind.

For Mozi, benevolence is written into the fabric of existence itself. As you come to know the fundamental character of the world and yourself, you will understand that you will only avoid violence and pain in your own life if you rid the universe of violence and pain. It's a benevolence rooted in self-interest. We may have no emotions or feelings drawing us to benevolent attitudes, but when we understand that the world where we will live best is a world of perfect benevolence, we will work to transform our emotions to act with kindness toward all.

And he put his money where his manuscript was. Mozi apparently organized a band of vigilante warriors who defended villagers from foreign sieges during the military instability of the Warring States Period. He quite literally organized peacekeeping forces.

Our reason leads us to love. I see this idea in so many contemporary peace movements. I’m not just talking about a bunch of hippies blissing out in a park, though that's part of it. I also saw it in the philosophy of the environmentalist thinking Arne Næss, an idea I explore in Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. But I discovered something today that made me think of a more profound way that knowledge of ourselves and the world can make us better ethically.

I’m a sci-fi fan. Hell, I'm a sci-fi author. So when I found out that a racist and sexist right-wing author had organized a group of several hundred Gamergaters to join the Hugo Awards’ voting membership to push out books they perceived to have progressive political messages, I was pretty appalled.

Diversity in art lets that art tell more kinds of stories,
which makes art better.

Yesterday afternoon, I listened to the podcast where Phil Sandifer, Jack Graham, and Andrew Hickey discussed all this. It’s about 100 minutes long, so I hope you have enough time. But one point the trio discussed struck a chord with me after reading about Mozi. 

Theodore Beale, the man who hijacked the Hugos, is a terrifying bigot who enlisted people who feel threatened by marginalized people making themselves heard within their earshot. They lash out at these “social justice warriors” because they are filled with hate for what is different from them, but it’s a hate born of ignorance.

One of the aesthetic motives that inspires the fans of the socially conservative, simple-minded sci-fi stories that dominated the Beale-backed slate of Hugo nominees is a desire for simplicity. Graham, Sandifer, and Hickey describe Beale as advocating a form of sci-fi literature that exists so a reader can turn his brain off, writing as mere entertainment.

Beale and his crew don't want to think as part of their entertainment. They don’t want to be exposed to stories that would call their beliefs into question and make them reconsider who they are and how they live. They don’t want to expand their own existence with the experience of difference.

Please don't think I'm articulating the tired old liberal talking point that any conservative beliefs at all are motivated by ignorance of stupidity. Such a platitude is frankly stupid. I’m not talking about well-reasoned conservatism about particular values held by people with whom I can have friendly conversations where we disagree about political issues.* I refer to the people whose first reaction to a contrary political belief is rage and cyber-harassment.

* Believe it or not, but this actually happened to me on Twitter a while ago with a libertarian proponent of Indiana's religious freedom law. We vehemently disagreed, but explained the reasons for our beliefs and wished each other a good weekend.

The knowledge of difference empowers your reason because you are learning about others. Learning more about people and knowing them and their narratives literally makes you a better person because empathy emerges from understanding someone's life as they live it. A point that seems in a companion spirit with Mozi.

Anticipating Chaos Concepts With Kongzi, Research Time, 06/04/2015

I always read two books at the same time. One is a more serious, technically intense piece of work. It’s usually central to whatever major philosophical project I’m working on, and I’ll always have a notebook next to me so that I can take down specific ideas and page references for later. 

It may not even be an openly technical book, like The Road to Serfdom, but I'm reading it with more detailed, intense scrutiny. Right now, that book is Understanding Social Networks by Charles Kadushin. It’s an introductory text for technical social network theory and analysis, which I'm reading to familiarize myself with the core concepts of a science that I plan to use in my communications career. 

God tells Bender that Her method is to act so subtly that,
when you're most successful, no one sees that you've
done anything at all. Futurama's God is a Daoist.

But the book I'm reading in a more relaxed mode is the latest book by my old supervisor, Barry Allen. Vanishing Into Things is a fascinating book about the history of Chinese philosophy, concentrating on uncovering that tradition’s conceptions of knowledge. It’s written with Barry’s usual flair for very understated, direct language that explains concepts very clearly and quickly.

As someone who doesn't know much beyond a few general and vague descriptions of the ideas, his book is remarkably illuminating about ancient Chinese philosophy. The book covers the tradition up to the time of China’s contact with the modern Western powers in the 1500s, and I'm still in the early sections about the early Confucian period.

I had always known about the pragmatic focus of Chinese conceptions of knowledge, which Barry confirms. Knowledge in the Confucian paradigm is about practical action, the ability to make the best decision of how to act and do so with maximum efficiency. It originates the concept that would become the centre of Daoism, wu wei, movement without effort, accomplishing much with virtually nothing. 

Before reading Barry’s book, I had no idea about how precisely one went about this, doing much by almost nothing. There's nothing mystical about this knowledge, despite how the phrase sounds profoundly self-contradictory to our ears.* It’s a matter of perception.

* I believe that no statement is inevitably nonsense. Any grammatically reasonable arrangement of words can be meaningful if listeners decide to work hard enough to give it meaning. “Colourless green ideas sleep furiously” is now a deeply meaningful term, if only for its significance as a reference to Noam Chomsky's linguistic ideas.

I haven't seen the biopic of Kongzi
starring Chow Yun Fat, but I have not
heard good things.

You have to understand the small differences in the initial conditions of a process that will constitute its major characteristics. Knowing this, you can make changes in a process' genesis that can radically change its unfolding, long before it becomes so large and powerful that it's impossible for humans to contain or control at all. Making the right change means making it benevolent to you instead of hostile or dangerous.

Kongzi’s thought anticipates insights about the world that ecological science codified empirically and mathematically: bodies relate to each other through catalyzing, augmenting, or disrupting their constituent processes, and small changes in a process’ initial conditions can radically alter how it will develop in maturity. The earliest genuine forerunner of these ideas in the Western tradition is Spinoza with his concept of common notions.

In the ontological aspects of his thinking, Kongzi seems to have been the first to develop a metaphysics of the world as a dynamic ecology. Dynamism and becoming were primary organizing concepts of Chinese philosophy from the earliest written records, in contrast with the Greek/Western focus on stability and the eternal ever since Parmenides. 

So the Chinese tradition strikes me, at this first glance, as having a superior grounding to translate the scientific concepts of dynamism into broader philosophies of life. The current era's version of the clockwork metaphor of the Newtonian cultural influence in the Enlightenment. No idea how this would play out.