WORLD PHILOSOPHY SERIES
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WORLD PHILOSOPHY SERIES
STORY-THINKING: CULTURAL MEDITATIONS
KUANG-MING WU
Nova Science Publishers, Inc. New York
Copyright © 2011 by Nova Science Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means: electronic, electrostatic, magnetic, tape, mechanical photocopying, recording or otherwise without the written permission of the Publisher. For permission to use material from this book please contact us: Telephone 631-231-7269; Fax 631-231-8175 Web Site: http://www.novapublishers.com NOTICE TO THE READER The Publisher has taken reasonable care in the preparation of this book, but makes no expressed or implied warranty of any kind and assumes no responsibility for any errors or omissions. No liability is assumed for incidental or consequential damages in connection with or arising out of information contained in this book. The Publisher shall not be liable for any special, consequential, or exemplary damages resulting, in whole or in part, from the readers‘ use of, or reliance upon, this material. Independent verification should be sought for any data, advice or recommendations contained in this book. In addition, no responsibility is assumed by the publisher for any injury and/or damage to persons or property arising from any methods, products, instructions, ideas or otherwise contained in this publication. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information with regard to the subject matter covered herein. It is sold with the clear understanding that the Publisher is not engaged in rendering legal or any other professional services. If legal or any other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent person should be sought. FROM A DECLARATION OF PARTICIPANTS JOINTLY ADOPTED BY A COMMITTEE OF THE AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION AND A COMMITTEE OF PUBLISHERS. Additional color graphics may be available in the e-book version of this book. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Wu, Kuang-ming. Story-thinking : cultural meditations / Kuang-ming Wu. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978-1-61761-258-9 (eBook) 1. Life. 2. Storytelling--Philosophy. 3. Thought and thinking. 4. East and West. I. Title. BD435.W78 2010 128--dc22 2010026178
Published by Nova Science Publishers, Inc. New York
This humble trial at global interculture is dedicated to My dear Father 吳永授(1907-1951) Who gave me Taiwan, China, Confucius, Japan, music, and much more, and My dear Teacher, the Rev. Boris Anderson, MA (Oxon), MA (Cantab) Who gave me the Bible, Greek, Shakespeare, poetry, and How to be simple, deep, and alive, in Deepest reverence, gratitude, and appreciation.
CONTENTS Preface
vii
Prelude:
Life as Story and Storytelling
1
Chapter 1
Storytelling
13
Chapter 2
History
59
Chapter 3
Science: Story Factual and Fictive
87
Chapter 4
Interculture, Relativism
113
Chapter 5
Milieu Our Lifeworld
177
Chapter 6
Pain
195
Chapter 7
Akrasia, Interpersonal and Personal
235
Chapter 8
Selflessness, Silence
269
Chapter 9
From Oneself to the Music Together
293
Conclusion
353
Coda: Story-Thinking China
362
Index
447
PREFACE Story-thinking is direct actuality-thinking; actuality is active and alive, never set or formal but free and reasonable. Actuality is things as they are alive, actively actualizing themselves, birthing unceasing. They sound forth to resound, vibrate to inter-vibrate, tell to retell it, to reveal-R to express-E it. This ―R to E‖ is not logically inferential, free of inferential error. Such R-to-E process dialogically transmits across an instant as ―storythinking.‖ Story-thinking primordially hears of actuality to story-express it. Thus, actuality sounds itself—tells its story—to a sensitive hearer who retells the story-actual in her own resonance, and her vibration is ―storytelling.‖ Actuality tells and is heard, and storytelling comes about. Story-thinking begins at storytelling to continue storytelling, this way.
PRELUDE: LIFE AS STORY AND STORYTELLING A. STORY AND STORYTELLING AS ESSENTIAL TO LIFE Story-thinking is direct actuality-thinking; actuality is active and alive, never set or formal but free and reasonable. Actuality is things as they are alive, actively actualizing themselves, birthing unceasing. They sound forth to resound, vibrate to inter-vibrate, tell to retell it, to reveal-R to express-E it. This ―R to E‖ is not logically inferential, free of inferential error. Such R-to-E process dialogically transmits across an instant as ―story-thinking.‖ Storythinking primordially hears of actuality to story-express it. Thus, actuality sounds itself—tells its story—to a sensitive hearer who retells the story-actual in her own resonance, and her vibration is ―storytelling.‖ Actuality tells and is heard, and storytelling comes about. Storythinking begins at storytelling to continue storytelling, this way. Actuality tells its hearer to tell its story, and so storyteller is the primal story-hearer of actuality. This storytelling is then heard by other story-hearers, who retell the story, and adjust and add to the story heard, and new stories are born. Actuality telling-hearing is ―storytelling,‖ to retell in story-hearing to story-add, to tell new stories; story co-vibrates, reenacts, re-performing the primal music of actuality vibrating, from storyteller to story-hearers, as things birthing unceasing. All this is story-thinking, hearing actuality to tell it forth, hearing to story-tell of things, to be heard by another to retell their story to add on, to retell it. Such is things‘ creative rehearsal, resonating from actuality birthing to storyteller, from storyteller to story-hearer who adds to tell her story her own way. This creative birthing-transfer is ―story-thinking‖ where storytelling begins the story-rounds. So story-thinking is often expressed as ―storytelling,‖ a shorthand for storytelling-hearing-adding resonating across an instant here now, and then across time into history. Story-thinking is thus story-communication, which is oral-aural, direct and primal, in story-thinking as real actuality-thinking, true without editing. The process is interpersonal reel-to-reel transfer from me spontaneous to me aware, from me aware to hearer, or often 1 onto paper, and from paper-record to heartfelt reader in time, from heart to heart through history. Story-thinking is thus historical, this way. 1
Reading a story on paper forgets reading and paper to hear and co-respond. On the importance of writing down stories, see Kuang-ming Wu, ―World Interculturalism: China Written in English,‖ Taiwan Journal of East Asian Studies, June 2005, pp. 1-42.
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Telling and hearing reel off a series of echoes called ―history,‖ whispering in silence at the heart of being, making a musical poetry of actuality. Telling is heard instantly, and silence nods echoing, caught intimately, through time. Story-thinking thus distinguishes itself as the actual, the natural, and the human without pretension, directly interpersonal, nothing objectively impersonal. I do not emit sounds but tell a story word-echoing ear to ear as music, orally or on paper, deep to deep. Did I repeat myself? How could I resist this story-thinking, life-thinking? This fact is more than intimated in Feyerabend‘s spirited attack on the one seamless robe, 2 as it were, of Western natural science. His attack is odd, betraying something story-important unawares. His consistent logic demolishes the all-ruling logic of one imperial science; his logic the familiar argues for scientific development the novel unfamiliar. All this is existential contradiction of a logical sort. He pulls off the stunt by historically showing how illogical concrete cases are. This is a matter of course. The ―belligerent plurality‖ (p. xiii) of fierce independents 3 would have pulverized and silenced everyone, unless some connection is made among them; 4 the connection is ―logic‖ in a wide sense, a ―gathering.‖ He yet tells of ―settlement of controversies‖ (x), ―negotiations between different parties‖ (xi), without telling us their how, their logic. His is story-thinking that accepts clashes, contradictions, and paradoxes logical and actual. While vaunting ―anarchism‖ (chapter 1), Feyerabend also notes, ―The stories they (Indians, Chinese) told and (their) activities enriched their lives, protected them and gave them meaning‖ (3); theirs is story-thinking that has story-rhythm of historical actuality; it is 5 poetic and dramatic, as he himself intimates that poetry and drama complement scientific research, to conclude his volume (267). The way a story goes—the way we talk, our grammar, and our writing-system—shapes the way our world goes. We all live many my-story-shaped worlds. ―Culture shock‖ is world shock, as a result of going from my globe to an alien moon and other stars. Poetry is a grain of sand among many to make a world among many, a compressed storytelling to sing a specific world thus made among many. Poetry shapes science, and so science is a plural, 6 spewing out diverse sorts of ontology, as Feyerabend correctly said. What Feyerabend did not say is that, therefore, our story should shape according as we are shaped by our milieu in which we breathe and move naturally, never to force our storyway onto nature-milieu to violate it. Our story-ontology should conform to nature-ontology surrounding us, breathing us, even while we breathe to shape nature, as nature and we intershape breath to breath. 2
Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (1988), London: Verso, 1993. Cf. Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics: 25th Anniversary Edition, Shambhala, 2000, and The Turning Point, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1982; China features in both books prominently. Also see Douglas R. Hofstadter‘s convoluted Gödel, Escher, Bach, 1979, and I am A Strange Loop, 2007, both by Cambridge, MA: Basic Books. Spontaneous inter-involvement should be delightfully simple. 3 ―Connection‖ is his favorite word. We wish he devoted a chapter telling us what it means and implies. 4 On ―logic‖ as gathering, see Wu, On the “Logic” of Togetherness: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 1998, pp. 162 and note 41, 334 and note 181, Calvin O. Schrag, The Resources of Rationality, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992, p. 93, and Merriam-Webster‟s Collegiate Dictionary, 2008, pp. 144 (on ―analects‖) and 710 (on ―legend‖). 5 See Feyerabend, op. cit., p. 273, index on ―art.‖ 6 Ibid., esp. Chapter 16. Wu said as much in Togetherness, op. cit., pp. 27-87.
Prelude: Life as Story and Storytelling
3
Thus the way we talk and the way we write shape the way we think to shape the way our world works, either for or against our nature-milieu. So, our grammar and our syllabary had better be shaped by our life-milieu to naturally shape our world most natural. So far in human speech-world, Chinese ideographs, aurally resonating with the sense of things, have shaped 7 the only story-ontology that creates its world most natural and its long history, albeit quite tragic. Story-thinking uses stories to think and thinks story-way. Such thinking begins at storytelling, around which story-reading, story-hearing, story-adding, and story-revising revolve—to story-think. And so, we begin with storytelling and keep telling stories of storytelling, knowing all this while that all this story-telling on ―storytelling‖ represents storythinking in a cosmic-comprehensive sense quite irresistible. All human enterprises political, sociological, economic, commercial, etc., tell stories of recent past to make a flowchart of the trends, to scheme steps into the projected future. Stories are told of the past to chart our actions to project tomorrow, and past, chart, and project are 8 stories. Story-thinking patterns life; we live stories. All journals and writings are storybooks. We live in stories to live out stories. We must then solidify life by telling stories of storythinking. Story, not logical argument, moves people. After all, few people dislike stories. On a few people who prefer paintings, sculpture, movies, music, and news to stories, we 9 can say that paintings and the like are so many ways to tell stories, and these people‘s preferences also tell interesting stories of disliking stories. Besides, painting and sculpture tell stories more often and more naturally than stories are painted and sculpted, for aesthetic appeal, factual punches, and logical coherence feature storytelling, more than beauty, facts, and logic feature painting or sculpture per se, to fascinate us and teach us about life. ―The purpose of a short story is, I believe, that the reader shall come away with the satisfactory feeling that a particular insight into human character has been gained, or that his knowledge of life has been deepened, or that pity, love, or sympathy for a human being has been awakened. . . . The instinct to listen to a good story is as old as humanity itself,‖ said 10 Lin. It would be less usual to claim for painting or sculpture what is claimed here for storytelling. All this is because every life has a story on which it lives. In fact, our life is an ongoing 11 story; life itself tells stories. No wonder, one loses oneself who loses one‘s story. Storytelling extends far into history, when myth is reenacted in ritual that myth explains, and myth is ancient story that ritual actualizes. Life acts out parables in stories that express our acts since time immemorial. Our life is rooted in history; history is story-in-time to sensesolidify life. Our lifeworld is packed with stories and shaped by stories, as daily news shows. 7
Feyerabend also noted something like it (op. cit., pp. 36-37, 163) in the specific area of Chinese medicine. Interestingly, two well-known magazines kicked off 2010 with articles on China and Taiwan, ―The Great Leap: New China Enters Its Third Act,‖ The Nation (the oldest weekly in USA), January 11-18, 2010, pp. 10-17, and ―Taiwan‘s Love Affair With Beijing,‖ Foreign Affairs, January/February 2010, pp. 44-60. Their quality is beside the point here. 9 Movies are dramatized stories; news is today‘s story. Music is our primal language, our painting and sculpture in time, and so considering language, painting and sculpture considers music. This is because painting and sculpture tell stories to dance music, as China has been foot-tapping poetry musical for millennia. I am preparing a book, Chinese Thinking That Dances, a delightful musical. 10 Lin Yutang, Famous Chinese Short Stories, NY: John Day Company and Pocket Books, 1948, 1951, 1952, p. xi. 11 Neuropsychologist Oliver Sacks dramatically brings out this stunning truth in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, NY: Summit Books, 1970, though he did not put it our way here. 8
4
Kuang-ming Wu
And so, all conscientious scholars cannot help but study storytelling, but so far they all treat it as ―narration‖—naming storytelling activity as noun is significant—objectively analyzing it as ―narratology,‖ one discipline among many others. Some astute scholars did sense the importance of narrative and study time-and-history (Ricoeur) and primal culture 12 (Frey) in terms of storytelling, but neither probes storytelling as storytelling. All august scholars I know of have thus missed ―storytelling,‖ for such life-activity is the primal matrix of humanity; it is the dynamo in which and by which all our thinking operates. Storytelling is culture told, words and intellect crystallized, awareness total and human, unawares. To understand storytelling we must undergo it as a physiognomy of living, and then we will see how storytelling illuminates all disciplines, and see that it puts the cart before the horse to study storytelling with methods of these disciplines derived from storytelling. Scholarship kills stories. Thus, instead, the pages below touch and probe religions, history, myths, words, politics, psychology, music, poetry, science, philosophy, pain, ethics, idleness, kids, logic, milieu, fanaticism, devotion, translation, and so on, to show how storytelling as pan-method enlivens all these diverse ways of living human. Storytelling is the torch that enlightens all our activities conscious, intellectual, and cultural, and since the torch is minded, self-aware spontaneous, its vast generality does not trivialize its importance or eliminate its luminous centrality in life. Thus few things are more significant than stories to shape us and lifeworld. Story13 thinking is the air we breathe, flowing through us to sustain us. So nothing is more common than stories, and nothing is harder to capture. These pages may appear too diffuse to grasp, for what enables coherence cannot capture coherently, except by showing how, by telling stories of storytelling. Still, it is to do X to explain X the unknown. There is no other way to elucidate story-thinking than telling stories of it; it is to be caught, not explained, for explaining is also a storytelling. Story-thinking is at work as storytelling, story-hearing, and story-adding. From now on, ―storytelling‖ is often used to stand for all three activities to show story-thinking in action. ―If storytelling can only be story-told to appear, and if life tells its stories, then why do you exercise in such futility of telling stories of storytelling?‖ This important query answers itself. If life‘s past is non-present till appearing in its story, history, so as to show us how to live better now, then our life elusive as past must show itself-as-storytelling telling its stories, so we can turn self-aware to self-grasp, to self-examine to live better. ―Telling stories that are living‖ is cathartic of us to solidify us; it is our indispensable task of living-as-human, as we live story-way. The pages below do not consider story as an object of study and analysis, but tell of what story is story-way—as storytelling and story-hearing in story-thinking—as we actually think story-way and argue story-way.
12
Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. I (1984), Vol. II (1985), and Vol. III (1988), University of Chicago Press. Rodney Frey, ed. Stories That Make the World: Oral Literature of the Indian Peoples of the Inland Northwest, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995. 13 Roland Barthes also says something similar about the universality of narratives as ―life itself,‖ but curiously describes narratives as ―transhistorical, transcultural.‖ See A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag, NY: Barnes and Noble, 2009, p. 212. Stories and story-thinking are the very sense and essence of history and culture—as life is, not beyond it.
Prelude: Life as Story and Storytelling
5
B. THREE NOTIONS IN OUR TITLE 14
The pages below consider story-thinking by telling its stories, and our title, ―StoryThinking: Cultural Meditations,‖ tells in these three terms of how we tell stories of storytelling, that is, what our story-thinking consideration consists in. Our story-consideration is stories told in and as ―meditation,‖ ―culture,‖ and ―story-thinking‖ itself. (1) Meditation: We here ponder over story-thinking. As meta-philosophy that considers philosophy is itself a philosophy, so to consider story-thinking we tell stories of telling stories, to show how impossible it is to live without story-thinking. ―Meta-philosophy‖ is not thinking but quietly pondering over things and thinking, what can be nicknamed ―meditation‖ that our title indicates. Meditation undergoes the situation as it is to understand it, and to undergo is to go along with its story of the situation as the story goes on, a storytellinghearing, a story-thinking. (2) Culture: Storytelling reveals and elucidates culture as nothing else does. Culture is our life-habit and cultivates it, habituates us into a lifestyle, a habitat of life. Family and society cultivate our certain way of seeing, thinking and doing, to make our habit of life; we now have our life-habit (―habit‖ and ―have‖ are etymological siblings) as our living style, our culture, thanks to our storytelling routine and spontaneous. This life-cultivation is a cultural activity; civilization is its deposit. Our culture cultivates and explains our logical thinking; logic does not explain culture. Children have no ―universal validity‖ of logic, but show ubiquitous coherence, primal-logic, in storytelling, and then ―mature‖ into logical validity to settle as part of our adult world. It takes a genius to come back to the child to break out of such accustomed routine of thinking, to see things otherwise, afresh. Lewis Carroll was a mathematician at Oxford, genius enough to break out of logic into ―Wonderland‖ for ―Alice‖ his favorite child-friend. M. C. Escher was genius enough to etch out a world of his imagination that defies our accustomed ―logic of actuality,‖ playing with the ―illogical world,‖ reveling in it to catch mathematicians‘ attention, to delight ―kids of all ages.‖15 Why are we so happy if not eager to revolt against ―cultural trivial logic‖ to go back to the child‘s ―useless‖ world defying it? Its answer is significant. All things flow (Heraclitus) and change (Chuang Tzu), and our en-cultured lifestyle and habitat must change, by selfexamining to re-turn to our primal nimble childhood, back to where our life begins from scratch, as we do every dawn, to rejuvenate and re-start life. Our child-dawn is the primal vigor to adapt to change to ride on its crest. This answer has three significant spin-offs. First, we must return to the dawn of our culture at regular intervals to self-rejuvenate, as we must sleep every 12 hours to re-begin at 14
15
I sadly rejected the title ―cultural metaphilosophical reflections on storytelling,‖ or even ―cultural narratology,‖ for its anti-storytelling stuffiness and cultural-philosophical parochialism in the word, ―metaphilosophy,‖ typified by the journal of that name, or ―narratology‖ that represents a genre of analytical studies of narratives as object. Lewis Carroll is too well known to require citation. On Escher, see F. H. Bool, et al., ed. J. L. Locher, M. C. Escher: His Life and Complete Graphic Work (1892), NY: H. N. Abrams, 1992, for moving essays on his life, his mathematical interests, and graphics. He wrote, ―My subjects are also often playful; I cannot refrain from demonstrating the nonsensicalness of some of what we take to be irrefutable certainties. It is, for example, a pleasure to deliberately mix together objects of two and of three dimensions, surface and spatial relationships, and to make fun of gravity.‖ Douglas R. Hofstadter comes to mind who is much less than delightful.
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dawn, reborn as baby. Then we see things for the first time, stunningly strange and beautiful. We run around with kids gazing at things and touching them around as the first dawn of creation, with birds chirping so beautifully afresh. Secondly, refreshing is coming home to where things actually are, to reshape the lifeworld of culture made of ―names‖ as called in ancient China. ―Righting names 正名‖ rights the world, and righting names requires returning to things‘ primal freshness. Name Scholars 名家 insist—tell stories—that ―white horse, no horse,‖ i.e., distinct from ―horse‖ in general, and ―take off today, arrive tomorrow,‖ so as to jolt us into an awareness of our takenfor-granted common sense, to reshuffle our culture,16 to renovate to remold our lifeworld. Thirdly, culture as life-habit is habituated, and habituation takes time; it is a historical process. Culture is historical, and history tells stories of life to elucidate life.17 We must then repeatedly listen to our stories-of-the-past, to enable us properly to tell our new story of today and prepare for storytelling tomorrow. In short, culture is our home where we are born to do its house-cleaning with storytelling. Storytelling makes culture to re-make culture, and so meditation on storytelling, i.e., story-thinking, is indispensable, in the following pages. (3) Story-Thinking: What is story-thinking, however? Asking this question touches the core of these pages. Story-thinking is a sort of ―mediation‖ that is also a distinct thinking with a story-logic that is not symbolic logic. Or rather, symbolic logic is one sort of language of story-thinking to express an impassioned story, as did Aristotle, Spinoza, J. S. Bach, Lewis Carroll, Pablo Picasso, and M. C. Escher.18 Wright said that China has no ―philosophy‖ but ―thought‖ between philosophy and 19 common folks‘ common sense. We reply that China has a grammar that includes the 16
This is Name School‘s version of ―righting names.‖ Confucius grabs another version of ―righting names,‖ to ―right‖ our life-praxis to the ―names‖ we profess in society, fathers must behave as ―father,‖ children behave as ―filial,‖ etc. 17 Even our notion of ―universal gravity‖ has undergone from Newton‘s to Einstein‘s, and then is changing to whatever sense only our future knows. This notion is the story-in-time of physics that explains the shift of physics in the shift of culture, from the absolute space-time to the relativity of the universe, so far. Thomas S. Kuhn tells its story as The Structure of Scientific Revolution (1962), University of Chicago Press, 1996. We came then to have inexpensive nuclear energy and horrendous nuclear weaponry, both spreading today very rapidly throughout the world. Another example of culture as story-in-time is China. Its autocracy persisted for millennia to collapse in the Opium War and the May Fourth Movement. It has since been searching for an alternative sociopolitical system. Mao‘s ―Cultural Revolution‖ adapted from alien Marxist ideology is still on, looking all over for a viable alternative to centralized autocracy. The West has undergone a similar revolution in the Renaissance but China‘s is more tragic, poignant, and no less worldwide in its impact of ongoing nationwide upheaval, still waiting to rise from the ashes. And why did all people have to begin with autocracy? Why did they have to change it later? China is an enigma, for it has no one-God to set up theocracy as the West did, where why people had to rally to one-God and then revolt against him requires explanation. All this is a story-in-time of China and the world to elucidate them. 18 See J. L. Ackrill, Aristotle the Philosopher, NY: Oxford University Press, 1981; Kuang-ming Wu, The Butterfly as Companion: Meditations on the First Three Chapters of the Chuang Tzu, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990, pp. 366-368, 394. H. A. Wolfson, The Philosophy of Spinoza: Unfolding the Latent Processes of His Reasoning, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934, 1983; Marjorie Grene, ed., Spinoza: A Collection of Critical Essays, Anchor Books, 1973. F. H. Bool, et al., On M. C. Escher, see Impossible Worlds, Köln: Taschen, 2002. Carsten-Peter Warncke and Ingo F. Walther, Pablo Picasso, 18811973, Köln: Taschen, 2002. Martin Gardner, The Annotated Alice by Lewis Carroll: the Definitive Edition (1960), NY: W. W. Norton, 2000; Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, NY: Columbia University Press, 1990 (on Lewis Carroll). Bach needs no documentation. 19 Arthur Wright was correct in saying (H. G. Creel, ed., Chinese Civilization in Liberal Education, University of Chicago Press, 1959, pp. 144, 135, 154, 159) that China has no Stanford philosophy of logical analysis where he was. David S. Nivison in the same milieu agreed. Henry Rosemont, Jr. said (1983) that China has no ethics
Prelude: Life as Story and Storytelling
7 20
Western kind of philosophy and common-sense wisdom. This is Chinese wisdom, the so21 called ―Chinese philosophy.‖ Western philosophy pursues consistency and necessity ; Chinese wisdom flexes with coherence that goes on as actuality does historically, that is, in a story-net, vast and coarse-meshed, nothing leaked, as Lao Tzu said of Heaven Web (73). Chinese wisdom has the grammar of actuality, both historical and rhetorical. The grammar does not logically legislate on actuality but follows it to express our rhetorical activity that flows with and within the world, as the inter-flow of actuality around us and our expressive actuality right here throughout Heaven and Earth. This is the ―logic‖ of storytelling, story-thinking. Storytelling is thus worded expression, wording that has an order. Ordered wording is usually called ―logic‖ that is part of ―rhetoric,‖ the logic of flowing persuasion of words. The logic of words is ―grammar,‖ ―the grammar of persuasion‖ that is the logic of deliveryrhetoric, and the ―grammar of assent‖ that is the logic of reception-rhetoric, and both tell stories as forms of story-thinking. ―How can we rhetorically tell truth, not do demagoguery that misleads? How do we steer rhetoric from capricious demagoguery toward solid guide?‖ Well, an agitator fans up hearers‘ fascination to channel it into his preset goal. Truth-rhetoric is based on actuality to ―argue‖ from it, flowing from it to follow wherever it leads. After all, more rhetoric cures rhetoric, for adding falsehood on falsehood exposes them as ―false,‖ by and by, as history. In history, actuality sounds and resounds over and over, and sooner than later demagoguery emerges to sound hollow. Afterthoughts are better as aftersights, reviews, are, because they thus turn truer, more actual. The ―Aha!‖ time will come, and history judges in the end. In all, history reveals what sort of rhetoric we hear. All this sounds spooky until we realize that we are history, as these seven points explain. (1) I breathe Homer‘s Odysseus, Plato‘s Socrates, Confucius‘ Analects, all of whose presence I feel in my bones. (2) My felt presence of the past changes the past as the past directs how I breathe and feel now. It is history. (3) To provoke such breathing and feeling is selfcultivation; it is education. (4) Thus history and education are one, living in me, in you; we die without history-education. We are alive creating because of history-education. What does ―creation‖ mean here? (5) We naturally react to reading as we breathe responding to air, and putting down our reactions is called ―criticism.‖ Reading is history; criticism enlivens it. Criticism is our own, so it is creation, our life, thanks to history, as we breathe our own way thanks to the air. (6) Now, all this is my own critical reaction to Eliot,22 but he would not have recognized himself in it, being so much altered out of his shape. I thus practice history that becomes me as I become history, creating it.
of an Aristotelian systematic sort. H. G. Creel criticized Wright and Nivison, and Wing-tsit Chan criticized Rosemont, yet none said what ―Chinese philosophy‖ is, not just as convention or thought in China. I reacted to them all in ―中國哲學的共相問題,‖ 哲學論評, 臺大哲學系, 八十年一月, pp. 1-23, On Chinese Body Thinking: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 1997, pp. 207-208, On the “Logic” of Togetherness, op. cit., pp. 304, 305, 435. Here I continue my reply. 20 K. Wu, Chinese Wisdom Alive, NY: Nova Science Publishers, 2010. 21 ―Consistency‖ turns deconstructively complex, while ―necessity‖ turns sinuously analytical, in the West today. 22 ―T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays: New Edition,‖ in Modern Poetics, ed. James Scully, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1965, pp. 61-64.
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(7) As breathing made conscious turns self-conscious and unnatural,23 so history cannot be objectified as the self is systematically elusive. Criticism in history is ―past‖ and ―now‖ mutually measuring, confessional, autobiographical. Thus China has no criticism of history, no philosophy of history; all criticisms by Grand Historians are history. History cannot be objectified; it can only be presented as stories. Let us put the same point and same content another way. ―What is history?‖ can be asked from outside history and from inside history. Collingwood asked the question from outside, by fighting objectivism (scientism, scissors-and-paste approach), saying, ―history is ideas reenacted in question-and-answer.‖ Dilthey also asked it from outside as he fought objectivistic scientism, when he said knowing can undergo personal ―understanding.‖ And then ―What is history?‖ can be asked from inside history, where we realize that ―asking‖ is itself part of history to make up history, for our asking results in recording our living through time as history. Our asking makes ―us‖ to realize; asking makes us aware that our living composes history, that our living is history. We are history, and history is bigger than any one of us. This is why China‘s two volumes on historical criticism, History All-Through 史通 and Literary History, Comprehensive Meaning文史通義, are not on history but on how to be a good historian. As we cannot ―we,‖ so history cannot ―history‖24; as we cannot stand outside our ―self,‖ so history cannot be objectified as ―history,‖ while history keeps mirroring us in time. Thus we breathe Homer, Plato, Einstein, Hitler, as our parents breathe us now. We call our breathing-in-time ―history.‖ Pull off history, and we humans die into animals; realizing we are history, we come alive as human. To make one another among us realize all this is ―education.‖ And then we see Dilthey and Collingwood are our history teaching us history. Education is how history works; history is what education does. History teaches history, at one as story-thinking. 23 24
Breathing exercises, in religions and health disciplines, purposely make breathing self-conscious to adjust it correctly, so as to turn it non-self-conscious by and by. 章學誠 said, ―六經不言經，三傳不言傳，猶人各有我而不容我其我也,‖ (文史通義校注, 經解上, 北京中華書局, 2005, p. 93); 經 and 傳 are history. His volume is one of the only two on historical criticism in China that are not on history but on how to become a good historian, for history is ―systematically elusive‖ as we. Gilbert Ryle (The Concept of Mind, London: Hutchinson, 1949, pp. 195-198) and Ian Ramsey (Christian Empiricism, Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1974, pp. 17-31) noted ―the systematic elusiveness of the ‗I‘.‖ Neither Ryle nor Ramsey took the elusive I as historical, as part of history. Let us go slower here. ―不容我其我‖ says that ―the I has no room to ‗I‘ its I.‖ I can ―I,‖ not actual I, as Tao can ―tao,‖ not Always Tao. As classic ―classic‖-ed is not actual classic, so history ―history‖-ed is not actual history. No actual sage claims himself a sage; no actual history claims itself as history. The reason is simple; no I obtrusively declare I, as no Tao declare itself Tao, as God is ever a hidden God. This is to oppose Socrates. Self-examination manifests the self that does not self-describe-manifest; the self‘s meta-act shows the self but does not describe or analyze the self. Pragmatism can only be the spirit of pragmatism that is the pragmatic spirit; no ―pragmatism‖ is here. Art criticism (詩品，書譜，文心雕龍) must be itself art (see my ―Chinese Art Criticism as Art,‖ Chinese Wisdom Alive, NY: Nova Science Publishers, 2010, p. 137); criticizing historians is itself history. No art or history describes its analyses of them, for praxis is praxis, and ―pragmatism,‖ thinking about praxis, is praxis. Thus no praxis, classic, history, or art can be objectified, for they are activities of the self that ceases to be the self once objectified as the ―self.‖ Subjectivity objectified is no ―subject,‖ for subject is no object. When I say ―I,‖ I exhibit I or display I, yet I do not produce an object, ―I‖; I-as-object does not exist. So, writing that transposes onto paper as sincere conversation, that is, letter-writing and journals, is most natural and powerful. They tend to mention dots of points, open-ended, to move people, and evoke the participants–writers, readers—to freely develop the themes and the points mentioned. Cf. William H. Shannon and Christine M. Bochen, eds., Thomas Merton: A Life in Letters, HarperCollins, 2008, pp. x-xiii.
Prelude: Life as Story and Storytelling
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Story-thinking shows in literature that tells stories about persons and events, what happened and to whom. ―What happened to whom‖ is biography, ―what happened‖ is history that includes biographies, all ―factual‖ that includes fictive stories with factual impact. We tell our ideas, factual or fictive, to us and others in stories, and the telling is a fact, what happens to make things happen. ―History fictive‖ may raise some literalist eyebrows. This is ―fancy history‖ that has no fact, yet no unreal impact, as a statue of Andrew Jackson on horseback, to bear on actuality to stir us up today. This ―fiction‖ is then ―actual beyond fact.‖ This is history-at-meta-level. ―Meta level‖ is of two sorts, observing not-participating, and catalysis to make things happen. Fancied history is a meta-level catalyst to real-ize things. This whole volume is itself a metalevel catalyst to China-West interculture in a story-thinking milieu, to facilitate interenrichments among world cultures. 25 Thus persons and characters embody ideas that events show. Ideas are ―demonstrated,‖ that is, proven and shown, not logically but factually-rhetorically in history, for logic tolerates nothing illogical that constantly happens, while rhetorical storytelling includes whatever happens; in fact, that is what ―history‖ is, telling stories about whatever happened, to discover what they mean, their ―ideas.‖ In short, all ideas are expressed concretely in storytelling. 26 Story-thinking tells stories; it is a ―concrete logic‖ to demonstrate ideas in history, factual and fictive. 27 Let us take a concrete example. On reading Fischer‘s Liberty and Freedom on America‘s ideas, we cannot help but ask two sets of questions, each with four sub-questions. One set are on ideas; another are on our struggles to actualize them. The first set ask wherefrom those ideas, how many, how related they are, and how they developed. We know where the two ideas came from. To him, liberty is independence; freedom is belonging. The two are distinct in America due to its root in individualism; China has no such distinction. Fischer must answer other three questions. The second set ask how much has been achieved, how our struggles have changed the ideas, how the idea-changes have changed our struggles, and where we (should) go from here. So we ask, and the book must answer on those eight themes that are our latecomers‘ retrospective roundup, objective and intersubjective. ―Fischer has no obligation to bother with your questions, does he?‖ He is obligated to clearly elucidate the themes of his book‘s title, and the elucidation answers eight questions of mine entailed by the title. I doubt if his book has answered well any of my questions, and thus his book is a defective history. Or else, answers must be extrapolated from the book, and how easy we can extrapolate shows how good is his book, which cannot be a random lump of scattered data. We call such probing dialogues ―history of ideas.‖ It is ―history.‖ 25
See on how the 19th century English writers eschewed bloodless abstraction of logical proof to express their ideas in persons and events, in John Holloway‘s slightly soft The Victorian Sage: Studies in Argument (1953), NY: W. W. Norton, 1965, pp. 12-13, 292, et passim. His ―plot‖ is our storytelling; his ―sage‖ reminds us of Chinese sagely mode of ―argument.‖ Sadly, those writers—Carlyle, Disraeli, Eliot, Arnold and Hardy—labored under the shadow of the context of ―logic,‖ and few philosophers pay attention to them. Chinese sages happily have no such sad shackles; they are cumbered instead with soft sentimental muck in need of logical clearing and cleansing. 26 ―Demonstrate‖ side-glances at ―demonstrative‖ that shifts meaning with shift of user and of situation. This point fits the dynamic character of rhetoric that shifts with concrete situational shift. This is headache to staid logic. 27 David Hackett Fischer, Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History of America‟s Founding Ideas, Oxford University Press, 2005.
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C. STORY ABOUT STORYTELLING Story-thinking operates in storytelling. We are here, then, to tell a story about storytelling told to all people in ancient days and today, to kids and adults alike. We must note that storytelling is no dissecting of story, though analysis is one peculiar sort of storytelling. Analysis de-scribes to flatten and enervate things, while telling a story presents things as they actually are, alive. Analysis constructs an abstract system with dissected bits, while telling a story is systematic as pre-sented matters, as revealed in the very process of storytelling. Story is a circle irresistibly expanding, with ―everywhere‖-center and ―who‖-edge all 28 over, bits and pieces everywhere, every one reflecting all others, as Leibniz saw in monads, as Blake saw in grains of sand that see many worlds. Our pages follow these bits of sandgrains as ―sections,‖ as they spontaneously arise to exhibit structures structure-less, i.e., systematic and coherent without a formal system. We tell coherent stories of storytelling scattered all over life. Various academic muscles—ethnology, typology, historiography, cultural anthropology, and the list goes on—have been greatly flexed to analyze stories and storytelling, only to 29 dissect them to death. To understand what ―story‖ is, we must tell stories, and to ―correct‖ a specific story, we must tell more stories, simply because storytelling is one supreme indispensable way to let things cohere and present themselves to us as they are. Academic 30 analyses themselves are one mode of storytelling, a less good one than usual storytelling we are daily accustomed to. So, storytelling is the best way to undergo to understand—tell a story of—storytelling. To tell a story about storytelling, we must tell it as it is, that is, we must just tell a story about storytelling. Storytelling is the best, flexuous, open-ended, and at the same time most rigorous way to present things, as stories of all sorts do, gossip, fables, news, history, myths, speeches, letters, conventions, sciences, celebrations, memos, gifting, ideologies, and the list goes on. The reason is simple: We cannot open our mouths without telling stories. This is why few people dislike stories; in fact, no human can live on without storytelling. To ―prove‖ so we must, without further ado, begin telling stories about storytelling. So, we here tell stories of storytelling that meanders coherently in the river of life, shooting breeze where it wishes with winds of nature.
D. NINE SECTIONS IN THIS VOLUME We have nine sections called ―chapters,‖ on story-thinking as storytelling. Since storytelling is indefinable as life, Chapter 1 reminds us with ―storytelling‖ in general by telling of its origin, its how, its magical power, and how we meta-story-tell. Chapter 2 tells of the story of life, ―history.‖ It begins with translation in time as transposition of our forefather 28
Our later section, ―Various Ponds Alive,‖ will ponder on this strange circle, to tell its story. E.g., Pierre Maranda, ed., Mythology: Selected Readings (Penguin Books, 1972) congeals the blood of storytelling. 30 I also shiver at scientific analysis of myths by Elizabeth Wayland Barber and Paul T. Barber, in When They Severed Earth From Sky: How the Human Mind Shapes Myth, Princeton University Press, 2004. 29
Prelude: Life as Story and Storytelling
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in our historical reenactment, then goes into specific stories of politics and history of ideas, then surprises ourselves to realize how history makes no mistakes as the I Ching its story in mathematical poetry does not. This Chapter concludes with a look at how history relates to mathematics, a part of culture, under three themes, science, culture, and milieu. Stories tell of our knowledge, ―science,‖ and our ―culture,‖ both amounting to our ―milieu.‖ So we have Chapter 3: Science, to show that storytelling not science comprehends random events, which now appear with story-sense, and science itself is part of mythmaking. Then we see how Japan‘s Shinto naturelove story makes agrarian technology and ―idleness‖ that nurtures the self, but psychology as science cannot. Chapter 4: Culture, follows to tell of its two themes, vital relativism that is a dynamic ―circle‖ of China-West interculture, and, naturally, Chapter 5: Milieu, rounds up both science and culture as our life-milieu. It begins intimately with kids, and then spreads to logic, time and space, and our ―self‖ in relation to our milieu. After this, we turn personal to Chapter: Pain, which is not evil, in pleasure-involvement that leads to the biblical love of enemies, charity, against capital punishment, and global ethics. Pain is shown as strangely unintelligible in Chapter 7: Akrasia, violence and depression. Finally, storytelling climaxes in Chapter 8: Silence, and Chapter 9: Music, where storytelling and hearing join in nature. In short, as time heals, history resolves matters to enable life to go on. Reflecting history, storytelling and story-reading put us at ease, to make sense of all things, and fulfill life. The following pages tell stories of all this story-thinking, reflexively and spontaneously. This is the only apt and natural way to deal with life as it is naturally told in stories.
Chapter 1
STORYTELLING WHEREFROM STORYTELLING Stories such as Homer‘s Odyssey develop over a vast period of time; it has been a popular hit, recited, read, and quoted repeatedly by a vast number of people, all over the world, for millennia. Besides, kids and students love to talk, talk, and talk, making teachers insane and making cell phone companies thrive. This fact of ubiquitous storytelling raises fascinating questions on why, what, and how we tell and hear stories.
Why Tell and Hear Stories? Why, to begin with, do we love to tell and hear stories, as if we had nothing else to do? Odysseus‘ slave the swineherd, who played host, gave us an answer, when he invited his guest, beggar stranger Odysseus (actually his master), saying, ―But we two, sitting here in the shelter, . . . shall entertain each other remembering and retelling our sad sorrows. For 1 afterwards a man who suffered much and wandered much has pleasure out of his sorrows.‖ That was the world‘s earliest psychotherapy. Story-therapy is an excellent counseling; counselor is simply a hearty skillful listener who requests to hear a story told her, ―Now, tell me about yourself. . . . Please, tell me more.‖ We love to tell and hear stories because, among others, storytelling heals. Why does it heal to tell and hear stories, however? Well, what is a ―story‖? Story is 2 3 intimately related to ―history,‖ not only etymologically but also in life, as Sartre said, (A) man is always a teller of stories. . . he sees everything which happens to him through these stories; and he tries to live his life as if it were a story he was telling. . . . While you live, nothing happens. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that‘s all. There are no beginnings . . . an interminable and monotonous addition. . . . But when you tell about a life, everything changes; . . . events take place in one direction, and we tell about them in the 1 The Odyssey of Homer, XV.398-401, tr. Richmond Lattimore (1967), NY: HarperCollins, 1999, p. 235. 2 See Oxford English Dictionary, 2001, VII:261 (―history‖), XVI:797 (―story‖). 3 Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, NY: New Directions, 1964, pp. 56-59. Cf. Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being, Chicago: Regnery/Gateway, 1960, I: 192-194. We appreciate storytelling here in opposition to their view that it is a self-deception. Cf. my The Butterfly as Companion, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990, pp. 7-8.
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Kuang-ming Wu opposite direction. . . I wanted the moments of my life to follow each other and order themselves like those of a life remembered. I might as well try to catch time by the tail.
Storytelling weaves together scattered meaningless bits of life-events into a coherent sense, to make a meaningful ―history‖ out of life events, to make sense of life, and meaningfulness makes life whole—and to make whole is to heal. We can now smile at our 4 pain. To tell is already to shape life‘s chaotic pieces into a story. The story is now a coherent life, a complex whole, all of a piece; and to heal is literally to make whole. Therefore, to tell a story is to heal. Storytelling is unfinished without being heard, however. Telling implies listening; storytelling expects to be heard; such is story-thinking. A story needs a listener to support, 5 6 interfuse, and complete, as Siddhartha felt when he met that humble ferryman Vasudeva. Vasudeva listened with great attention; he heard all about his origin and childhood, about his studies, his seekings, his pleasures and needs. It was one of the ferryman‘s greatest virtues that, like few people, he knew how to listen. Without his saying a word, the speaker felt that Vasudeva took in every word, quietly, expectantly, that he missed nothing. He did not await anything with impatience and gave neither praise nor blame—he only listened. Siddhartha felt how wonderful it was to have such a listener who could be absorbed in another persons‘ life, his strivings, his sorrows. (Then) the ferryman listened with doubled attention, completely absorbed, his eyes closed.
It is clear, then, that ―listening‖ is quite an active involvement. The activity of the listener turns crucial as one‘s story makes an intolerable whole of sorrows, for then the listener would gently nudge the storyteller to retell, re-describe, and rewrite a new story, and thereby turn the painful negative whole into a prideful joyous one. The gentle turning takes time, listening to which amounts to ―psychotherapy.‖ It happened when Siddhartha was unable to face the prospect of letting go of his son, the young rebellious Siddhartha, quite spoiled. Vasudeva had to gently nudge him to attend to the only hope for his son, to let his son leave him to face the world alone by the son himself. 7 Siddhartha remained hesitant, until finally a tragic breakup erupted. The (father) told him to gather some twigs. But . . . he stood there, defiant and angry . . . ―Bring your own twigs,‖ he shouted, foaming. ―I am not your servant. I know that you do not beat me; you dare not! . . . I hate you; you are not my father even if you have been my mother‘s lover a dozen times!‖ . . . The following morning he had disappeared.
All this while, Vasudeva was silent, waiting, waiting, and waiting, watching Siddhartha‘s fatherly pain, and followed him wherever he went in search for his son. Vasudeva listened well with his quiet behavior and followed Siddhartha‘s life-story with his life until it is complete.8
4 This is the whole point of Viktor Frankl‘s meaning-therapy, logotherapy, in Man‟s Search for Meaning, Boston: Beacon Press, 2004. 5 The listener can be oneself listening to oneself, of course. 6 Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha, tr. Hilda Rosner, NY: Bantam Books, 1971, p. 104. 7 Ibid., pp. 123f. 8 Ibid., pp. 136f.
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As Vasudeva rose from the seat on the river bank, when he looked into Siddhartha‘s eyes and saw the serenity of knowledge shining in them, he touched his shoulder gently in his kind protective way and said: ―I have waited for this hour, my friend. Now that is has arrived, let me go. I have been Vasudeva, the ferryman, for a long time. Now it is over. Farewell hut, farewell river, farewell Siddhartha. . . . I am going into the unity of all things.‖
As we see it happened, the events cooperated with the waiting, or rather, the waiting went along with the events. Waiting could do so because waiting takes time, and taking time gives room to go along with the events. Waiting is thus synonymous with listening, listening to events as we listen to the one suffering. Listening waits on the sufferer as listening waits on time to transpire. I walk out (of myself) into nature, and I am in raw contact. Green trees keep telling me of their green stories, with birds chirping, all by just being themselves in casual breeze. Flowers are not beautiful enough without birds chanting them, for birds are flowers of the air and the sky, and flowers are birds on the roadside singing beauty; they match and echo. We call them ―stories.‖ Hearing their stories, I feel so good, put together wholesome.
How to Listen How did he listen to the life-story of Siddhartha‘s as it developed? Anthropologist 9 Rodney Frey, in his objective ethnographic project, told us that he once bombarded a Crow Indian Chief Alan Old Horn with ―naïve‖ questions. In the end, Alan‘s patience ran out. He held up his hand and pointed to a tin shed some fifty yards away. ―You see that tin shed?‖ Alan asked. ―It‘s like my culture. You can sit back here and describe it, but it‘s not ‗til you go inside, listen, feel it, see from the inside looking out, that you really know what it‘s all about. You‘ve ‘gotta go inside!‖ The lessons of the ―tin shed‖ were taken to heart. Twenty years have passed since they sat under that cottonwood. What does Alan‘s talk mean? When I am just alone, not lonely, I am just I am; I do not listen to me, not deal with me, but I am just I am, alone; I am that tin shed. And then I hear this, see that, and they are just as they are, alone. We are alone, together. That is togetherness, in a tin shed. Thus togetherness has the quiet shed-depth of being alone, as the unknown bird just chirps, and the bare branch just stretched there, against the blue sky, as I trudge on, while in me my tin shed. Togetherness trudges on, alone. All this trudging makes it hard to imagine a year has just passed, and I cannot believe I am ―this old‖ now. I am what I am, and nothing is ever different from what I am. ―Difference‖ is not me but someone else talking outside the tin shed. I am I while someone else talks to make a difference, to make togetherness, alone and different. That is Alan talking, from his tin shed to invite us in.
9 Rodney Frey, ed., Stories That Make the World: Oral Literature of the Indian Peoples of the Inland Northwest As Told by . . . Elders, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995, p. 5. Alan‘s lesson shapes this book that tells this story and their stories.
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All talks are oral literature. All talks are a storytelling that is a ―confession,‖ what 10 11 literally speaks-out from inside a culture my tin shed and inside myself; such a talk links things together and yarns, weaves, and makes the world, my world, and thereby makes things whole—whole ciphers alone—and heals them all, the storyteller and the listener. To listen to such talks is to ―go inside, listen, feel it, see from the inside looking out,‖ and share the new creation of the world that puts us at home our tin shed. And that was what happened to Siddhartha as he, with Vasudeva, listened intently to the river, the Nature in which they both lived, intently. Such listening together made a new creation, in a new story of life, told, confessed, and intently listened to. In creation something brand new begins to be; it is the first step to initiate something new, and ―something new‖ is a fresh coherence of things, a making ―whole‖ against previous disintegration into chaos, into bits and pieces. Disintegration describes discomfort and disease in disarray; creation is fresh integration and coherence, where things fit together whole. Creation makes things emerge fit and whole, something wholesome. Now where does such creative beginning of all things begin? It begins at the self; creation is first and foremost an initiation of self-creation, to wit, making my self whole. Creation makes the self fit, whole, and thus wholesome. Creation in its very initial step is 12 self-healing. Creation makes whole to heal. Therefore, scientist Rodney Frey must have felt fit and wholesome as he told us the story of how Chief Alan Horn told him how to understand his tribal stories that compose their tin shed, their culture. This scientific storytelling of storytelling tells us a variety of sorts of storytelling and story-hearing. We can see five ways of seeing such variety of storytelling— story-thinking.
Five Sorts of Storytelling We see five points here about diverse sorts of storytelling. First, we have an originative storytelling from inside me and inside my culture, my tin shed my stories. It is overpowering; ―So he spoke, and all of them stayed stricken to silence, 13 held in thrall by the story all through the shadowy chambers.‖ Here I see everything alive, 14 ocean (Poseidon), dangerous high cliffs (Skylla), whirlpool on the coastline (Charybdis),
10 See Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, 1989, 2001, ―confess,‖ III.702. All words are alive with their unique biographical-etymological stories to tell-confess to us their users. All our talks are made of these living words that comprise our culture; to talk is to tell stories cultural and confessional. 11 I have been untiringly telling everyone that Chinese people think by telling stories, in all my books and articles. 12 This reflection answers the question of why Jesus heals. Jesus who claimed to be the Son of the Creator, came to habitually heal us in every sense, and often on the Sabbath, the Day exclusively of Creator God. Jesus the healer also tells stories, for stories heal; Jesus the healer and Jess the storyteller are one. As for story that heals, see Rollo May‘s interesting explanation of how storytelling—he calls it ―symbolism‖—heals in Symbolism in Religion and Literature, edited with an Introduction by Rollo May, NY: George Braziller, 1961, pp. 11-49. 13 Odyssey, op. cit., XIII.1-2 (p. 198). 14 As are well known, these are divinities who sorely troubled Odysseus in ibid., XII.85 (p. 187), XII.104 (p. 188), as explained in Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon (With revised supplement), Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996, p. 1617 (Σκύλλα) and pp. 1980-1 (Χάρσαδις).
Storytelling
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and even Dawn and necessity (Anankē). Nature is ―natura naturans and natura naturata,‖ 16 nature naturing, the birthing-power birthing things, and nature natured, things thus born. Nature is forever nascent physis, in constant process of growth, ―birthing, birthing, 17 without ceasing.‖ This sentiment of things alive, all in their own right, naturally breeds awesome polytheism, often condescendingly taken as ―anthropomorphic,‖ while we today continually recognize Nature‘s awesome power by naming hurricanes as Hurricane Agnes (1972), Hurricane Andrew (1992), Hurricane Mitch (1998), etc. ―Nature‖ is a correlative term, i.e., alive with us. Then, in reaction to the above inside storytelling, there arises storytelling from outside, an objective one. Here things are seen as mechanical blind stuff and processes, and today‘s 18 physics is born. Mechanism is the story taken for granted today; mechanics of technē, handcontrol, governs all things in the world and the world itself now. In opposition to anthropomorphism, this is ―mechano-morphism‖ today covering literally all, including ourselves in physiology, psychology, sociology, cultural anthropology, cultures, and everything in life in the universe. Thirdly, there is a storytelling from both inside and out. In fact, looking back, we realize that we have been telling stories about storytelling this way. To realize how naturally we see things from inside (how Mother Nature forever natures), and to see us today seeing things from outside (objectively, mechanically), we must ―catch time by the tail‖ (Sartre) to see time spatially and see space in time, as divinities do. We are ―created in divine images,‖ ―godintoxicated.‖ This is again a polytheistic way of telling stories. Here we hear the stories of things in the world in time/space from the past through now to the future, as told by Muse (and the dead 19 people beyond space/time) in the Odyssey. It is significant that Muse is the goddess of musing, that is, pondering and meditative thinking, as Oxford English Dictionary X:121 tells us. Etymology tells the story in the word. She oversees and surveys the entire story of anything; in fact, the Odyssey begins with appealing to goddess Muse for the hearing of the whole story of Odysseus. This comprehensive frame contains the confessional and autobiographical stories of Odysseus‘ adventures in Books VI through XII, and beyond. Fourth, the above three sorts of stories can be told in three ways. First, stories are told by life-behavior called ―ritual,‖ sacrifices and hecatombs with much invocation to change the course of events to our benefit and gratitude afterward, in ancient days, and today‘s science and technology to change the world without gratitude.
15 Quite often goddess Dawn appears in Odyssey to initiate new stage in Odysseus‘ adventures. 16 For ―natura‖ see P. G. W. Glare, ed., Oxford Latin Dictionary, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1982, 2002, pp. 1158-1159. For ―natura naturans and natura naturata‖ see William L. Reese, Dictionary of Philosophy and Religion, Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1996, p. 509. 17 See ―ananke‖ and ―physis‖ in F. E. Peters, Greek Philosophical Terms: A Historical Lexicon, New York University Press, 1967, pp. 18, 158-160. I combined this meaning of ―nature‖ as the constantly growing Urstoff with the famous Chinese phrase, ―生生不息.‖ Martin Heidegger was obsessed with physis as eruptiveactive, Introduction to Metaphysics, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000, p. 252 (index on ―phusis‖). 18 Ibid., p. 190. 19 The Odyssey begins with a request to Muse to ―tell me of the man of many ways‖ (I.1 [Lattimore, op. cit., p. 27]). The great Dead are as divine as nymphs, freely going in and beyond the confines of space/time (XI, pp.168-184).
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Stories can also be told by words of mouth, which is alive, rhythmic, rhymed-repetitious, and constantly in flux, as do today‘s political speeches inherited from such oral tradition. That was the oral tradition of epic poems and of today‘s political campaigns. Finally, stories can be told by hand into written mythologies, classical and contemporary, and volumes of pages. Fifth and finally, all explanations tell stories. We see two ways of telling such stories. (1) To begin, Aristotle summed up our explanations in ―four causes,‖ formal, material, final, and efficient; obviously, they tell four sorts of stories of how things are shaped, made, for, and work. Why does it rain? We humans say, because there is a tilt in the earth‘s revolution, the Dragon Up There sheds tears, I am hungry, or it just happens. We say they are ―whybecause,‖ so they are ―reasoning,‖ the first scientific, the second mythological, the third zodiacal, and the final fatalistic. We can equally say that these four sorts of reasoning sum up these sorts of storytelling. ―Is ‗science‘ a story?‖ Well, ancient people told their scientific stories that we call ―mythologies‖; we can equally say that science today continues to tell mythologies of the future, for today‘s science is a ―mythology‖ of tomorrow as ancient ―science‖ is today‘s mythology. Such science-mythology inter-transfer is story-thinking communicating itself across time.
Lessons from Stories (2) Besides, each storytelling breeds more stories of significance, lessons for our living. For example, the Odyssey stirs our meditations on four matters of consequence to life: (a) how important death and dead people are, (b) how Odysseus is strikingly compared with Agamemnon, (c) how this comparison illustrates an innocent joining of fate with freedom, and (d) how Greek polytheism, which graphically tells stories of this joining, echoes Christian triune monotheism. (a) The Odyssey has two elaborate episodes of dead people and Odysseus‘ visit with them—one is in the middle of Odyssey, just before Odysseus‘ straight journey home (Book 11); another is at the end, just before he visited his father Laertes (Book 24). These episodes‘ positions, the dead people first appear to Odysseus just at the crucial juncture of homecoming to give him a vista of his life-course, and then appear again at its conclusion to render their final judgment. Dead people have such an uncanny power, almost divine, because death is history, the retrospective finality of all; world history is indeed world judgment. History is the final arbiter because, as all Chinese history-writings show and tell us, history exhibits as nothing else does how nature works; history embodies the law of nature that natural science instinctively tries to discern by ―experiments,‖ contrived history. This—history in nature, nature in history—is the standard whereby all historians judge historical incidents. Let us go slower here, for the point is crucial. Incidents straightly story-told judge, and their historical judgments are most serious. A bare word of praise exceeds highest honors, and bare half-blame cuts deeper than axes and 20 galleys, for historical praises and blames stay forever incorruptible. History does not say but 20 My English trailed, barely from afar, 劉勰‘s incomparable 「褒見一字， 貴踰軒冕；貶在片言， 誅深斧鉞。」in 史傳第十六, 文心雕龍, 臺北市三民書局，民83, p. 156.
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shows, intimating its two judgment-criteria, wisdom and law, by straightly telling of both as another bunch of stories. The historians‘ criteria to judge incidents are historical wisdom and historical laws of cosmos. The first one is historical wisdom. Ssu-ma Ch‘ien judged Hsiang Yü‘s tragic arrogant 21 demise as due to his ―refusal to learn of ‗old‘ 不師古‖ ; Ssu-ma could judge Hsiang by learning of old 師古. Thus historical incidents are judged by accumulated wisdom of history, hammered out by long periods of repeated critiques of the ages, during which all various dross of ―mistakes‖ is found and cleansed. History as process of critical judgments thus makes no mistake; history is wise without qualification, for history-process includes all qualifications; it has gone through it all. The second criterion of historical judgment is the Laws of Nature-going ascertained by history. They are cosmology in cosmogony manifesting the Yin-Yang Five-Goings 陰陽五行, obtained by the long periods of repeated observations of various happenings perpetrated in history. Laws of nature are those by which ―mistakes‖ appear, and ―mistake‖ is inapplicable to the laws. Such natural laws are sought after by today‘s scientific experimentation, i.e., contrived history, and amassing observed data by sociology and natural sciences, i.e., historical data. Thus, these two standards of historical judgments are themselves ―history.‖ In short, history is judged by history. Uncannily, however, history betokens dead past. ―Cover the coffin, (we) finally judge 蓋棺論定,‖ China says. As we can now step back from the dead to look back at all matters about them, so can the dead now afford to give us their definitive vista, guide, and judgment over our past, present, and future. We make history out of dead people to critically learn from them about our own lives now into future. Now the last statement above is itself un-cannier than we can imagine. It amounts to saying that we ourselves make dead people uncanny, for the statement amounts to saying that it is we ourselves now who cover the coffin to the dead past, to make the dead come alive, make ―history‖ out of dead people, and have them tell us, judge us, and guide us, as we modify their instruction. We latecomers are the ―dead people,‖ as it were, to those who are dead, to make dead people come alive, to judge us as we judge them! ―Only dead people talk; we the living just chatter,‖ say we. Well then, if we want to really ―talk,‖ we had better be ―dead,‖ dead serious, to dead people and listen carefully to them. How? We do so by telling their stories with loving care. The Odyssey is in fact such a ―history‖ that renders the final judgment over our ideal hero Odysseus. He suffers so much as to be given an epithet, ―hated of gods and men‖ as his name 22 shows, yet he ―stubbornly‖ persisted in love of his no less ―stubbornly‖ devoted wife 23 Penelope until he was ―allowed‖ to succeed to come home to join Penelope. (b) As part of the final picture in retrospect, Homer skillfully placed throughout the story the dead Agamemnon side by side with the living Odysseus. The contrast is striking, serving as a striking foil to the breathtaking magnificence of Odysseus‘ life-adventure. How closely 21 This is Ssu-ma‘s 司馬遷 concluding remark in 項羽本紀第七, 史記，臺北市三民書局，2008, I: 457. 22 The mythic origin of the name ‘Οδσζζεύς is ―hated by gods and men,‖ ―Why, Zeus, are you now so harsh with him? ηί νύ ηόζον ώδύζαο, Σεΰ;‖ (Odyssey 1:62, Lattimore, p. 28; cf. pp. 99, 219, 242, 286, 289, 291, 292) See ‘οδύζομαι in Liddell and R. Scott, Greek-English Lexicon, op. cit., pp. 1199-1200. 23 Both Odysseus and Penelope described themselves as ―stubborn‖ (Lattimore, pp. 94, 299, 337, 339, 341).
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similar one life was to the other, and yet in how radically divergent they ended their respective lives! Both Agamemnon and Odysseus were rulers, friends to each other, fought together, loved their wives, and even made it home after much suffering. They both loved and were so grateful to be back and met their wives. Incredibly, however, Agamemnon was then murdered by his own wife and her paramour, while Odysseus came back and methodically murdered his devoted wife‘s arrogant suitors! Nothing is more shocking and poignant than this contrast. 24 This contrast is the climax in the final Story of the Dead People that concluded the final judgment on the life of Odysseus. Their contrast climaxed in having the dead former bless the 25 living latter, and the admiring judgment was delivered by none other than Agamemnon who freely admitted to his tragic fate before his friend, that incredibly fortunate Odysseus. What a 26 devoted friend Odysseus had in Agamemnon! (c) We cannot help but sigh, ―But poor Agamemnon! Why did their lives go so similar yet so different?‖ The Odyssey nonchalantly tells their stories, however, on how they were both free and fated. ―How could fate and freedom join in so naïve a manner?‖ In response to this query, the Odyssey simply keeps on telling their stories, as if to say, ―It just happened that way.‖ If we are disappointed, it is we who are naïve, for we are blind to how significant this ―It just happened that way‖ is. We don‘t see that if it just happens, it is beyond us, to wit, something divinities ordain, and so it is fated; at the same time, if it just happens, we can just enter the way things happen and freely do something about it. It is precisely in such an actual storytelling as this, of what just actually happens, that fate and freedom ―naively,‖ i.e., naturally, join. (d) This is what makes polytheism so appealing, what makes our lives alive, colorful, and variegated. ―It just happens‖ in polytheism relieves us from theodicy—to reconcile evil with one almighty all-loving God—while we can freely struggle to adjust what ―just happens.‖ Such ―simple‖ interactive union of divine fate and human freedom was vividly brought out by a straight telling of gods and goddess‘ love/assistance and hate/torment, diverse divine interventions, in Odysseus‘ persistent suffering struggles. Athene, the goddess of love, wisdom, war, and power, constantly came in to help Odysseus, even to the extreme of operating like ―deus ex machina.‖ Besides, her assistance was under the aegis of Zeus her supreme father god, who even appeared to Odysseus with the 27 portent of thunder. The theophany of both divinities binds the story, to begin and end the Odyssey. Now, this lively Greek polytheism echoes Christian monotheism. It takes two different matters and situations, far apart one from the other, to echo one against the other. Nothing is farther apart than Greek polytheism and Christian monotheism. Precisely because of their distance in every sense, we hear their echo, such as the Christ of love, fight, wisdom, and 24 Lattimore (p. 5) calls our attention to how often Athene exhorted Odysseus‘ son Telemachos to follow admirable Orestes‘ example to avenge on the suitors as Orestes avenged his father Agamemnon‘s death by murdering his father‘s murderer. It may well be so, but this insight fades in importance before the striking AgamemnonOdysseus contrast. 25 Ibid., p. 350. 26 China has some stories of moving friendship, but not as dramatic. We admire Agamemnon‘s generous friendship. 27 Lattimore, pp. 301, 319.
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power as the Son of God the Father who sponsors Christ‘s mission. Atheists accuse such acts of ―deus ex machina.‖ God the Father thunders ―for your sake,‖ said Christ (John 12:29). Homer foreshadows Christ. ―Now, are we sure of lessons of consequence today in dated classical mythologies? What 28 about ‗immortality‘?‖ Let us look at the world‘s oldest epic, Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh the heroic king of Uruk was jolted by his bosom friend Enkidu‘s death into an intense passionate search for immortality. Against four warnings by immortals to enjoy his present moments of mortal life, Gilgamesh kept up his wearisome search. Gilgamesh finally met an extraordinary mortal, Utnapushtim who, blessed by immortals, lives on undying. At his wife‘s urging, Utnapushtim gave Gilgamesh a plant that restores youth, which Gilgamesh sadly lost to a snake before he came home. He ―engraved on a stone the whole story,‖ and died happily ever after. Now, Gilgamesh must be happy that his story indicates at least five sorts of immortality. First, what immortals told him must be immortally valid, namely, we mortals can and must at any moment enjoy the present moment to the hilt, for ―now‖ is eternal. This insight is picked up later by Zen masters, ―Day after day, it is a good day 日日是好日.‖ Secondly, Gilgamesh found Utnapushtim forever idle in a rocking-chair; this is one sort of living undying. Do we want such life? Thirdly, he gave Gilgamesh the plant of renewal of youth, as the snake shedding its skin. Fourth, the immortality Gilgamesh wanted was his heroic exploits that forever win recognition. Fifth, this was why his whole story was ―carved on a stone‖; storytelling itself often achieves immortality as a ―classic.‖ The above five sorts of immortality remind us of four more sorts. Sixth, a person‘s ―character‖ or ―virtue‖ can often attain immortal renown, what Chinese people yearn as the first of ―Three Incorruptibles 三不朽,‖ the other two being Exploits and Words, also mentioned above by the Epic of Gilgamesh. Seventh, Indian people believe that human lives keep on dying and rebirthing (transmigration of souls) unless, eighth, some manage to reach and unite with the Eternal One and can afford never to return (Nirvana in later Buddhism). In response, ninth, Christianity looks forward to God‘s Kingdom after the Final Judgment. We hardly need to remind us that all these ―immortalities‖ are informed by ancient mythologies, and we today barely pursue only two of them, the second easy idleness and the 29 third youth-renewal, neither with much success. ―But then, what about the proposal that the present moment as eternal? Doesn‘t it sound incredible, if not too good to be true?‖ This query leads us to considering ―historical particularity.‖
THE CHRISTIAN SCANDAL OF HISTORICAL PARTICULARITY To show how the above explanation—storytelling—of storytelling is no idle talk but has practical bearing on the now as eternal, let us take the Christian scandal of historical
28 Among many versions, the following strikes the balance between literal truncated verses and a wholesale embellished story. N. K. Sandars, The Epic of Gilgamesh, London: Penguin Books, 1972. 29 These two sorts are what we usually mean by ―immortality,‖ as told by the editors of Time-Life Books in Search for Immortality, Alexandria, Virginia: Time-Life Books, 1992.
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particularity, supposedly30 unique to the Christian faith. With all respect to much sophisticated reflections in theology and comparative religion since Kittel coined that notorious phrase, ―the scandal of particularity,‖31 the problems enshrined in it32 refuse to leave us. In fact, today‘s global shrinking intensifies the problems.33 Here story-thinking handles the problem better than logical analysis. The problem is created by the impact of the beyond. Suppose we list incidents of the beyond, the non-actual, just for fun. We can think of going faster than the speed of light, a dragon a hotchpotch of actual features, a monster un-paint-able, forefathers and future plans, ideals unreachable, logical operation non-actual, mythical beings, gods and goblins, the imaginable, the unimaginable, UFO, parapsychology, fiction, utopias, the absurd, contradictions, paradoxes. We can go on listing them indefinitely. Kids are good at compiling them. These incidents happen without rhyme or reason. Storytelling can yarn it out, even yarning out logic and illogic. Scientific technology actualizes some of them, and metal can now fly and float to go to the moon, and smash and fuse atoms. Geniuses pleasantly, and insane people unpleasantly, expand our prosaic mundane mind, and they are beyond us to tell apart. Under the impact of the Ultimate Beyond, our usual world of concrete particulars now turns strange and awkward. Things no longer fit together as expected, but appear as oddly out of joint as described by Chinese Name Scholars, British Lewis Carroll, and Dutch M. C. Escher, though none of them seems to be aware of the impact from the Beyond on them (unless their inspiration is taken as the Beyond‘s impact). To us humans, religious ultimacy is universally particular, a strange one. Days going and dawns coming are beyond logic as religions are, yet as the Beyond-us, past events and future plans capture us as awesome gods and goddesses do, all vigorously come alive to enthrall us, in the irresistible power of storytelling as history, as visions, and as otherworldly might, to impinge on us here now to alter our world for ever. Story brings us the impact from Beyond us. Story and religion are twin sisters as the Muses and Hermes are siblings of mighty mythology, another name for storytelling. But ultimacy is one; religions are many. Historical Christianity is in a bind, in history. Jesus said, ―One who is not against us is with us,‖ such as Buddha, and ―One who is not with me is against me,‖ 34 such as Buddha. What does Jesus want of Buddha? Jesus said to Peter, ―You will be this and that‖; Peter 30 ―Supposedly‖ unique, because the Christian faith is often taken to uniquely typify this scandal, but as we see later, this ―scandal‖ is just a part of human daily living in naming specifics that spreads to universals. 31 Gerhard Kittel coined that notorious phrase, ―the scandal of particularity‖ (in Mysterium Christi, 1930), tacitly assuming Lessing‘s unbridgeable ―ugly broad ditch‖ between eternal logical necessity and ephemeral historical contingency (Lessing‟s Theological Writings [1886-1924], tr. Henry Chadwick, London: Adam and Charles Black, 1956, p. 55). This ―difficulty‖ is concocted out of radically separating the logical from the actual, with a Western penchant of logic-rationality. The scandal has another problem, however, as mentioned in the main text. 32 Obviously a cluster of issues, all ―tough cookies,‖ are related to this ―scandal‖—the uniqueness of Christianity, its truth, its mission, its relation to other religions, agnostics, atheists, deists, anti-Christians, non-Christians, other religionists, and the list goes on. Christ‘s atonement is not considered here, for it falls under ―uniqueness‖ as Buddha‘s Nirvana does to Buddhism. These issues are best raised naturally, as we will do some of them, while considering the concrete ―scandal‖ of a historical universal, Jesus as the Christ. 33 Notable are Christianity and the Wider Ecumenism, ed. Peter Phan, New York: Paragon House, 1990, and Jacques Dupuis, Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002; both volumes have extensive bibliographies. 34 Luke 9:50, 11:23. Amazingly, these two statements that seem tautological are actually incompatible!
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responded, ―How about him?‖ He said, ―What is he to you? You just follow me.‖35 Be not concerned with others but follow Jesus; but love is concerned with others. We should spread his love, to clash with other religions, but love does not compete (with other religions). Historical specifics gnaw. The resolution (not solution, for we cannot solve eternal problems beyond our logic) must be our common sense, that all religious, historical or not, are beyond us humans. The Beyond both intensifies the above problems and resolves them, in a storytelling way. We first consider the problem before its resolution.
How Problematic the Scandal is The scandal is that of the historical particularity of trans-historical ultimacy (not historical contingency involved in logical necessity as Lessing thought36). One form of the scandal is the ultimacy allowing no religious plurality, yet manifested as religious plurality in fact. Here are two concrete examples to show how problematic this scandal is, (a) whether the Confucian classics can serve as an Old Testament to Chinese (Christians), and (b) how we believe in historical Jesus as the Christ at all. (a) The first issue is, Can the Confucian Classics be the ―Old Testament to the Chinese‖? Can Chinese people take Christ to fulfill the ―Chinese OT‖ as he does the Jewish Bible? This is a two-edged dilemma, for Christianity as the Incarnation of ultimacy is historical and missionary, two features pulling in opposite directions. The historicity of Christianity entails its historical spread, i.e., Christian mission its life. So historicity and missionary spread interimply, and yet they pull apart, as follows. On one hand, as the historical faith, Christianity must be incarnated in the historical context of Judaism; Jesus was a Jew, and cannot forego his Jewish heritage—cut OT, and NT turns unintelligible. So, Bultmann37 is wrong in trying to extract the universal Christian ―essence‖ out of its historical ―mythological husk‖ that includes Judaism. On the other hand, the Christian faith is a missionary faith. It must be spread among nonJews to incarnate in non-Jewish cultures, and giving non-Jews the ―alien‖ Jewish OT gives 38 them a burden. Is this burden indispensable? Is this ―historical particularity‖ of having the Jewish OT an essential part of the ―Gospel scandal,‖ or is it an excess ―yoke‖ (cf. Acts 15:10,
35 John 18-22. 36 Gotthold E. Lessing said, ―That is: accidental truths of history can never become the proof of necessary truths of reason.‖ (―On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power‖ [Lessings Werke, ed. Lachmann-Muncker, xiii, pp. 1-8], in Lessing‟s Theological Writings, tr. Henry Chadwick, London: Adam and Charles Black, 1956, pp. 54-55) 37 I considered Bultmann‘s ―demythologization‖ in On Metaphoring: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 2001, pp. 283-310. He is today‘s Marcion of Pontus (c85-c160 AD) who cut OT for the ―pure‖ Gospel in NT, ―pure‖ in terms of his unhistorical principles of Gnosticism, as Bultmann‘s ―pure kerygma‖ today is Heidegger‘s existenz. On Marcion, see Henry Chadwick, The Early Church (1967), London: Penguin Books, 1980, pp. 3840, 77, 80-81, 107, Paul Edwards, ed., The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1967, V.155-156 (note its Bibliography), and Paul Lagassé, ed., The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition, NY: Columbia University Press, 2000, pp. 1752-1753. 38 Those ―Christians‖ such as T. Merton, W. Johnson, and others, who try to ―welcome‖ Buddhism into their Christian faith, are strange/―funny,‖ as if advancing to someone else‘s wife. Cf. Sylvia Boorstein, That‟s Funny, You Don‟t Look Buddhist: On Being a Faithful Jew and a Passionate Buddhist, HarperSanFrancisco, 1997.
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19)? In short, can we substitute the Confucian Classics—equally historical —for the Jewish OT, to the Chinese? The crux of the problem is the very notion of ―incarnation.‖ It is ―Word made flesh,‖ Ultimacy made into history, Ultimacy historicizing in two senses. It can mean ―once and for all,‖ ―at last,‖ in the past; Jesus of Nazareth was and is the Christ, and no other. This is the historicity of Christianity. Incarnation as historicizing can also mean Jesus become Christ continually in history in all places and times; Jesus is Christ for Africans, Indians, Chinese, and so on, today, tomorrow, and always. This is the Christian mission spread; no spread, no Christianity. Historicizing Christianity thus means both ―once‖ and ―continuous.‖ The Jewish Bible as Christian OT belongs to the historical aspect; asking if Confucian classics can be OT to the Chinese belongs to the missionary aspect. We want both, but ―once‖ and ―continuing‖ cannot join. Such is the problem we have of Christianity as historical incarnation of the ultimate. (b) This Incarnation-problem cuts deep into the second scandal, a more radical Gospel 41 scandal. What does historical Jesus as ultimate Christ mean? Concretely, what does it mean for us today to believe in historical Jesus crucified under Pontius Pilate, as the ultimate Christ our eternal Savior of the whole world in all its history? Two extreme positions are possible. (i) Does it mean that the Christians of the twenty-first century must speak Aramaic of Jesus‟ day, go in pilgrimage to Golgotha, and be in quest of Jesus‘ skull? Do we embrace the historical fetish of Jesus in all his historical smells and details? We shrink from saying/doing so. At the same time, we are uneasy about the other extreme as well. 42 (ii) Jesus told us that we love him when we love the least of our brethren, so Jesus is a mere tag for loving God and brotherly men in general (Harnack). We now have no historical Jesus (Schweitzer), as Zen Buddhists kill historical Buddha and burn specific bibles standing in our way of universal love. In other words, accepting the Gospel-historicity wholesale would be historicism-fundamentalism, but picking-choosing from the Gospel as Marcion and Bultmann did would be judging the Gospel from (today‘s) general extra-historical principles. If neither of them is the Christian faith, what is? We can say that accepting historical Jesus does no blind historicism or intellectual judgment, but what does saying so mean? What is accepting the ―Christ crucified‖? Put Jesus‘ historical particularity this analytical way, and 43 we are impaled in a logical dilemmas, cornered in an analytical cul-de-sac. We must realize that such a logical way of analyzing history always lands us in insoluble troubles. Why? Logic misses the flesh and blood of history by analyzing and chopping it in two, ―on the one hand, on the other hand.‖ Logical either-or has cleaved up a living organism of history into two irreconcilable poles. Lived history is now nowhere, for history is neither anachronistic fetish nor ghostly principle that logic demands. Historical particularity is thus a ―scandal‖ to logic that analyzes, 39 Another problem: taking the Chinese Classics as an OT to Christianity may smack of a Christian knowledge of the Elephant (a favorite image among Indians) after which other religions only grope. 40 Taoism or Buddhism in China is not mentioned because they are less historical than Confucianism. 41 Mind you, Jesus Christ was crucified by the power that executed criminals, and all this happened by God‘s agency, for Paul. That is the Gospel scandal. Historical understanding as a part of the Christian faith, however, is not a scandal, much less Gospel scandal. We consider the latter, not the former. 42 Matthew 25:40. 43 Christianity and the Wider Ecumenism, ed. Peter Phan, NY: Paragon House, 1990, bravely walks this analytical route to harvest some impressive fruits, none of which is wholly satisfactory. We go a storytelling way.
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while history is as it actually is; it is a time-woven montage of events and situations. History alive, as flesh-and-blood, cannot be torn up into bits lifeless and unintelligible.
Resolving Historically—Storytelling Way—The Problem of Historicity Luckily, if logic chops, story joins. Analysis divides the forest of the world into its trees 44 to miss the world-forest; story-thinking joins trees to perceive the forest, for storytelling is not cognition of things but recognition of their whole pattern. Storytelling is alive as life. Any event that happens into life sticks together one after another into stories, into history, to tell of life to make sense of life. The Bible is made up primarily of stories of histories. Cobb said, ―Where have I learned these things? . . . I must come back to the fact that it is from the 45 Christian story that I have learned them, primarily from the Bible.‖ Story is yoked to history, and both are joined to understand lived particular events. History comes alive as stories because history is a story of living humanity. Historical 46 47 particularity can only be historically understood, to wit, by storytelling (not by logical analysis into generalities). E.g., the horrendous description in Judges 19 is less enlightening 48 than David‘s tragic ―O Absalom, my son, my son!‖ How can we think so? We do so historically, taking that fullness-of-time Incident, Jesus of Nazareth, as fulfiller of David‘s wishes, not of Judges 19. 49 50 Historical Jesus thus completes historical OT that explains him. History makes more history to make history intelligible, storytelling way, to understand how historical particularities, Christian and non-Christian, join toward intelligibility. ―How does such historical understanding go?‖ We can only tell stories, one after another, to show how. (a) Thus the dilemma of what comprises our belief in historical Jesus originates in unnatural logical analysis, and can be resolved in natural story-way, somewhat as follows. We see how the mother tenderly tenders her child‘s physical wellbeing by washing him, feeding him, and clothing him. Seeing her serving his physiological needs, we say, ―Aha, Mom loves her child.‖ Spiritual love invisible is shown in physical service all too visible to all. 44 This forest-perception is what Bernard J. F. Lonergan calls ―insight‖ in Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, NY: Philosophical Library, 1958. Gestalt psychology calls it ―pattern recognition.‖ 45 John Cobb, Jr. in Toward a Universal Theology of Religion, ed. Leonard Swidler, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1987, p. 92. Sadly, Cobb has his own problem he does not even perceive and falls into universalism of a sort with John Hick. 46 Contrary to Gordon Kaufman‘s claim that history is a quagmire of relative human limitations (The Myth of Christian Uniqueness: Toward a Pluralistic Theology of Religions, eds., John Hick and Paul F. Knitter, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1987, pp. 3-15), we must assert that history is the final judge of things, as many antiuniqueness scholars judge Christianity by its historical effectiveness, as Jews and Jesus constantly appealed to OT‘s events and sayings, and as Chinese people meant by ―immortality‖ as historical continuation of virtue, feats, and words. Chinese historians continue to appeal to history to judge the past and the present. We continue to admire/learn from Socrates throughout history. See also ―§ History and the I Ching Make No Mistakes‖ below. 47 C. S. Lewis (Reflections on the Psalms, 1958) confesses that he cannot be proud of some passages in the Psalms (e.g., 137:9), for he takes the Bible as a collection of eternal ahistorical truths. We can take such passages historically, and see how lovingly God the Father has collected all his children‘s inner feelings and outer behaviors, mostly embarrassingly ugly. Our ugliness manifests God‘s parental love cherishing it. 48 2 Samuel 18:33. 49 ―Ye have heard that A. But I say unto you that not-A‖ to ―fulfill‖ ―the law and the prophets.‖ 50 ―And the scripture was fulfilled, which saith. . .‖ (Mark 15:28)
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This is by the nature of the case. As Peter lost sight of Jesus to fall into the turbulent waters on which he was walking, he instinctively called to Jesus for help. Jesus‘ stretch of hand was instant. That physical pullout provoked the disciples‘ worshipful awe and belief in 51 Jesus as the Son of God. Here is the nick of time unity of pulling and believing, as dialing ―911‖ call for help that has no split between physical cares and personal attention. Similarly, as we claim we believe in historical Jesus, we know how to do so without bothering with the logical dilemma of whether our belief is to take him as our logical principle or to take his concrete details, cultural, historical, and physiological, as our idols and fetish. The principle is the concrete that incarnates the principle. What nature and history join, let no logical analysis put asunder. (b) The problem of whether the Confucian classics can serve as an OT to Chinese Christians is more complex to resolve, though it is in the same line as above. Let us begin by again telling a story. Suppose Mr. and Mrs. Smith went to a show of ―West Side Story.‖ As Tony was murdered, Mrs. Smith wailed aloud, ―O, poor Tony! My poor Tony!‖ Whereupon Mr. Smith was so enraged he dragged her out to accuse her of infidelity. She wiped tears and said, ―My dear, how could you miss me so miserably? How could I love you so if I were unable to cry over Tony?‖ This answer completely baffled Mr. Smith, but we see what she means. Her love of husband enabled Tony‘s tragic death to unbearably incarnate in her, as the incarnation in turn fortified her love of the husband. Two separate historical particularities, one actual, another 52 fictive, mutually echoed and fortified her spousal love. This story deeply moved me. Mrs. Smith‘s pain for Tony reenacts Jesus‘ praises of the Roman centurions, the Good 53 Samaritan, and the Samaritan leper. ―Bring your husband,‖ Jesus lovingly told the Samaritan woman before elucidating how to worship God in spirit. To love my neighbor, the one close to me, as myself now, all this is to worship God with all my heart and soul. Neighbor-love here now deepens God-love, while neighbor is no God, as shedding tears over Tony deepens Mrs. Smith‘s love of Mr. Smith, though Tony is no Mr. Smith. Love knows such oddity. Let us repeat this important point. Jesus said our spontaneous service to the needy here now is to serve Jesus himself always; it is what really counts at the Last Judgment. His story of the Good Samaritan, a Gentile‘s concrete assistance of someone nameless, upon seeing him half dead on the roadside, and all such Gentiles he cherished, elucidate the very inner sanctum of the Christian faith in God as ―loving my neighbor as myself,‖ all too inter-human love here now. He did not cite Abraham‘s love of Lot or Moses‘ love of his people. We cannot cleanse our house first, and then go out to spread the Christ to the infidels, for the Bible is itself suffused with ―mission‖ praxis that composes and spreads the Bible. To love and learn from my unbeliever-neighbor—as Jonah was forced to learn from Assyrians so atrocious an enemy superstitious and pagan, the Jonah Jesus cited as the only miracle for us—is to spread-serve
51 Matthew 14:28-33. 52 This story differs from the view that belief in Christ is like spousal commitment that allows others‘ similar lovecommitment to other religions. Mutual evocation and strengthening differs from allowing. 53 All these common Gentiles, great in Jesus‘ eyes, will be mentioned soon to understand the Christian faith.
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Christ, who told his disciples he had food they did not know, for sharing divine love with 54 infidels feeds our faith. But we have overshot ourselves. We must go slowly, beginning from scratch, to show how going out cherishing the human Gentile outsiders deepens our own divine faith inside. Let us begin at the Bible itself, on how it is formed by surrounding superstitious religions, which are not targeted as objects of conversion by our ―mission‖ if not of abolition.
Rejection Cum Assimilation as Self-Assertion and Enrichment The weak small Israelites had to assert their unique monotheistic faith against surrounding overwhelming religions of the mighty Assyrians and Babylonians, for religious ―faith‖ is the essential force that unifies and fortifies ethnic integrity against absorption.55 This situation yielded a paradox, however. On one hand, Israel must reject the surrounding polytheistic myths, and yet, on the other, in the very process of rejection, could not help but assimilate them, in a changed form, into the Israelite canon. Rejection and assimilation strangely went hand in hand to enrich the Israelite religion. The Bible itself shows some examples. Our first example is Genesis 1. Reworked assimilation of Mesopotamian myths resulted in an austere poetry of world-creation. In Genesis 1, the Hebrew tehom the Deep replaces Akkadian Tiamat, conquered in a messy cosmogonic battle by the god Marduk, and the majestic divine call resounded over the primordial waters, ―Let there be light!‖ and there was light primordial before the sun and the moon came about. And then, over six ―days‖ were issued six clarion calls of ―Let there be . . . !‖ and the orderly world came about in an orderly way, to be blessed with ―Very good!‖ before climaxing on the Sabbath Day of cosmic Rest. Adapting from the polytheistic myths produced these magisterial poetic lines. Such rejection cum assimilation makes up the Israelite‘s pattern of asserting their unique monotheism, of which they so weak were unsure at the time, over against their surrounding 56 religions. Niditch said, Our God is one, while theirs are multiple. Our God need only speak and the world becomes, theirs need to fight. . . . Genesis 1 points to Israelite insecurity at a time when her people, holy city, and temple have been conquered by the Babylonians, the people of Marduk. In fact, many people feared that Yahweh was weak, no longer able to protect his people, no longer God. Genesis 1 answers boldly, as does Isaiah 40, that God is the sole creator and is all-powerful. No tension grips the reader of Genesis 1, for chaos has no power. Rather, one approaches the account in awe, in the mode of the experiential.
54 Matthew 12:39-41, John 4:31-34. 55 Speiser strongly asserts this view, E. A. Speiser, Genesis, The Anchor Bible, 1962, pp. xlvii-lii. 56 Susan Niditch, Ancient Israelite Religion, Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 53. Speiser strongly insists on both the entire OT‘s extensive textual alignment with the Mesopotamian ―scientific‖ tradition and sharp divergence in over-all approach from it (Genesis, op. cit., pp. liv-lviii, 8-13). Cf. Genesis: As It Is Written, ed. David Rosenberg, HarperSanFrancisco, 1996, pp. 15-34. Neither probed what all this means, however.
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Besides, significantly, to repeat, such daring and awesome self-assertion of monotheistic faith is accomplished by adopting and adapting the religious languages of those against whom the assertion was made. The second example is vividly typified in the story above of Mrs. Smith that captures the logical paradox of historical love: Mrs. Smith deepens her love of Mr. Smith by wailing over Tony‘s death. Two instances in OT reminiscent of Mrs. Smith elucidate the paradox of love that seeps into our hearts and souls. The first is divine love. Yahweh-love vehemently rejected Baal-love while accepting the 57 Baalism-image of god-as-husband, by which to condemn Baal-idolatry as Yahweh-adultery. 58 The condemnation is legitimate in Judaism of the law of severe love. This love-paradox is a part of the paradox of Judaism rejecting other surrounding religions, and then avidly taking them into Judaism. Baal-love is vehemently rejected, only to enter Judaism as Yahweh59 husband pledging his absolute fidelity to the wayward Israel-wife. The second Bible instance of Mrs. Smith is the pagan gruesome offering of firstborns to 60 61 appease gods that Yahweh forbade, yet Yahweh ―tempted‖ Abraham with this horrid trial 62 itself. And then, incredibly, these two abominable instances, sex-worship and infanticide, joined in the Bible to make up the core of Christianity! How did the joining happen? 63 Both Isaiah and Ezekiel vehemently condemned sex-worship and fiery infanticide 64 routinely practiced among the surrounding neighbors. However, the twofold prohibition later somehow transmuted into God offering to himself his own Son on the gruesome Cross to 65 atone for our sins, ―for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son.‖ Thus the two pagan abominations turned into two foci of the oval, the ―olive‖ of Good News that, 57 This sentiment climaxed in Hosea. See Francis J. Anderson, Hosea, The Anchor Bible, NY: Doubleday, 1980. H. D. Beeby, Grace Abounding: A Commentary on the Book of Hosea, Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1989. Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, eds. Karel van der Toorn, et al., Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995. Niditch, Ancient Israelite Religion, op cit. And the list goes on. 58 Judaism is not a missionary religion and only slowly proselytized pagans almost by default, and so the paradox exists only by default. This is my opinion contrary to most OT scholars. 59 Biblical theologians are almost all obsessed with the closest intimacy between the Judeo-Christian tradition and its surrounding cultures and religions. Niditch‘s Ancient Israelite Religion, op. cit., chronicles intimacies of the Israelites with religions surrounding them. John H. Marks and Robert M. Good, eds., Love and Death in the Ancient Near East, Guilford, CT: Four Quartet Publishing Company, 1987, has essays on death, love, sex, kings, and human mortality in cultures surrounding the biblical tradition. John T. Fitzgerald, Cracks in An Earthen Vessel: An Examination of the Catalogues of Hardships in the Corinthian Correspondence, Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1988, sees parallels between Seneca‘s proud catalogue of sufferings and Paul‘s. Dale B. Martin, Slavery as Salvation: The Metaphor of Slavery in Pauline Christianity, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990, sees how the Christian community adopted the Greco-Roman notion of ―slavery‖ to express their pride in being ―Christ‘s slave,‖ saved by their Lord Christ and absolutely belonging to him. Aristotle‘s words, ―some are fit to rule, some fit to be ruled,‖ could also have been picked by Paul—Christ fit to rule, Christians fit to be ruled, not by talents but by His self-giving love. Even Norman H. Snaith‘s The Distinctive Ideas of the Old Testament (1944), London: The Epworth Press, 1957, appeals to parallels to surrounding cultures to bring out the distinct Christian tradition. None, however, notices the paradoxical character of unique exclusive Judeo-Christian sentiment and its close parallels with surrounding cultures it vehemently rejects. 60 Whether or not this custom is related to the offering ―of the first of all the fruit of the earth‖ (Exodus 23:19, Deuteronomy 26:1-10, etc.) awaits investigation. 61 See Jeremiah 7:31, 19:5, Ezekiel 16:21. 62 See its terse gripping story in Genesis 22. 63 Isaiah 57:5, Ezekiel 23:37. 64 See II Kings 3:27, 16:3, 17:31, 21:6, 23:10. 65 This is the famous John 3:16. Seldom do people notice its paradoxical joining!
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incredibly, the Son to be offered announced as divine Love wooing his unworthy wife of humanity! Here is the paradox of rejecting two pagan abominations—sex, infanticide—only to take them, transformed, into the core of Christianity, as God‘s persistent atoning compassion, and then into our redeeming imperative of divine compassion to spread vigorously as LoveIncarnation among various peoples of alien cultures. The spread thrills our souls. 66 The shepherd leaves 99 sheep in the wild to go after the one lost ―until he finds it.‖ Compassion is intensely particular. OT is full of God‘s ―arrogant‖ declaration, ―Mr. A I love! Mr. B I hate!‖ It is a fierce partiality of love, and it strangely spreads all over. This is because, paradoxically, this partiality of empathy eventually, inevitably, spreads throughout every particular act, as Mrs. Smith‘s love of Mr. Smith spreads to her compassion with Tony‘s disaster, only to redound back to Mr. Smith. The Red Cross and medical personnel heal enemies. Historians‘ empathy on each event makes ―history.‖ The parents love each child as if they had no other, and their partiality spells 67 their impartiality. Yehudi Menuhin vowed never to play the Beethoven Violin Concerto with any other conductor—such musical empathy he had with Furtwängler his conductor!— and then played it 25 times a year with every other conductor. Compassion in enthusiasm is relentlessly particular to spread to all, without confusion. All this happens here now. If this spread of particularity sounds incredible, think of our love of many biographies. We love to read biographies of all sorts, of various heroes, heroines, and scandalous people, each unique and different from all others, yet we do not confuse them, much less losing our own lives in them. On the contrary, we devour biographies of others to learn how to live our life, not in their ways but in our respective ways. In fact, not only do we not mind reading biographies of different times and cultures; we positively relish such differences, transporting ourselves to those days and cultures as we enjoy traveling to foreign lands and meet exotic peoples. In fact, it is not too much to claim that all short stories and long novels, and even essays, casual or theoretical, are disguised biographies and autobiographies. They tell of themselves and we listen intently as Odysseus‘ swineherd and Siddhartha‘s friend, ferryman Vasudeva, do. Events and things appear; their phenomenon shows their autobiographies telling of whereon they depend, wherefrom they spring, and wherein they rest, and nothing is hid as they tell of their self-stories. Things appear always confessing to their stories, and their phenomenal appearance is their phenomenology their appearance-logos, showing their stories. To watch, observe, and ponder on their telling, confessing to their dependence, origins, and home understand them.68 Such is ―story-thinking‖ on things‘ ―phenomenology.‖ 66 Divine Love‘s search is persistent (Luke 15). [a] Love goes after the lost sheep in the wilderness of iniquity among ―all the [captivated] publicans and sinners‖ ―until he finds it/him/her—dead, and is alive again.‖ It seeks the lost coin in the house of orthodoxy among ―the [murmuring] Pharisees and scribes‖ ―till she finds it—lost, and is found.‖ [a‘] Love thus leaves the 99 sheep (for one sinner), sweeps the house (for his elder brother Pharisee); love revolutionizes the entire establishment (Luke 15:1-10). [b] The first two parables focus on the Son of God as shepherd searching, as lady sweeping, until finding the precious lost; the third describes how all this while Father God intensely, patiently, awaits the beloved home. [b‘] The parable climaxed in the lost sinner-son joined with his Father (17, 20-24); sadly, Father‘s pleading with elder brother to harvest his homecoming (28, 31-32) is yet to realize. Jesus‘ three love-parables are tightly knit, heartrending. 67 Less dramatically but no less concretely and crucially, a little sister insists on having her birthday party on the big brother‘s that day, or else it is ―Not fair!‖ Their parents comply, smiling; what else could they have done? Equality (of love) is no sameness (of treatment). 68 I rifled Confucius‘ sigh (2/10), ―視其所以，觀其所由，察其所安。人焉廋哉! 人焉廋哉!‖
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It is thus that we love biographies, stories-of-life, in history that is time-biography, in culture that is race-biography, and in the current news that is today-biography. Informed about stories-of-life out there to resonate with them, our life here now grows enriched. We join with them naturally to inter-thrive, yet without confusion. The point is clear. We should accept historical Jewish Jesus with his OT, and accept our respective cultural-historical traditions, to see Moses and Jesus among us. By the same token, Britons should study their Churchill, Americans study their Washington, and Chinese their Confucius, to appreciate Jewish Moses. Churchill is not Moses any more than he is Washington or Confucius, but studying them in our respective cultures inspires our lives in our respective ways, as the Moses does us as he does Jews. This realization leads to a maxim of Christian mission.
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Inter-learning to inter-deepen various respective faiths is what ―conversation‖ means. 70 After all, a dialogue assumes and requires differences among its partners. Mountain climbing conquers our inner-mountain, and chopping a tree chops the chopper, they say, but obviously our self remains the human self, not mountain or tree. Remaining disparately themselves, these events coincide as co-incidents co-happening. As the exclusive faith of Judeo-Christianity rejects pagan abominations only to absorb them to self-deepen, so its life in mission-spread consists in saving other faiths and cultures into themselves. The Christians must not level down other faiths; such our human move plays god, a prime crime against the Christian First Commandment. Instead, the Christians should admit that they are as human as other religionists, and humbly learn from them to enrich their own Christian faith, and invite others to learn from Christianity, and help them deepen their own non-Christian faiths. Religions are concrete cases of coincidence of counterparts. This existential drama manifests clearly in our handshake, which requires both parties to stand facing each other, mutually opposed, to stretch hands from opposite ends. Dialogue among religions is a religious handshake, a conversation inter-versing among empathetic minds, independent, diverse, and opposed. The handshake occurs at the Mountaintop of Salvation for the Hindus, the Elephant of Reality for the Buddhists, the Heaven Above All Over for the Chinese, and the Logos of Truth for the Christians. For the Christians the Christ is Logos Incarnate, for the Chinese the 69 I explained how Christians can learn from Zen and Taoism in On the ―Logic‖ of Togetherness: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 1998, pp. 240-253, etc. Yagi Sei-ichi has breathtakingly deepened the Christian truths in subterranean Oriental mindlessness (無心) and naturalness (自然) in 八木誠一 and 秋月龍泯著, 無心と神の國: 宗教における<自然>, 東京青土社, 1996. My stand agrees with Jacques Dupuis‘s quite wordy Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002, pp. 7, 11, 17f, 23, 198-201, etc., John B. Cobb, Jr.‘s Whiteheadian Beyond Dialogue: Toward a Mutual Transformation of Christianity and Buddhism, Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982, and H. D. Beeby‘s devotional Canon and Mission, Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1999. But none effectively relate inter-learning (relatedness) to its rejection (ultimacy). 70 Dupuis also stressed the differences among dialogue partners, and stressed both faith-commitment and otheropenness. Sadly, he simply wordily repeated his assertions without rationale or explanation (op. cit., pp. 379380, etc.).
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Heaven is what they best understand, for the Buddhists the Buddha is the Elephant, for the Hindus, many gods and goddesses are the Mountaintop. To the Christian description of self-sacrificial love toward neighbors (Good Samaritan) and friends and foes (Christ on the cross), the Buddhists would nod as selfless ―mercy,‖ and the Confucians would nod as self-sacrificial devotion to societal ―justice.‖ The Christians would in turn deepen their faith by realizing the Buddhist dimension of mercy, and the Confucian filial devotion to justice, in Christ‘s love. Thus in the dialogue of handshake each party learns from others to know better about their own Mountaintop, Elephant, Heaven, Logos, and Compassion. All partners honestly affirm their respective stands and viewpoints for genuine meaningful dialogues to occur in inter-versals, to attain a universal in the religious multi71 verse. Such is the ―Christian mission to nonbelievers,‖ the mission of mutuality of deepening. ―Mission‖ is inter-mission dialogical, as Jesus was ―fed‖ by a Samaritan woman and urged us to learn from Roman centurions and soldiers, the Good Samaritan, a SyroPhoenician woman, and the list goes on. ―How about Christian ‗redemption‘ in this inter-learning context?‖ Well, Jesus told us to learn from them all, for learning is one mode of loving them, and redemption is an act of dying for the beloved, whoever they are. Jesus told us not to tell about him while roaming everywhere; he commissioned us the task of ―mission‖ only after he died for us all, for all Romans, all Syro-Phoenicians, all Samaritans. He performed loving them, dying for them (=redeeming them) one by one, in silence, and then asked us to love them, one by one, likewise, in silence, incognito, now. To redeem people is to restore them into themselves as they really are. Christian medical and psychiatric missions of Schweitzer and countless others restore people‘s health, physical and mental, and Christian literacy campaigns enrich and deepen indigenous cultures. Christian hospitals in Taiwan turn so many people vibrantly healthy, and Taiwanese language written and spoken was promoted-deepened by many vernacular dictionaries that are 72 unwitting torchbearers of Taiwan culture. Redemption is restoration to pristine spiritual selves, physical and cultural.
71 To the query whether honest non-Christian believers, or even honest humanist atheists, can be saved, the Christians can answer, ―We humans do not know, but we do know Christ died for them, and the God of Christ is all-compassion. So our God will take very good care of them.‖ 72 Charles R. Joy, ed. Albert Schweitzer: An Anthology, Boston: Beacon Press, 1947. 潘稀祺編著，
新樓情，舊相簿：全台第一間西醫病院，歷史腳跡, A Pictorial History of the First Western Hospital in Taiwan: The Sin-Lâu Christian Hospital, 1998, and 臺灣醫療宣教之父—馬雅各醫生傳，2004, both
published by 台灣基督長老教會新樓醫院. Rev. Carstairs Douglas, suppl. By Rev. Thomas Barclay, ChineseEnglish Dictionary of the Vernacular or Spoken Language of Amoy (1873), Taipei: SMC Publishing Inc., 2009. Rev. Dr. William Campbell, The Dictionary of the Amoy Vernacular (1913), Taiwan Church Press, 廈門音新字典, 臺灣基督長老教會公報社出版, 2009, continuing to be in press. The last volume begins by citing how conversion to the Christian faith turned all illiterate catechumens literate, from Report of the Centenary Missionary Conference at Shanghai. All medical-cultural missions and publications in other lands and by Catholicism are omitted.
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The Divine One beyond Human Reason ―Where is the Divine One in these bewildering inter-learning dialogues?‖ Their final rationale lies precisely in this Divine One as beyond ours. In ―God is One‖ the One is a 73 74 Mystery ; it is beyond and includes human numerical ―one.‖ God‘s One is beyond and 75 includes both the West‘s either-or exclusivity and Asia‘s inclusive both-and; the Divine 76 One includes both the West and Asia and is neither, for the Divine is beyond us all. ―How does it obtain?‖ Look at the child, to whom the Kingdom of God belongs, says Jesus. His saying so stunned people at the time that all three Gospels record the saying almost verbatim.77 ―But the child is still growing up to adulthood, how could it be where Perfection belongs? Kids are so imperfect; how could Perfection belongs to imperfection?‖ Well, such adult chauvinism is precisely what angered Jesus, provoking him to make the statement that Perfection belongs to imperfection on the go. ―What can we learn from the imperfect child, then?‖ What about its constant learning attitude? We must learn their constant learning; anyone who ceases to learn is dead. Let‘s see how kids learn. To a child, the fascinating adult world has every sort of things, a, b, c, . . . and so the adult world is a+b+c+ . . . But a is not b and often cannot be joined to b, so a+b+c+ . . . is a contradiction, an impossibility. This is because the adult world includes the child‘s world and it is not the child‘s. We are children in the adult world of the Beyond. Moreover, we humans know only a, b, c, and do not know ― . . . ,‖ nor do we know what ―+‖ means. ―A single grain of sand‖ is enough for us to ―see a whole world,‖ and, worse, we do not know if we tend to take ―enough‖ as ―no other savior‖ or not. Finally, we must refuse to ―draw implications‖ of agnosticism, universalism, inclusivism, etc., out of our ignorance, for such ―logical drawing‖ does not hold in the realm of the Beyond, as if we could apply our human notion of ―cause‖ to the creation of the world to reach its Almighty Creator as its ―Cause.‖ These negatives warn us about our human finitude before the Beyond. So many various schools in Chinese Buddhism, Catholic scholasticism, and the 78 hopelessly cluttered history of Western philosophy, show how impossibly mind-boggling 73 Often mentioning the word ―mystery,‖ Dupuis never reverently and seriously considers what it means. 74 Paul Tillich develops this theme in an interesting way, saying that the ubiquitous criterion of the divine is selfnegation as self-affirmation, as Christ on the cross did. F. M. Jelly summed it well in Christianity and Wider Ecumenism, ed. Peter C. Phan, NY: Paragon House, 1990, p. 195. 75 Tillich says, ―Religion is the depth-dimension of culture . . . Unity does not exclude definitory distinction. . . . [T]he dimension of ‗depth‘ shines through [that of] cognition.‖ This is said on the ―unity‖ of religion and culture. This saying fits our view if ―religion‖ is our ―mystery‖ and ―culture,‖ many actual religions. (The Theology of Paul Tillich, eds., C. W. Kegley and R. W. Bretall, NY: The Macmillan Company, 1961, p. 337. See its elaboration in his Systematic Theology, Volume Three, University of Chicago Press, 1963, p. 158.) 76 This is a short gist of my On Nonsense: Cultural Meditations on the Beyond, yet to publish. 77 Matthew 19:14=Mark 10:14=Luke 18:16. ―Such as these‖ means ―kids of all ages.‖ Derived from kids‘ learning openness is of course their honest translucency; ―Mom, grandpa gave me a candy, and told me not to tell you.‖ This is pure innocence, lost among Adam and Eve hiding from God in the primal Kingdom the Garden of Eden. Adam‘s posterity, scholar Nicodemus, furtively visited Jesus at night; so Jesus had to shock him by advising him to be born again in wind and water of open translucency (John 3:3-8). Openness goes with translucency, so open as to be a secret closed to Nicodemus‘ scholarship; this is kids‘ Kingdom of Perfection, revealed to infants alone in joy, hid to the wise (Luke 10:21, cf. Matthew 11: 25). It is kids‟ Gateless Gate 無門關that Zen misses. 78 Sorensen said, ―Mathematicians characterize prime numbers as their atoms because all numbers can be analyzed as products of the primes. I regard paradoxes as the atoms of philosophy because they constitute the basic points of departure for disciplined speculation.‖ (Roy Sorensen, A Brief History of the Paradox, Oxford University Press, 2003, p. xi) The quip that begins his book on the history—story—of paradox can be understood by taking paradox as an embarrassing cipher of logical mess (reason‘s ―dox‖ ―para‖-ed) at the
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these logical kaleidoscopes are, and even each school is beyond our understanding on what it has and why it goes that specific way and not any other. All this ―makes sense‖ if we take it as manifesting the human confronted with the Beyond. In fact, every religion, every history, even daily happening now, is as spectacularly 79 mind-boggling, without rhyme or reason. The historical scandal of the Christian faith just honestly exhibits this fact of the Beyond made flesh in human actuality.
Inclusive and Irrelevant This realization enables us to reject both Hick flattening all religions including Christianity, and the fundamentalists totally rejecting non-Christian religions—and include 80 both approaches. We now understand why Jesus tells us to go nowhere except the houses of the Israel, and to go learn from all non-Christians on how to worship God and love our neighbors—Roman centurion, the Good Samaritan, the Samaritan leper, the Syro-Phoenician 81 mother, and other Gentiles. ―What does it mean to claim the Beyond to include both fundamentalists and liberals, yet has nothing to do with them?‖ Let us be concrete. Fundamentalists are right in taking the Bible as God‘s message, but are wrong in claiming that therefore the Bible is wholly inerrant and divine. The liberals are correct in saying that the Bible is written by men, but wrong in saying that therefore the Bible is wholly human, expressing only human awareness of the holy. The truth is made by combining what are right in both parties, that the Bible is God‘s message ―seen darkly‖ through fallible human perception. For example, Psalm 137:9, Judges 19, and many other embarrassing records of ugly deeds and emotions are wholly human (liberals), and God‘s love in horrendous sorrow recorded all of them, as human parents collect all their beloved children‘s words and deeds, mostly so embarrassing and horrendous (fundamentalists). Thus the records of human ugliness reflect and exhibit God‘s extraordinary parental love. The key is parental love that goes beyond and includes all children‘s ugly emotions and deeds. The Kingdom of Perfection belongs to kids-of-all-ages opening out learning unlimited, forever refreshing.
From Parental Love to Christian Mission as Interreligious Dialogues Parental love hits three points. One, parental love is a concrete universal joining particular and general, one and many, concrete and ultimate. Two, generalizing parental love into a family of the world is a pivotal move in the Christian faith and every human culture. Three, the Heaven and Earth as a triune Family of Father Heaven, Mother Nature, and heart of Western philosophy; it is philosophical reason self-bankrupt, Socratic self-examination of reason pushed to the ultimate. 79 See the later section, ―§ How to Manage Things Happening Without Rhyme or Reason.‖ 80 This point counters the anti-uniqueness thinkers‘ dogmatic appeal to ―mystery‖ to claim that no religion or theology can therefore adequately comprehend God (The Myth of Christian Uniqueness: Toward a Pluralistic Theology of Religions, eds. John Hick and Paul F. Knitter, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1987, pp. 53-88). 81 Matthew 10:5-6, 8:10, 15:24, 15:28, Mark 15:39, Luke 10:37, 17:15-16. It is thus that we depart from Dupuis, Hick, Cobb, etc., as we include them.
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Humanity-their-Child is heartfelt and central in the entire Chinese tradition. ―Heavenly Father‖ in the Bible is the soul notion to China, and is apt and natural to Chinese folks, Christian or no. This reflection helps us understand the goal of the Christian mission to bring all peoples into Christ‘s fold. 1John 4:12 (cf. 2:5) gives us a quiet bombshell, saying in essence, ―The love of God is perfected by our loving one another.‖ It is paradoxical as ―My strength is made 82 perfect in weakness,‖ ―because the weakness of God is stronger than men.‖ To see how paradoxical such a thought is, we look at the ―love of God‖; it can mean ―our love of God‖ or ―love of God.‖ ―The love of God‖ as ―our love of God‖ would mean that the First Commandment of loving God with all our souls is performed by the Second, loving our neighbors as ourselves here now. Our love of God depends on our love of neighbors to manifest; it is a surprise that God depends on us. No less surprising is ―The love of God‖ as ―God‟s love‖; it would mean that our love of neighbors is part of God‘s love, and our neighborly love completes and perfects God who is Love! Both these points are quite incredible and extraordinary, literally ―turns the world 83 upside down‖! Perfect Love perfectly depends on the beloved‘s mutual love to be perfected! All this graphically expresses how God‘s parental love thrives in our acceptance and spread of it. In fact, its acceptance is measured by its spread, and its spread so completes the love that the love does not need to be touted as such in its spread. God‘s love spreads in our loving neighbors, so much so that we need not tout ―love‖ as His as we love one another heartily. Love is its spread, from God to us and through us all to God, here now. In other words, the ―essence‖ of Christ is love, and love fulfills the integrity of each beloved individual. Helping to fulfill the integrity of each non-Christian religion fulfills the 84 mission of Christ‘s love. ―Hidden Christ‖ is poignantly true here. Young Jesus quoted an OT passage as his mission, as God‘s ―servant, . . . chosen (and) beloved,‖ to ―proclaim justice to the Gentiles.‖ How? ―He will not wrangle or cry aloud, nor will anyone hear his voice in the street. He 85 will not break a bruised reed or quench a smoldering wick until he brings justice to victory.‖ Clearly, ―justice‖ here heals and acts to right wrongs; it is not judgment. It is thus 86 that in the end ―in his name the Gentiles will hope‖ ; it is thus that his mission is accomplished in silence, right here and now. This quiet righting-healing justice goes quite a long radical way. Jesus highly praised a Roman centurion‘s deep awareness of the divine authority, and told all his followers to learn from this Gentile‘s ―faith,‖ which might not have been the Israelites‘ faith in exclusive monotheism. During the discussion with the Jewish lawyer about the two central Commandments, loving God and loving neighbors, Jesus told the lawyer the know-it-all to 82 2 Corinthians 12:9, 1 Corinthians 1:25. Implications here (is it possessive genitive? Is it subjective genitive?) are again so staggering and bottomless that both passages have to be left alone. 83 Acts 17:6. 84 ―Hidden Christ‖ means not Christ all over in other religion. Instead, it assumes no error in other religions as Karl Rahner‘s ―anonymous Christians‖ does. 85 Curiously, he may allow reeds to bruise or wicks to smolder but never allows them to break or quench, i.e., be destroyed totally. Reeds stand on their own; wicks shine around. He heals, fulfills, and enhances our reedintegrity and our wick-flame for others; his is such ―justice‖-in-action. 86 Matthew 12:18-21. (NRSV)
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learn from a Good Samaritan, a despised non-Israelite who could not have cared less about abstruse Judaic doctrines. Jesus told us to learn from the Samaritan despite the fact that the Samaritan village refused to receive Jesus. Whereupon Jesus and his disciples quietly ―went on to another 88 village,‖ for he ―has not come to destroy lives but to save them.‖ Jesus healed the Gentile centurion‘s servant and bound the wounds of many unknown others wherever he saw, as did the Good Samaritan. He silently healed Gentiles‘ hurts and helped them. That is how he fulfilled his mission, to unobtrusively ―proclaim justice to the Gentiles.‖ (Christ‘s) love is fulfilled in fulfilling the beloved needy, including nonbelievers; all the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the sick, and the 89 imprisoned are the least in Christ‘s family, helping whom helps Christ himself. All this is what it means to have an inter-religious inter-learning dialogue among many religions. Such inter-learning should not compromise, much less ―correct,‖ but enrich the absolute integrity of each religion, to mutually deepen the self-understanding of each 90 religion that is by nature incorrigibly ultimate. 91 The ―fruit‖ of Christian mission is less conversion than mutual cherishing ; we are all ―converted‖ to mutual appreciation toward God beyond us all, an appreciation of insights of 92 other religions for ―deeper openness to God . . . through the other,‖ and an appreciation by other religions for the enrichment of their own deeper self-understanding due to the Christian considerate love of neighbors, that is, whoever we meet here now. Such mutual enrichment, not correction, results in the final ultimate rejoicing together in 93 the Final Judgment Day of Divine Love all around. Here is no room for quibbling about whether this Final Day is Buddhist or Christian or any other. Our shared joys drown all our quibbles in the Ultimacy of the Beyond.
Storytelling through it All Thus, we should rejoice in historical Jesus loving us and see him in every brother we love here now. Such a logical paradox can be captured, understood, and lived, only in storytelling. No wonder both OT and NT are collections of stories of living love, lived in love. Christian 94 theology is narrative theology, and Zen Buddhists talk about killing Buddha, burning 87 Cf. John 4:9, ―Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.‖ 88 Luke 10:25-37, 9:51-56. 89 Matthew 25:35-40. (NRSV) 90 This stance is not mutual corrections but mutual deepening of religions (Dupuis, op. cit., pp. 381-382). 91 Saying, ―[The dialogue] tends to . . . conversion of each to [the same] God‖ to risk pantheism, Dupuis suddenly identifies this ―same God‖ as Christian God (p. 383; this is the key place where he betrays his ―Christian bias‖)! 92 Dupuis, p. 383, though I hesitate to claim with him that ―[exchange and encounter] are an end in themselves." 93 ―Is this Divine Love the God of Christ or the Mercy of Buddha or . . . ?‖ The question remains in the realm of Mystery. One thing is certain. Here in this Ultimate Realm, every religion is satisfied and fulfilled, beyond our human understanding. In the Beyond all quibbles are dissolved without dissolving respective integrities. 94 George A. Kennedy, New Testament Interpretation through Rhetorical Criticism, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1984, Robert A. Oden, Jr., The Bible Without Theology: The theological tradition and alternatives to it, Harper and Row, 1987. Cf. Raymond E. Brown, The Death of the Messiah, NY: Doubleday, 1993, p. 1573 (―Passion Narratives,‖ Index). See also Frank Kermode‘s interesting ―New Ways with Bible Stories‖ in Poetry, Narrative, History, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990, pp.29-48, and the bibliography there. I
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scriptures, and then go ahead to expound on Buddha‘s teaching —and thrive in such telling of their stories as this.
Confucian Classis as OT to Chinese Christians Saying so above raises two interesting issues. One, how do the Confucian classics serve as an OT to the Chinese Christians? Two, how does the Confucian classics fit in with the OTNT scheme already there in the Christian dispensation? Our clue to answer is how the Jewish OT used its ―OT,‖ the mythologies of their surrounding cultures such as the Babylonian mythology, and how Jesus used his OT and how Paul used both the Jewish OT and Athenian mythologies. Such ―OT‖ of Christian OT forever surrounds Christian OT as its humus out of which Christian NT grows. One: ―How do the Confucian classics serve as an OT to the Chinese Christians?‖ An answer is: In the same way as ancient mythologies served as an OT to the Jewish OT, and as the Jewish OT served to Jesus. It is well known that mythologies and beliefs of other religions surrounding Israelites entered Jewish OT, reshaped, refashioned to fit OT‘s pattern of beliefs to let the remolded stories tell and proclaim OT. This is a ―sacramental‖ use of the ―bread‖ of 96 existing materials, i.e., mythologies of other religions, around the Israelites. 97 A dramatic example is Baalism, as mentioned a while ago. The prophets violently opposed it yet Hosea adopted its central notion of Baal as ―husband‖ to the believers, and proclaimed Yahweh as the jealous Husband of Israel; Ezekiel followed suit. Similarly, Jesus used the OT to proclaim his Good News, by pouring his new wine into his refashioned OT as a new wineskin, his mode of expression; ―you heard it said A, but I tell you B.‖ He called this operation a ―fulfillment of the laws and the prophets.‖ Thus, what mythologies of other religions are to OT is what OT is to NT. Thus again, for the Christian believers, as NT is the interpretive principle of OT, so OT is the interpretive principle of mythologies of other religions. OT is a sacramental symbol to NT, and so religious mythologies are ―OT‖ to OT. Paul must have used OT this way when he said that ―according to the scriptures‖ Jesus died and rose to life for us. His well-known hymn of Jesus Christ, who with his similitude with God obeyed God the Father to most miserable death, and was raised to the heights of glories, and we must have Christ‘s heart as ours, must have been taken from OT or other religious myths and adapted to the Christian faith So must his ―hymn‖ to Christian lovebe out 98 of ―pagan‖ hymns. hesitate, however, to estimate how many among them genuinely appreciate how pivotal narrative understanding is for NT, not taking it as just one tool among others of understanding the Bible. 95 Cf. Y. Kashiwahara and K. Sonoda, eds., Shapers of Japanese Buddhism, Tokyo: Kōsei Publishing Co., 1994. 96 See Donald M. Baillie, The Theology of the Sacraments, NY: Charles Scribners, 1957, Susan Niditch, Ancient Israelite Religion, NY: Oxford University Press, 1997; Norman H. Snaith, The Distinctive Ideas of the Old Testament, London: The Epworth Press, 1944; Brevard S. Childs, Myth and Reality in the Old Testament, London: SCM Press, 1960; Henri Frankfort, et al., Before Philosophy (1946), Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1946, esp. pp. 266 (index on ―chaos‖), 270 (index on ―Marduk‖), et passim. 97 The same applies to the Christian adaptation of Molech/Baalim fiery infanticide. 98 1 Corinthians 15:3-4, Philippians 2:5-18. Many scholars too numerous to cite, noticed the poetic hymn-like feature of Paul‘s intoned praise, and attribute its origin to some hymns of former times, either in the OT or elsewhere.
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The fact remains, however—and this is important—that it was not Babylonian myths or Baalism that served as OT; it was OT that made intelligible those myths and NT. Conversely, it was not OT that explains NT but NT, and its Center, Jesus, who explains and ―fulfills‖ OT, as in Matthew 5 and Luke 24:25-27. We must then go to Jesus to render intelligible Babylonian stories, Baalism, and Confucius—as to their meaning and significance—to us-as-Christians, whether we are Chinese Christians or Babylonian Christians, or Israelite Christians, etc. Jesus is the hermeneutic Principle for all those non-Christian scriptures and wisdom, for the Christians. We now know the principle of taking the Chinese Confucianism as Chinese OT for the Chinese Christians. Two: ―Concretely, how would the Confucian classics fit in with the Christian OT-NT scheme?‖ Let us take two specific examples. The first example is this. Confucius took the notion of ―princely one (chün tzu 君子),‖ originally meaning man of princely blood, and changed it into man of princely virtue. This ―princely one‖ could help us understand Jesus as the Christ and Messiah, an OT notion baptized into NT‘s divine Savior-King. As royal prince is of blood, Confucian prince is of virtue. Likewise, as Messiah is of OT, Christ is of NT. Our second example is the Golden Rule, justly popular everywhere for being situated between Kant‘s abstract Categorical Imperative and Mencius‘ (1A7) concrete ―‗Old-ing‘ my old folks to reach others‘ old folks; ‗young-ing‘ my young folks to reach other‘s youngs.‖ Jesus‘ formulation of the Golden Rule is logically identical with Confucius‘, yet they differ in 99 praxis, and storytelling alone can bring out their difference. Let us see how they differ. Confucius said (12/2), ―What oneself desires not, give not to people.‖ Rabbi Hillel said (Shab. 31), ―What is hateful to yourself, do not do to your fellow man. This is the whole of Torah and the remainder is but commentary.‖ This is a negative version of Jesus‘ Golden Rule, ―Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to 100 them: for this is the law and the prophets.‖ We could see, though need not,101 that Confucius and Torah see eye to eye to serve as OT to prepare for Jesus. How does it happen? First, the Confucian classics parallel OT. The human situation tends to agree more on what is hateful than what is loved, so prohibitions of hurtful acts and hateful matters, what not to do, urgently spring up to order society, to publicly declare ―laws and statutes‖ against harm. These laws publicly express our inner considerate spirit for others: ―Do no harm.‖ This is a natural negative version of the Golden Rule. The whole OT is built on this principle of ―Do no harm,‖ whose detail applications all prophets zestfully proclaim. Likewise with the Confucians, such as Mencius (2A2) who nudges us to see how ―helping (things and people) grow‖ kills them. The road to hell is paved by goodwill that imposes, not letting be. Never meddle with things, in proud ―goodwill,‖ for do-gooding sours, stunts, and slays. Sadly, perhaps later Confucian traditionalism has 102 neglected Mencius, and imposed yokes onto free breathing of life.
99 Interestingly, Mencius‘ insistence could be taken as Kant‘s imperative concretized in story form. H. G. Creel‘s Chinese Thought from Confucius to Mao Tse-tung, NY: Mentor Books, 1953, interprets China in Kant‘s way. 100 Matthew 7:12. 101 This way would be for Jesus to fulfill them as he fulfills OT. Another way is to see them fulfilled by Jesus redeeming them. We go the first way, in line with our viewing of Chinese classics as Chinese OT. 102 See a shocking confession to choking Confucianism by Donald J. Munro‘s ―Afterword‖ to Tsai Chih Chung, Zhuangzi Speaks: The Music of Nature, tr. Brian Bruya, Princeton University Press, 1992, pp. 127-142. Cf. a
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Secondly, the Confucian classics could thus prepare China for NT, as OT does Israel for NT that in turn fulfills the true intentions of OT. NT‘s basis is this OT, Confucian or Jewish. To love people means to restore them to their original health, if needed, as the Good Samaritan did, but otherwise to let them be freely themselves without disturbing them; it is the Golden Rule in negative praxis, here now. Remember how Jesus led his disciples in silence to go to ―another village,‖ when ―a 103 village of the Samaritans‖ ―did not receive him.‖ To love neighbors as ourselves and to 104 love enemies are all in this spirit of non-interference, to support all people to grow of themselves into themselves, and that is the spirit of the Golden Rule Jesus incarnated in his 105 life and his death. Jesus is the Golden Rule fulfilling OT.
Christian Mission Again ―What would you say on ‗mission‘ at the heart of Christian faith, however?‖ Christians are supposed to preach Jesus as Christ and convert people. Mission is the cornerstone that the theory-builders reject, only to crush them to pieces; it is the ―stone of offense,‖ ―the rock of 106 stumbling,‖ to abstract theorization on Christian-non-Christian relationship. Let us then meditate on this most difficult theme in the context of religious dialogue, to clinch the entire matter. Four points can be raised out of Jesus‘ dialogue with a Samaritan Woman (John 4:3-43), as he ―left Judæa‖ his religious turf on his way to Galilee. This is his journey of mission; to meditate on this journey mediates on the Christian mission. One, the Bible-words are less logical than confessional, as Kierkegaard, Marcel, and 107 Stendahl said. Confession is made not to assert and point to metaphysical truths, logical, objective, and bloodless, but to ex-press from the bottom of the very existence of the experienced subject, ―in spirit and in truth.‖ Two, confession involves the hearers to move them. Jesus asks for water. The lady responds. Then he confesses, ―Woman, believe me, the hour cometh, when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor at Jerusalem, worship the Father. . . . (T)he hour cometh, and now is, when . . . worshippers shall worship . . . in spirit and in truth . . .‖ (John 4:21, 23) Three, confession unwittingly reaches out to help, to fulfill others; it is ―love language.‖ Jesus‘ request of water begins his giving of Living Water (4:10-15), to begin his death on the
grain of truth in the misguided essay, ―Five Things We Can Learn from China,‖ in Time, November 23, 2009, pp. 34-41, saying China is oppressed under the weight of its history. 103 Luke 9:51-56, 10:25-37, especially verses 35 and 42 saying ―leave them alone.‖ 104 These precious matters will be detailed later in ―§ Love thy neighbor as thyself‖ and ―§ The Bible as Stories of Loving the Enemy.‖ 105 Luke 6:31-32 takes this Golden Rule to go beyond ―sinners‖ i.e., to love enemies to climax Matthew 5. So Jesus means by this Rule Jesus‘ radical love of enemies he lived and died for. 106 All this is extrapolated from Luke 20:18 and Isaiah 8:14-15. All theoretical considerations of Christian-nonChristian relation that I know of either bypass the ―Christian mission‖ (Monika K. Hellwig, in Christianity and the Wider Ecumenism, op. cit., pp. 82-83) or dismiss it as leftover of Christian arrogance (John Hick). 107 Kierkegaard stresses Subjectivity as Truth. Marcel has Mystery that involves the subject of the inquirer. For Kristen Stendahl, the Bible assertions are confessional ―love language, caressing language.‖ (quoted by Phan in Christianity and the Wider Ecumenism, ed. Peter Phan, NY: Paragon House, 1990, p. 173) For R. P. Scharlemann, confessional statement has free personal response as its base, not logical implication or perception. (ibid., pp. 38-40)
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cross, which is his self-negation without self-loss (Tillich ), i.e., self-affirmation within other-affirmation, in other words, selfless love-creation of others that spreads. Four, all this give-and-take pleased Jesus immensely. He told his disciples that he was fed (4:31-35); the lady did respond to Jesus‘ request and gave him a drink, after all. Thus to 109 share the Good News with non-believers is to be fed by them. This it is that feeds Jesus, enriches him, and authenticates him, and this it is that spreads (4:16, 21, 25-29, 39-40) to fulfill his ―work,‖ his mission, to ―rejoice together‖ (4:34, 36). Before generalizing the Christian paradox of universal divinity incarnated in historical 110 specificity, we here distinguish our position from John Hick‘s inclusivism, for our position and his appear inclusive, identically, indifferently. That we mutually differ can be shown as follows, however. This is crucial. Hick sees religions as indifferently ―many human awarenesses‖ of one divinity, and blots out all specificities as contingent irrelevance. How does he, being human, know that religions are human awarenesses only, unless he takes his ―one‖ as a logical one confidently divine, though actually human? As a result, he ends up downgrading the exclusive specificity of particular historical religions as dated superstitions. Hick‘s ―universal one‖ is thus, ironically, one of ―exclusive religions‖ he opposes, not truly ―inclusive‖ as he claims his is. His ―inclusivism‖ plays god to exclude all contingent historical religions, as the fundamentalist ―exclusivism‖ excludes all non-Christian religions but his own. Hick idolizes Platonic eternity as the fundamentalist idolizes Biblicist eternity. Both forget they are human, to arrogate themselves as divine. Our position, in contrast, takes the ―divine one‖ seriously as divine, that is, beyond human ―one.‖ As a result, historical exclusivity of historical religions, such as ―fundamentalism,‖ are included. At the same time, being human, we would never play god, and the religious claim of ―the historical Jesus as the divine Christ‖ we can only humanly respect with reverent reticence, as Confucius‘ reverence expressed in his reticence. All we humans can and should do is never to facilely judge among those supra-human claims that are beyond our understanding, but to humbly facilitate their inter-learning and inter-enrichment. Much less would we brush aside, as Hick would do, those different beyondhuman claims as so ―many different human awarenesses‖ of the indifferent divine one. This fact and imperative, that we are human, not gods, and must behave as human, cannot be overstressed. This is what is great about Jesus, that he knew and lived precisely as human, as a mere obscure servant, to obey God till death on the cross; being human he lived as human. Thus his powerful cry, ―He that believeth on me, believeth (not on me but) on him that sent me,‖ originates in his utterly human confession, ―he that believeth on me, believeth 108 See Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology Volume 1, The University of Chicago Press, 1951, p. 136, among others. Significantly, missionaries to China (James Legge, Courtenay H. Fenn, R. H. Mathews, Carstairs Douglas, Thomas Barclay, William Campbell, etc.) are often Sinologists and dictionary-compilers, contributing to the advancement of literacy in China. Many missionaries are also medical doctors. These humane endeavors could be taken as Love‘s healing and enlightening power gradually incarnated among us. Love enhances itself in enhancing the beloved. 109 This is a direct clinching description of Christian-non-believer relation, not Scharlemann‘s (op. cit., pp. 35-46) who is incoherent. He has no ―mission,‖ a core problem; he denies application of intra-Christian matters to extra-Christian realm (36), yet he applies Peter-Judas relation to Christian-non-Christian relation (43); Yes-No in freedom is not Christian-non-Christian; his position (40) is not Barth‘s (38). 110 Of so many publications of John Hick‘s, the most recent, clearest, and shortest I know of is his ―Is Christianity the Only True Religion?‖ in World Faiths Encounter, Number 28, March 2001, pp. 3-11. My brief response appeared in its next issue, ―Religious Togetherness,‖ pp. 22-24, Number 29, July 2001.
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not on me.‖ This it was that resulted in his being ―highly exalted‖ to the name above all names. We should also behave likewise. Being human, we should never play gods, casually mov112 ing divine pawns on human intellectual chessboard. Only by consistently stubbornly behaving as human, all too human, can our thinking begin to devoutly discern what passes all understanding. Fear of the Lord is the alpha and omega of religious wisdom.
F. The Paradox and the Power of Naming, of Universals It is time to take stock. We have considered the here now as eternal by considering historical particularity under the beyond-human eternal. We now generalize our storyreflection so far, to realize that our religious paradox of divine one and actual many is (a) really the paradox of our ordinary daily life, typified in particular naming/wording as universals, and (b) enlighten our basic issue: How did religious ultimacy—the divine One— turn out so many actual religions? How is the singular religious ultimate related to many religions in our actual world? (a) The paradoxical combination of one and many in religion may well have come from our daily situation in this world.113 ―Religion‖ means what is beyond the human world within the human world; it is our problem of the Beyond. The ―beyond‖ means that when A is beyond B, A is not B but enwraps B. These two contrary features between A and B, A unrelated and related to B, describe how we note the relation of ―beyond.‖ This noting composes the above paradox, and noting is manifested in ―naming‖ that indicates our knowing and wording. Thus, our religious paradox of one and many is really the paradox of our ordinary daily life, captured in particular naming and wording to result in universals. We now describe how noting as naming and wording produces the paradox. Mind you; the description here thinks story-way, via logical parsing, about the problem of paradox. Naming produces the notorious problem of ―universals‖; a name names many things into an identical group, say, ―leg,‖ to two legs of a chicken that we call ―two legs.‖ We take ―legness‖ as somewhat synonymous with ―leg,‖ that is, as leg-universal. Hui Tzu the namelogician says, therefore, the chicken has ―three legs‖ when we see two legs.114 Is there now one more leg added to the chicken‘s two legs? Do we have two in three and three in two? If Yes, then we must call the previous ―legness‖ we just named with a new name, ―legness1,‖ for the same reason as we had to add ―legness‖ to the two ―legs.‖ But then, we 111 Philippians 2:7-9, John 12:44. 112 We remember how, when Paul and Barnabas were about to be apotheosized as Mercury and Jupiter, both rent their clothes and ran in among the people, crying, ―Sirs, why do ye these things? We also are men of like passions with you . . . !‖ (Acts 14:11-18) They resolutely, consistently, kept to their being human. 113 [a] is here; [b] is far ahead later, where we say, ―Let us now return to religions and their stories.‖ In all this, we must keep in mind that this is the problem in our world, not in the World Beyond us. This is the so-called onto-theo-logical principle, the categorical rule of considering things beyond us and God beyond us. We must remember that we can never know thing in itself or God in himself. Neglecting this rule plunges us into Kant‘s antinomies (our paradoxes here) and a Hick-fundamentalist arrogance that plays god to violate the First Commandment, not knowing what we talk about. Cf. Mark 9:6, 10:38. I treated this problem of one-and-many in religion in On Nonsense: Cultural Meditations (556 pp.), yet to publish. I treat it here in a fresh way, for the Beyond always begins afresh here now. 114 Chuang Tzu 33/75. Chuang Tzu reported Hui Tzu‘s paradoxes, many originating in names/universals. Chuang Tzu gave all these paradoxes to illustrate the wonder of actuality beyond our understanding.
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now have to keep adding more and more legnesses without end, for we must keep naming ―legness‖ over the legness we have just named, ad infinitum. If No, why did we add ―legness‖ in the first place? What is this not-leg ―leg‖ that we call ―legness‖? In short, does this legness stand side by side with other ordinary legs, or not? Chuang 115 Tzu goes the Yes-way and tells us to simply stop, and this ―stop‖ indicates the ineffability of the unspeakable concreteness of things, where our wording goes bankrupt, wiping out the effectiveness of words, to wonder at actuality beyond understanding. Western philosophers go the No-way to produce conundrums of realism, nominalism, etc., to make up ―answers to the problem of universals.‖ We are hardly satisfied with this route, either. If this question is answered neither Yes nor No, what is this legness, this strange ―not-leg leg‖? Should we stop naming legs? But we cannot live without naming things. No wonder, Lao Tzu honestly says that ―a name nameable is not the always-name,‖ and then goes on to name things important in life in Tao Te Ching. This act is a paradox over word-paradox, quite unsolvable, and Lao Tzu simply lets it stand, as a meaningful paradox. Just think, just naming a thing generates such insoluble paradoxes! Russell‘s paradox, etc., are ―self-referential inconsistency‖ and their amendments, e.g., that restrict applying ―all,‖ is a copout from applying the words, not to resolve the paradox. When we get stuck in a naming cul-de-sac like this, what we should do is to retreat and look on concrete things all over again. We then realize that the whole problem begins at naming itself. Naming something indicates our noting/recognizing/knowing it, to fixate it with word as such-and-such, but fixating things, always in flux, is an exercise in futility. Remember. Words just label things, having nothing to do with things themselves. No wonder, things out there slip through our words/names, and people resent being ―called names.‖ Words are ours, the thing is not, and capturing not-ours with ours would surely fail. But we cannot help but wording/naming things, for without names we cannot identify things to live with them; even things unknown must be identified as Unidentified Flying Objects so we can live with them. So, here is the tragedy. We cannot help but identify things with labels, but labeling would slip into identifying things as labels, and we miss things themselves; we end up taking the worded as the words, falling into the ―fallacy of misplaced concreteness‖ (Whitehead116). It is thus that the paradox of naming and universals comes about. Lao Tzu had to say (1, 25), ―Name can name, not Always Name,‖ and the Unnamable had to be ―nicknamed ‗Tao,‘ ‗Great.‘‖ Words go over and accompany all thinking, all expressing, as words hover beside things and try clumsily to enwrap them in vain, and the very failures cipher the existence of things beyond naming. Paradox insinuates; namebankruptcy intimates. In sum, the ―problem‖ of universals comes from words labeling no-word things, and then misidentifying names with named. Chuang Tzu parodies it by counting ―one‖ to reach an unmanageable infinity.117 India‘s ―third eye‖ Siva is ―philosophy‖ of reflection,118 to pile up 115
Shakespeare is England, Goethe is Germany, Pyshkin is Russia, and Cervantes is Spain. So people say. Who is China, then? We are hard put to answer, for China is full of so many literary beauties. Is Chuang Tzu China? We suspect so because, more than Ch‘ü Yüan 屈原，Chuang Tzu 莊子began all beauties in China. This point answers the question as to why I often quote Chuang Tzu. 116 For ―fallacy of misplaced concreteness,‖ see Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925), NY: Free Press, 1953, pp. 51, 58, etc. This is the fallacy of reification. 117 Chuang Tzu 2/10-40, 51-55. They are profound entanglements indeed, and he tells us to stop.
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unmanageable examples, rambling, going nowhere.119 Wording is Nicholas of Cusa‘s ―circle,‖ edge-less (universal) with centers everywhere (things), a paradox. Tillich‘s God is ―God beyond God,‖ an enigma. Religion beyond us is the ultimate of universals where, naturally, the absolute enwraps the relative, and the universal embraces the concrete, as the form/name does the actual. This is where the many includes the one, the one implies the many, while the many rejects the one and the one rejects the many, for the ultimate unspeakable is both one-and-many and neither one nor many. We see here the Chinese Yin and Yang internecine while inter-nascent. This is because ―one‖ and ―many‖ are our words, and religion beyond us is beyond our words. We now know about all this ignorance of ours about religion. Religion is Nicholas of Cusa‘s ―docta ignorantia‖ (learned ignorance), knowledge of our ignorance. Religion beyond us acts out the ignorance of our human self-recursive self-examination; isn‘t Socrates pious! Still, Socrates lived in vain in assiduity in good conscience, we sadly realize. Keeping up with ―self-examination‖ supposedly keeps life worth living less and less imperfect, and never perfect. This continual life praxis shows life unfinished, ever not-real, inauthentic, and such self-honesty shows such living as worth living, as authentic—and so futile. Thus being honest about inauthenticity is authenticity; life is an earthen vessel cracked in two. Life worth living is fatally cracked in two, revealed by self-examination. The integral self is nowhere, for we are either in unexamined pretense, or in examined imperfection ever cracked. We sigh at Socrates‘ exercise in futility, at our living ever futile. All is vanity. ―Let‘s put the cracks in time,‖ King T‘ang says. Socrates‘ self-examination sifts off dross to reshape me; my crack is now the crack of dawn. The self now cracks on to tomorrow. Selfexamination ushers in ―day to day new, again today new‖ since millennia. Countless dawns, ever beginning, tell the story of ―history.‖ Perhaps Socrates indicates it in retrospective selfexamination, perhaps unwittingly if not wrongly. (b) Let us now return to religions and their stories. Here we see how the paradox of naming universals turns into the power of life. This turning can be accomplished by storytelling. Jean Valjean in Victor Hugo‘s Les Miserables was a sinner converted into a powerful hero of irresistible compassion, and has moved countless readers to tears throughout many cultures and incarnated himself in countless incidents. Does Mr. Jean Valjean exist or does he not? He is an ideal type Hugo created, a name that exists only as a universal in Hugo‘s novel, to get concretized in real lives. The Idiot is another universal Dostoevsky invented, too good for our scheming world where he always stirs up troubles, and Botchan, a universal of green lovable boy Natsume Sōseki invented, manages to clumsily ―right wrongs‖ of the society. These three characters are too good for this world, and are all reenacted repeatedly in this world. Do these characters actually exist or not? Our question persists. Both, we would say. Being mere fictive characters, ―existing‖ in name alone, they all yet exerted profound impacts in the actual world in countless different and concrete ways. So, without existing physically, they exist quite powerfully with powerful impacts on so many persons through so many days; they do exist more convincingly than most of us dragging on physically in this routine world. 118 The first scientific eye of knowledge looks out, the second religious eye of discernment looks in, and the third philosophic eye of reflection looks at the looking. (cf. Troy Wilson Organ, Third Eye Philosophy: Essays in East-West Thought, Athens: Ohio University Press, 1987, Preface) 119 Organ‘s book (ibid.) has an incredible wealth of citations and examples, limitless bits here and bits there in just 162 pages, to revel in the paradox of one and many inter-involving, as the universal enwrapping the concrete.
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What about those who have actually existed in history, say, Confucius, Socrates, Buddha, and Jesus, who are not here now but continue to exert influences today? What should we say about the historical universals continuing on through history? Jesus is peculiar to the Christians. He was a fictive criminal the Jews invented out of historical Jesus, who then turned into the divine Savior Christ for Christians till today. This peculiarity is the Christian ―scandal of historical particularity.‖ Now, each character above is unique120 and irreplaceable; each is irresistibly powerful over our lives to inspire us on. Thus all of them are both many individuals and one in personal impact, both existent and non-existent, and neither. That is the paradox, and as such, they wield their ever captivating power over us. Being paradoxical as above, they are specific names and general universals, inspiring inter-versals, and continue to live on in us. That is the paradoxical power of the name, the ideal and the universal that inter-verses. Storytelling alone can do justice to such strange power of the paradox of specific naming/wording to generate general universal inter-versals. The point of all this is clear, on two counts. One, the so-called Christian ―scandal of particularity‖ may be a logical one but never a ―scandal‖ in actuality. On the contrary, it is a most natural phenomenon of how our understanding takes place, how a name makes a universal notion that enables our life to go on. Two, from our reflection on naming as producing universals, we can envisage a hope of resolution—not quite a solution yet—of our difficulties understanding the Christian ―mission‖ among world religions, as follows. In naming a particular thing or event as such and such, the name bleeds out into universal intelligibility of things. In naming an ethical notion such as honor, grace, kindness, or the Golden Rule, the notion, while staying as a particular name, spreads to naturally cover widely different occasions and actions, cultural, historical, and actual. In our historical world, events such as ―conquests‖ or ―sages‖ appear and disappear to show how they do not repeat but rhyme in human time. When the matter comes to the Beyond, the particular and the universal join in extreme intimacy in this world, literally ―out of this world beyond worldly understanding.‖ Here is ample room for both ―mission‖ as a spread of a historical particular and religious ―dialogues‖ of inter-learning, inter-influencing, and inter-pervading, as religions shake hands by standing apart, opposed, facing one another, to mutually clasp their hands, hearts, and souls. The Confucian classics can now serve as an OT to the Chinese Christians, with the Jewish Torah as an OT to the Christians in the West. The particular here now is now immortalized in religion.
120 Incredibly, some feminists accused the Christian claim to uniqueness as sexist arrogance, as if asserting ―2+2=4‖ were sexism, as if the Christian claim to uniqueness did not mean the unsurpassable and worshipful, as if the claim were not a confession to the religious beyond-human to remove all arrogance, and as if religion could be judged by human criterion of the efficacy of effecting justice in the world. See The Myth of Christian Uniqueness: Toward a Pluralistic Theology of Religions, eds. John Hick and Paul F. Knitter, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1987, pp. 137-161, and Christianity and The Wider Ecumenism, ed. Peter C. Phan, NY: Paragon House, 1990, pp. 169, 173, 175, 180.
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Storytelling as Life-Imperative One final point we make to conclude all: All this takes place in story-thinking. We have just told a story about how stories of Confucianism, OT, and Jesus come together without confusion. In this way, all ―classics,‖ cultural and religious, are stories that continue to evoke more stories, powerfully breeding lessons of consequence in life. Besides, we may not always realize that all sorts of stories mentioned—scientific, mythological, zodiacal, fatalistic, Buddhist, Confucian, and Christian—are all classics that evoke and captivate us into action. We may not realize that each life-story, as classics, intimates significant lessons for our lives now, in what ―this specific story‖ amounts to and thereby what it can mean for us today. Storytelling, ancient and today, is our life-imperative. Thus, every story well told, to wit, told from our hearts, is a ―classic‖ worth paying close attention to, for it shakes us at the core and basis of everything in us and around. Psychology, psychiatry, counseling,121 and theology operate, live, and thrive on a realization that storytelling integrates, makes sense, and makes whole in this classical heartfelt way, to set us on our new life‘s way. The Christian paradox of historical particularity is an extraordinary story-―scandal‖ that heals and shapes our life praxis. How? Well, let us focus on the ―scandal‖ itself to wrap up all this meditation. It all begins with our words that name things. This fact amounts to three points. One, things out there, particulars here and there, are more than our naming, our words. Two, things express themselves in/via our words. Concrete particulars overflow to slip through our sieve of naming words, through which they express themselves. Three, the name, ―religion,‖ expresses one thing in the world beyond it. Religion overflows words to appear through them as ―religion‖ and ―religions.‖ That is the way actuality is, nothing scandalous about it. To take all this as a ―scandal‖ is our scandal, we the scandal. Our taking all this as a ―scandal‖ expresses our wonder at all this that goes beyond our words our expression and our expectation. This fact expresses itself via breaking through our expectation/expression. This wonder at the Beyond is of course what ―religion‖ means, and such religion inevitably beckons us to living a radically new life. Religion beyond us is the categorical imperative to live beyond our routines. All this is beyond words conveyed by storytelling words.
Words as Logos Words are expression, expectation, intention, and all this is packed in an ancient Greek word, ―logos.‖ We have taken words as ours so far, but words are more than ours. Suppose we take things out there as actuality beckoning us to express them. That beckoning is their originative primal expression, a primal logos originating in the Beyond, Its self-expression beyond us. The Beyond is; it is beyond what it expresses to us, the Logos that creates/expresses to be expressed by being ―made flesh‖ in history,122 in the human that expresses in words what all this is out there beyond human expression. It is the Beyond, the ―more,‖ that is divine, the 121 For similar reasons, Rollo May urged all pre-counselors to major in literature, in Symbolism, op. cit., pp. 11-49. 122 John 1:1-14.
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wonder that scandalizes our expectation. All this is ―good,‖ in fact, creative novelty ―very good‖123 beyond words, through words. Words just told us all this, in a story that tells of this ―scandal‖ that is our ―wonder,‖ our religious devotion. Now wonder is our access, our homecoming, to the originating primal Source of things, and our homing makes us whole as we originally are. Healing is making whole; making us whole as we originally are heals us at our roots. We go home to where everything is fresh and full as kids, and is ―very good,‖ at the dawn of creation of each day. Now, how does all this immortalize every moment here now? We had better learn the secret from kids. After all, to teach is to show why and how I love the subject-matter. I share my enthusiasm and learn with students. Students teach me as I learn from students. Education is an reenactment of learning, learning redoubled reincarnate. If we think we teach children, we had better learn from them first. Andrew aged five wanted to change his birthday, to get birthday gifts anytime he wants; his dad said he cannot change it, but he persisted. O, how refreshing his demand is! None but kids alone can stunningly demand it! I his ―Gumpa Akong‖ was drawn in; I told him how to do it. This is how. He can forget his birthday to begin all, all over again. Even if his Mom told him of his birthday (he whispered, ―February 26!‖), he can not-believe it, and ask her to ―prove it!‖124 Mom cannot prove it, for proving a fact must repeat it as science does, and birthday cannot repeat. Forgetting as Taoist and demanding proof as Hume, change his birthday, you see. Now he can change his birthday, any day every time he demands it, for his official ―birthday‖ is only as good as what Mom tells him, and after all, this is his birthday he is handling. He nodded in silence, in a strange sort of composure only he understands. I was about to tell his Mom how he can change his birthday, when he shouted me down, ―Don‘t tell! It‘s a secret!‖ I asked, ―Do you have secrets?‖ ―No,‖ he said. So this is his secret of no secret—his birthday change! Why is it a secret to Mom? The reason is simple; divulging secrets de-magicizes the magic. O, how cute, how deep is his secret Magic Land of no secret! And here is the crunch. Andrew may not realize this, much less do I, that ―today‖ begins the rest of his life and mine, and his incredible demand to change his birthday activates this truth, to make me and make him realize this every today as every birthday of his and mine. So, his asking to change his birthday has already changed it; in the very asking, right now, his birthday of everything comes about, for his demand makes his today sparkle with the beginning of the rest of his life, for kid‘s demand sparkles things afresh, as he the kid is forever fresh, making everything afresh. He-asking-demanding is the delightful scandal of every particularity of ―birthday‖creation of everything, immortalizing today into the future. I cannot help but sing,125 Future comes 123 See Genesis 1:4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25, 31. 124 David Hume is the kid here; he dares to disbelieve in any birthday! His so-called ―skepticism‖ is really kidasking in wonder, refusing to settle anywhere; it is kin to relativism. This is where the world is born. Skepticism, relativism, and birthday are sisters in the creation-family of kids, and this is a secret! 125 Kuang Wu, ―Future Comes One Day at a Time,‖ Timeless Voices, ed. Howard Ely, Owings Mills, MD: The International Library of Poetry, 2006, p. 1. Apropos of its theme, this poem is the first one to begin all in this book of collection of poems.
Kuang-ming Wu
46 One day at a time. My future is here, I must walk out to it. Morning fresh, Evening calm; Every day is a new day, The first day of my life. The squirrels are here Hopping with me.
My future is my birthday today, one today at a time hopping with my Andrew hopping, hopping ahead with our squirrels, for no squirrel hops back, no Andrew hops back. This is the morning where/when I can do anything, as kids can do anything. Andrew is the first morning of creation of all, inside and out!126 Now, doesn‘t this story give all of us a smile? Even I laughed as I told this fabulous story! Such open secret of Andrew‘s, such breathtaking smile he evokes! He is the immortal here now. ―Here now‖ the unrepeatable, the despair of Mom unable to prove Andrew‘s birthday, now repeats itself as unrepeatable, as each unique moment keeps coming again and again. Creation is continual re-creation, thanks to Andrew‘s incredible demand to change his birthday. ―Thus‖ to embrace our scandal of particularity in kid‘s asking-wonder heals us at our roots, reborn afresh. It is our redemptive ―salvation‖ here now. This ―thus‖ is the story— haven‘t I told you this Andrew-story?—that makes us whole, smiling. The world is birthdaystorytelling and more storytelling unceasing; we all live storytelling, rebirth in it, to have our beings in historic storytelling, and to be healed to begin all over, thereby to spread the healing to heal others, making them whole, whoever wherever they are—the new Heaven and new Earth is thus birthday-created. Oddly enough, this kid-story is told to us adults, for Andrew could not care less about this story. How does all this incredible morning of all come about in our adult-world today? How is our ―storytelling‖ born? Unlike kids‘ world of storytelling, ours is born slowly. Storytelling takes time as time-narrative; time brews stories. It takes time to produce our adult stories. Stories are spread in time so that we adults can see history the time-spread, and live in it as time comes alive in storytelling, to consciously make ―birthday‖ of all things possible, one morning at a time, as we look around at one thing at a time. Our world is born this morning in storytelling, and shaped by the telling of these specific morning-stories. Birthday-story immortalizes here now. ―But what is storytelling?‖ Now, ―what is‖ is tricky, tending to imply that we can survey and look at ―what it is‖ from outside it, seeing it from nowhere in the Platonic sky. But story is story-told, and telling takes time in a story-organized way, to shape us in storytelling126 Andrew outshines Henry Bugbee‘s The Inward Morning: A Philosophical Exploration in Journal Form, State College, Penna.: Bald Eagle Press, 1958.
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hearing. To understand a story we must listen and go through the story as it goes along, as we live on along our storytelling. Here in story, to understand is literally to undergo life.
STORYTELLING AS TELLING WHERE A STORY IS BORN Story goes on. Story is its telling-hearing that goes on, never standing still. Story stood still is no story; a storybook waits for us to go in to go through. To understand storytelling on the go, we must understand music on the move, for story is music worded as coherent dance of life in intelligible music. We had better go into music to understand story that sings life. (1) I once wished I could ―get‖ a whole piece of music in an instant, for I had no time for the long time it takes to undergo the music. My impatience jolted me to see me so hurried to survey things visually. I thought thinking is to schematize, systematize spatially, skipping time. In contrast, music is art in time; we cannot deal with it spatially. We can only meet, enter, and take time to undergo to understand it. Understanding music cannot stand still outside music and survey it in an instant; I can only go-with the flow of music to become 127 music itself. (2) Music is no random noises but an artistic sonic ensemble to undergo and appreciate. Music develops, evolves as it envelops us along. The ―harmony‖ of many musical elements is made by elements interpenetrating in time to pervade everywhere, and we must undergo each element to ―get‖ it as it transpires as an element. The ―rhythm‖ of music throbs, varying itself. Harmony and rhythm compose melody, patterning itself spontaneously, as an art-in-time distinct from paintings and sculptures. (3) Music is thus alive to seep into our life, intelligible beyond analytical dissection of logical spatial reason. Music is life-reason pulsating itself as life. No wonder both Confucius and Plato touted music as education to shape us, and in Chinese common sense an ideal government is government by music, spontaneously organized, harmonious in melodies of 128 communal concord. Music bespeaks the lived orderly evolving of the telling of stories and the dialogue, in neither of which we know beforehand how the telling-talking would develop, conspire, and consummate. Realizing thus enables us to envisage ―history‖ as grand composition of storytelling and event-dialogues, a diversely and unpredictably developing story-music of the lifeworld. 129 (4) Here we may notice that spontaneous ―telling‖ recorded on paper is world apart from carefully contrived theoretical treatise on paper. History is the former writing. Chuang Tzu‘s (26/49) yearning after a word-forgotten one to word with may intimate yearning after the former records-of-telling. Chinese literary tradition is such, in Confucius‘ Analects, thinkers‘ journals, short essays, prose poems, as well as sayings of Buddha, of Homer, Socrates‘ dialogues, Shakespeare‘s dramas and poetry, and the list goes on. 127 Sadly, Mikel Dufrenne whom I deeply respect analyzes music in spatial terms; he schematizes and systematizes musical harmony, rhythm, and melody as if they were things out there to be handled. He explicitly said so in The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, trs. Edward S. Casey, et al., Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973, pp. 239-273. 128 This theme is elaborated in my Chinese Wisdom Alive, NY: Nova Science Publishers, 2010. 129 Rodney Frey carefully, delightfully, recorded Indian oral literature, Stories That Make the World, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995. Pp. 141-153 is particularly moving.
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(5) Besides, our understanding in ―reading a page‖ proceeds musically, seeing point A, then B, then C, then putting them together, and everyone comes to have their own personal pattern of going through those points and gathering them. So, every thinker—and we all are, being human—has a music-logic making one‘s own music of stories. So does every community, every nation, every culture, and history is a loose collective storytelling of so diverse a musical telling of stories through time. Reading of every sort could be taken as a counterpoint to writing, as listening is to musical performance. Reading is a being-told, a going-through of the author‘s excitement of telling-on-paper, an understanding that cannot stand still but undergoes to obtain, a musical happening of historical process. Receiving and responding, receiving and responding, the reader joins the musical rhythm and melody of the writer, dances with the writing, and in the meantime strikes out in the reader‘s own direction, creating with the writer an inspired dialogical music. It is thus that the music of ideas goes on this dialogical way, weaving a tapestry of history and a kaleidoscope of culture. Thus, it is the process of storytelling that originates stories and their hearing. We undergo to understand, trailing the same process of storytelling yet ever so slightly differing from the storyteller as we undergo our way to understand. All this parallels performance and enjoyment of music. Storytelling is a time-art as music is; both are the music of life. How does this music come to be? It makes a ―system‖ of reality. What does story as a system mean?
HOW STORYTELLING William Trevor (born 1928) the famed short-story writer said130 that everyone has a book in them, to enjoy being outside it, not belonging anywhere, that short stories are life-glimpses from outside. Our life is our story that is in us to get outside us—and that is our world in us outside us. In this way our life describes how we write stories, naturally; in fact, we cannot help telling stories as long as we are humanly alive. We see three implications here. One, everyone has a storybook in them because to be human is to carry a story of one‘s life; we all have memories that weave our life into a living coherent whole that yarns and spins forward as we live on. Life is not human without such ongoing open-ended coherence called ―a story.‖ Two, storytelling-as-living catches glimpses of life to understand it as we undergo it; undergoing from inside enables catching a glimpse of life from outside. Finally, for us to have a glimpse of life, we must be outside our life-milieu to tell of it, and we must be outside what we write about to be fair and comprehensive. But the story of our life is ours, and we must be inside us to write it to undergo to understand it. So storytelling is an act of being in and out of ourselves at once. To consider how we manage to do so is an exciting storytelling task of living itself.
130 This is his off-the-cuff talk in ―All Things Considered,‖ Morning Edition, October 21, 2002.
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STORY AS ORAL, AS TOLD We must carefully pick our way as we watch our steps here. Stories are basically told and lived, even as they are written down, for writing stories is for the sake of being read as told, and storytelling has an unexpected dilemma. Worse, storytelling in the end comes to forgetting words. Let us take an example. Chuang Tzu the great sensible storyteller sighs forth a story (26/48-49), ―The rabbit-trap is for the rabbit; once we get the rabbit we forget the trap. Words are for the intendedmeaning (意); once we get the meaning-intended, we forget the words. Where/how can I get the one who has forgotten words to word with?‖ At these colorful words, we are quite nonplussed. We twist and turn to ponder on what they could mean at all. Our five points in story come quite spontaneously. (1) Our immediate reaction is, of course, to wonder how someone word-forgotten can have words at all. (2) On second reading, we find the saying quite logical in this context. To have a word with someone is for the sake of getting the intended meaning, the one who has got the meaning forgets the word that has trapped the meaning, and so we want to have words with the one who has forgotten words, having got the meaning. (3) For all this, however, our initial shock and bewilderment remains, that is, the wordforgotten one has no words, and can have no word to word with. ―One who knows, words not,‖ quips Lao Tzu (56, cf. 81). The one deserving to word with has no words to word 131 with. How do we get out of this strange dilemma? (4) Here another of Chuang Tzu‘s quip comes to mind, ―Ultimate words leave words (as) ultimate deeds leave doing 至言去言, 至為去為‖ (22/84). As real deeds leave ―much ado about nothing,‖ so ―true words‖ cannot quite logically word out, for usual words are often roundabout and contrived, if not chatty. Logic is often chatty and redundant. True words are instead apt, direct, and simple. Kids are good at it; ―It‘s quiet when birdies sing,‖ they whisper, and then they shout, ―Look, a same different care!‖ ―I‘m OK, you‘re no-K!,‖ and they make perfect sense, not logically (being superficially contradictory) but truly, straightly, deeply. One really understands who is in tune with them and with the situation. One understands who is insider ready to perceive and receive. ―But understand what?‖ Good question you raised, my pal. Kids are in tune with nature; they are nature. Nature always has plenty of time; it is never in a hurry. Yet it is always changing without our knowing its change, as flowers open while we cannot see them opening. Nature changes without changing; it never frets as I do, racing against time. Nature is always same different at each moment. We follow along, day in and day out, and we won‘t be harassed. Birds sing their same songs to quiet me down. Kids shout and play as usual, to please me. Nature is always same, always different at every moment, as plants are. That is why I love nature, admire nature, and try to follow it, for it is stable and fresh, for I am part of nature. I am also same different at every moment. I am just not aware of this fact. I need to gaze at nature to realize it. Realizing it fulfills me. I am same different as kids are, in nature, as nature. It is beyond adult logic. Thus only the one who has forgotten words, logical, roundabout, can truly utter ultimate words that perfectly fit to ex-press what is actually the case. Those words often sound 131 Is this situation similar to one where only those who need no repentance can truly repent?
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unusual, even illogical; they are directly to the point, a straight talk directly connected to what actually is to express it; this is an immediate communication from and to those in tune with the situation. (5) These ultimate words of no usual words can be crisp; ―Great debate words not 大辯 132 不言,‖ says Chuang Tzu (2/59). They can also be quite involved, often attended with stories and parables. Jesus has many a story to tell, many a parable to share, only with those who have ears to hear and no other. Those stories and parables themselves can seem illogical and can be taken variously, and, for all that, they can be understood only directly, for they are confession from heart to heart, straight from the heart of the matter to the speaker‘s soul, to the listener‘s heart. Perhaps our situation is like this. Ezra Pound said that poems are the most meaning in the least words. The saying sets me thinking. Meaning here overflows words, which float in the misty ocean of meaning, and whenever words are caught meaning appears, overflows words, and we disappear in them, word-forgotten; we say we are word-forgotten in poems. We have words and silence; their echo hugs them both, and their echo itself is neither 133 word nor silence. Echo is penumbra talking with umbra shadowing forth its thing. Echo is silent as a baby embraced, while the cuddled violin, the violinist‘s soul, is just touched. The violinist never pounds but just touches her violin only at three spots, chinrest, bow, and strings on fingerboard. Touching to hug the violin, the violinist vanishes into it vibrating tunes in midair; there the violin and the violinist vanish as echoes to the tune. You pound on the piano before you, big, majestic; you hug your violin as part of you so 134 fragile, intimate. Pianist plays on any piano ; violinist carries and plays her soul-violin. 135 Piano is orchestral, dot-symphonic, and sonorous; violin sighs one voice soul-penetrating 136 long, quite personal. Piano is balanced, comprehensive, and public even when soft 137 Piano was appealing. Violin intoxicates, inundates, even insinuates to transmute all over. not invented in China, whose music is unthinkable without strings. Piano choruses the West; 138 violin intones China. The West pounds the piano sonorous to cover the world; all this while China touches the violin in music to hug silence, free, soaring, as its music in silence soaks the world. As silence vibrates the world, all people in it come alive, musical echoing to sing and hug the world, both aloud and silent, both in ode and in elegy. Every touch hugs, to each inter-echo to sing the world in silence of music all over. Every thing hugs itself to sing the world—in silent music so self-attractive. This decrepit car on the roadside sings the world, with this stone that no one cares if it is big or tiny. One is blessed who hears rhythms of silent echoes of things in the world‘s music. I am silent wile I am feeding, for silence feeds as in Buddhists‘ gathering and Quakers‘ gathering. Only birds chirp 132 ―Pien 辯‖ can mean ―discrimination‖ (Watson, Graham), ―disputation‖ (Mair), ―argument‖ (Legge, Giles), and the list goes on. This is itself a case of straight talk grasped and told variously. 133 Chuang Tzu 2/92-94, 11/63-65, 25/81 are combined here. 134 Horowitz shipped his piano to Russia for his recital, but no other pianist I know of does so. 135 At most, violin strains out two or three voices but no more, and they are so personal. 136 Someone told Accardo that she heard Francescatti as his violin was played by Accado. 137 We are transfixed by those who play piano like violin (Artur Schnabel, Clara Haskil, Ingrid Haebler), and shrink from those who pound on violin like piano, as so many violinists do today. 138 See long article, ―China,‖ Harvard Dictionary of Music, Willi Apel, Harvard University Press, 1977, pp. 151157. Sadly, this entire article vanished in later editions.
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among silent clouds, over the grass; and now all is quieter deeper as all is as it is. Do you hear Debussy‘s silence in all this? I am fed here. That is how music echoes silence to hug the world, and we are hugged, trembling in the joy of living. We call all this renovation of the world in us, and ours echoing the world, ―music alive,‖ as if nothing were the matter. Menuhin‘s music hugs silence, the louder the music, the louder the silence, and the silence hugs the music. My Professor Clare Anderson 139 has this poem, ―Hear,‖ that binds and sums up the rest in her book of poems: Here on this pebbled shore how music and silence meet, As the wind cries through the waves And the song hangs in the air And the rush of the spirit is one. Looking through long far-off times how the waters come and go, And the rocks break into stones 140 And the seats enfold and release And the gathering and scattering are one. Agate and forest amber and many-moulded flint Lie here in balanced motion Like violin bow suspended, And the movement and stillness are one. 141
This is poetry of the world, and this is how we come to word with the word-forgotten one, in the silent story, in poetry. Many stories, essays, and analects among the great ancients, religious sages, and those in China and in Japan, are of this expressive sort in and of the world; that is why and how they come down to us today echoing in us as ―Classics.‖ Stories are told, lives are lived, and each life-story means differently to different people at different times as they live and understand variously. Stories can be complex, various parables can be told; they can be understood variously, and all remain straight talks, directly connected to the actual situation and to the hearers and speakers. Story remains the stuff of which life is made and the frame in which life is lived, and storytelling is the way life goes on and grows in silence. Everyday is fresh, full of stories straightly told and lived, and variously received and lived. While strictly forbidding idolatry taking earthly things as God‘s images, the Bible says that humans are God‘s image, and the Son of Man God Incarnate is God‘s true Image that keeps giving us many earthly things as images, likeness, and parables of God‘s Kingdom. Jesus tells parables to form images of God‘s Kingdom in us, to show us God in things alive 142 here. Perhaps directly ―telling‖ to ―show‖ (as children‘s ―show and tell‖?) directly shakes us and shapes us, allowing no detached survey or visual examination, and idolatry is a matter of 139 Clare Anderson, Sad, Mad, Good, Bad, North Yorkshire, UK: Tradewinds Design and Printing, 1999, p. 2. 140 This is ―§ Why the I Ching Makes No Mistakes.‖ 141 This world-poetic sentiment is echoed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty‘s The Prose of the World (1969, ed. Claude Lefort), tr. John O‘Neill, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973. 142 Cf. Matthew 13 except vv. 44-46.
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visual images detached from our hearts for us to survey with our inspecting minds. Storytelling is luckily not idolatrous but basically oral; stories can be written down as records of what they tell, while stories by nature tell. Stories are told and we hear them as parables; all stories are parables that straightly show us novel unnoticed truth innocent, straight. What does telling-and-hearing involve? Frey savored and sensitively catalogued how telling-hearing differ from writing-reading; 144 Telling/hearing is auditory, surrounding the hearers with Smith pondered on ―orality.‖ impacts that cannot be shut off at hearers‘ will, the impacts that often shape the hearers beyond their control. Hearers are thereby linked via storytelling to the storyteller and the story, which in turn is shaped by hearers‘ reactions, to shape the storyteller shaped by actuality, to shape the world story-told-heard-and-shaped. Their shared world is thus shaped and revealed to them all as interactively changing, shaping, and becoming, ever in process. The process includes the action of telling that overflows spoken words, for storytelling often goes by nods and intoned gestures to point to the surrounding stones, trees, rivers, and mountains now echoed with story-significance to shape their shared world. Storytellers and story-hearers experience these stories shaped directly, personally; stories are the lived and living stuff of which their lives are made to 145 create the world. Such a story-dynamic life-phenomenon reminds us of confession, a story told from one‘s heart to someone. A story is really a confession about what is the case to the listeners. Is such a confessional story really a truthful one? Well, it is if it is told long enough in time, to become a part of history. Nothing is hid in such a story in time called ―history.‖ Things are told as they are, leaking nothing, in this time-net as Heavenly Net (Lao Tzu 73), true stories told as true, lies often told as things interesting if not as straight lies. Stories told are recorded often, and read often. Such a reading is repeated, not for new information as our usual reading is for, but to reenact it and participate in it and be shaped by it, thereby shape it further. We live in/by/on such constant reenactment, which is redescriptive reliving that inevitably pro-duces something fresh, drawing forth something nonexistent before yet patterned after that ―before‖ that is thus reenacted and relived. This is human creation by stories. So to reenact is to re-create, to inherit the past is to create the now and the future, and in order to create we must reenact the past. To live through this creative process is history; we live in/by/on history and, in fact, we are reincarnations, again and again, of history itself. In this sense, reading religious scriptures (such as Buddhist Sutras, Islamic Koran, and Christian Bible) is a life-recital, a recitation of life lived and living as it was lived in the great past stories told, to be enriched by them and incarnated in them. What does all this amount to? We inherit the tradition by kicking it. Anti-traditionalism is the true tradition. This is because tradition is something worth handing down, something excellent/distinguished/outstanding, and things outstanding are things that stand out of what has been, distinguished from the past, differing from past excellence, and such differing kicks 143 Moses unwittingly went (―turn‖) to the burning bush to ―to see‖ (Exodus 3:3-4). 144 Rodney Frey, ed., Stories That Make the World: Oral Literature of the Indian Peoples of the Inland Northwest, Norman: the University of Oklahoma Press, 1995. Huston Smith, The World‟s Religions (1958), NY: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991, pp. 368-372. 145 I have freely rifled Frey and added my own thoughts. There are some more but this is enough to show how vibrantly alive to communal life storytelling and story-hearing are. See Frey, op. cit., pp. 141-158, et passim.
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the past excellence, kicks the tradition, to be ―more‖ excellent than past excellence. So I used 146 to say; that was my past claim. Now, suppose I now disagree with this claim, then my disagreement amounts to kicking this claim, and I thereby inherit this claim that insists on kicking the inheritance. Suppose I agree with this claim, then I must follow this claim by kicking it. Thus, while agreeing or disagreeing with this claim, I end up following it, in the same manner as the belief in criticism embraces both agreeing and disagreeing with this belief. In other words, this claim is universally valid in all cases, whether we agree or disagree with this claim. Such is how history—storytelling in time, in life, throughout the ages—works. We end up being in history, while following or refusing to follow history. World judgment is world history, for our judgment of history is/becomes part of history. So history turns Hegel‘s dictum (―World history is world judgment‖) upside down, and justifies Hegel himself as part of history; history thus overflows and embraces its critiques, all our fuss about it. Story is thus powerful through time. We will have much more to say about the power of storytelling and story-thinking through time soon enough but we had better shed now our prejudice against storytelling and story-thinking as kid-stuff, beneath the dignity of ―adult mature thinking.‖
HOW STORYTELLING WORKS WONDERS Sartre said that drab daily ongoing, once told as a story, gains a life of its own, as if 147 catching time by its tail. This is how we make history, to become historical. We sigh and say, ―This is the wonder of storytelling.‖ Now, our question is how so, how storytelling, why/how just retelling what has happened or what is the case (nothing was the matter there), could work such a wonder. The situation is complex, perhaps tri-plexed. A child from inside the car shouts, ―Dad, look, a same different car!‖ and we instantly understand what he means, yet we who know ―logic‖ laugh and marvel; nothing can be both same and different, the child is logically wrong, yet how straightly apt the expression is! So, we have here in this situation (a) the child‘s innocence, honestly reporting the fact of ―a same different car,‖ (b) an adult the logician who judges it to be incorrect, (c) yet marvels at its peculiar aptness, and is jolted into laughter by the clash between unassailable situational aptness and logical incorrect-ness. Telling this mini-story brings this ordinary event into a complex wonder. ―Kids say the 148 darnedest things‖ only from Mr. Linkletter‘s adult viewpoint, for kids are just kids, to be marveled at only by the adults, to be told to by Linkletter. It takes Mencius (4B12) to say, ―The Great One is one who has not lost one‘s own ‗infant‘s heart‘‖ for us to marvel, while the infant is no ―great one‖ himself. Let us stay here for a while. The child is both original and originative, primal-root (Li Chih) and primitive-growing (Piaget), and its mysterious depth lies in this ―and,‖ the natural blend of its opposites. Here 146 The Butterfly as Companion, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990, p. 9. 147 Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, NY: New Directions, 1964, pp. 56-59. This novel was his first storytelling, an instant bestseller. Cf. Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being, tr. G. S. Fraser, Chicago: Regnery/Gateway, 1960, I: 192-194. 148 Art Linkletter, Kids Say the Darnedest Things! Berkeley, CA: Celestial Arts, 2005.
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are what kindergarten kids say about ―peace,‖ as my daughter with the heart of the child emailed me in mid-January 2010. Peace is trying to help everyone feel like they belong. Peace is a feeling you have inside your heart when you help people. Peace is like basketball—it‘s not about who is winning but how much fun we are having playing! Peace is happiness for everyone. Peace is taking care of our earth and everyone on it. Peace is caring for everybody. Peace is making friends with someone who looks like they are being left out of a game. Peace is making friends with our world, the people, the animals, the whole earth. Peace is playing with someone no matter what they look like. Peace taking care of each other. Peace is giving people a second chance even if they hurt your feelings before. Peace is smiling at someone you don‘t know yet.
In their refreshing immaturity these tiny kids teach us mature adults that ―peace‖ is felt acts of peacemaking interpersonal, never quiet, and never kept inside. ―Peace‖ vanishes otherwise, set, staid, dead. ―Toward the close of his life, Black Elk, a shaman of the Oglala Sioux, often fell to all fours to play with toddlers. ‗We have much in common,‘ he said, ‗They have just come from the Great Mysterious and I am about to return to it.‘‖149 Here is the mysterious unity of sagely maturity and toddler‘s immaturity, both gather to play on all fours. Such deep fun together! The wonder of wonders is that this ―mysterious unity‖ is never mystical, esoteric, or exotic, but starkly concrete beyond adult understanding. The child primitive disarms us into its primal depth, its surprising originality. This is the origin of the ordinary as the extraordinary, the simple as the spectacular, the origin of simple things around as they are present in depth. Things here now are the active child. The hills are just hills, and then appear as more than just hills, and then show themselves as hills truly, spectacularly, as poets, painters, musicians, and scientists perceive them. But all such stages of ―progress‖ tell of us adults progressing (Zen progress, we say) toward the children, who just clap their hands and stamp their feet ―dancing the hills‖ out there, for nothing, for joy of hills just there. The child thus charms us, disarming us, and so it is deep—because it is primitively concrete present so clearly, so completely; nothing is hid, and so all is dizzyingly deep beyond all fathoming. The child is an open secret so starkly present, singing in unison with all things so starkly concrete. We adults must simplify our engagements to go back home to the child‘s original depth of the simple concrete, solidly concrete. To put it another way, the reason why grandparents have no generation-gap with grandchildren is because grandparents are twice removed from the children. The parents scrape with children, while the grandparents sit back, clap hands, and enjoy them, and we who are neither parents nor grandparents tell their stories and smile. Only then can we marvel at the splendor of the kid-simple in daily life. What is simple is what is clear, out there for all to see, as a baby crying to show she is wet, tired, hungry, or sick, nothing else. Such charming simplicity is yet bottomless, for we cannot stop gazing at her in sleep or in smile, and her tears draw ours. She has no dull 149 Li Chih, ―On Child‘s Heart 童心說,‖ in 李贄文集，北京社會科學文獻出版社, 2000, I: 91-93. See Jean Piaget, The Origins of Intelligence in Children, NY: W. W. Norton, 1963, The Moral Judgment of the Child, NY: The Free Press, 1966, and many other volumes studying the child‘s development into adulthood. Huston Smith, The World‟s Religions, HarperSanFrancisco, 1986, p. 374.
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moments, for we wish she were awake when she sleeps, and wish she sleeps when awake. She keeps us busy. Simplicity keeps us busy, bottomless; each moment is eternal, and each eternity lasts but a moment. Traditional Chinese calendar loads each day with tons of instructions on what to do and what not to do. Each day is loaded with meanings. Western calendar has simple blank, vacancy, for each day. Both calendars are correct; simple blank is loaded with meanings. We call it being alive. Simplicity is alive, deep, and endless. Simplicity is deep, for it has nothing in itself, and so simplicity is roomy, nestling us; we are deepened inexpressibly, as much as we can do and be filled, and more, much more than we can, endlessly. Simplicity is thus irresistible, disarmingly charming people. Kids, Haydn, and Bruckner are all simple in all their different depths, drawing us all. But ―we all‖ here are no kids, and Haydn or Bruckner is no kid, either. We learn from kids to whom nothing is the matter and nothing matters, for to kids things are just as they are to play with, as kids are just as they are, ―naughty, unmanageable,‖ full of pep overflowing each moment. Thus it would be misguided to extol the child as a genius just because the genius has the 150 child‘s soul and perspective ; it is not the child‘s simple innocence but the adult‘s second innocence that is precious. Being a child and having the child in an adult‘s heart are two completely different worlds, and to bring out the difference (a) we must tell stories about both (b) the child and (c) the adult. To put it yet another way, daily life is simple as it is, nothing special. It takes (a) Chuang Tzu to notice its splendor to describe it in beguilingly simple mini-stories, (b) name-logician Hui Tzu to challenge Chuang Tzu, and (c) Chuang Tzu to ―rebut‖ Hui Tzu. It takes all these three to compose Taoism‘s various marvels at the splendor of the simple, and thereby thrive 151 in such stunning simplicity of this world. An example (17/87-91) gloriously exhibits the wonder tripled. Chuang Tzu and Hui Tzu (the name-logician) were strolling (yu) above the Hao River. Chuang Tzu said, ―Minnows are out in a leisurely wandering (yu); such is the joy of the fish!‖ Hui Tzu said, ―You are no fish; how (could you) know the fish‘s joy?‖ Chuang Tzu said, ―You are not me; how (could you) know I don‘t know the fish‘s joy?‖ Hui Tzu said, ―I am not you; of course I don‘t know you. (But) you are of course not the fish, (so it) completes (the case) of your not knowing the fish‘s joy.‖ Chuang Tzu said, ―Let‘s trace (back to) your original (question). Your asking ‗How (could you) know the fish‘s joy?‘ (shows) you already knew I knew it and asked me. I know it above the Hao.‖
(a) Being in situ, on the spot—above the Hao—enabled Chuang Tzu to understand the fish‘s joy. At the same time, this spot is where two friends enjoyed (b) creating problems and bantering around on it to understand the cause of knowing the fish‘s joy. As they on the bridge enjoyed darting back and forth arguing, so the fish under the bridge enjoyed darting back and forth. 150 王國維 risks committing this error when he said, ―自某方面觀之, 凡赤子皆天才也.; 又凡天才自某方面觀之, 皆赤子也. Seen from a certain aspect, all infants are geniuses, and all geniuses, seen from a certain aspect, are infants.‖ (in <叔本華與尼釆>, quoted by 馬自毅 in his 導讀 in 新譯人間詞話, 臺北: 三民書局1994, 2001, p. 19) 151 Chuang Tzu has stories out of this world as well, to say that things out of this world are part of this world, to say that this world is ―out of the world.‖ It limit is the sky, which recedes as you think you have reached it. We realize that the sky is limitless only by reaching to it as our limit. The sky is this world out of this world.
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(c) Finally, Hui Tzu‘s questionings manifested this joy, this way. ―I know fish-enjoying on the Hao.‖ This knowledge has two inconsistencies; each has a No in Yes. One, Chuang‘s knowing contains his not fish, difference is ignorance, so his knowing contains not-knowing. Two, difference as ignorance contains its denial, as Hui not Chuang yet knowing Chuang not fish. Both Nos compose Chuang knowing fish‘s joy here now, containing two Nos. Yes exists by containing No; negative is part of affirmative as room‘s vacancy makes it roomy and useful. Hui Tzu was thus indispensable to Chuang Tzu‘s enjoyment as No is essential to Yes. No wonder, Chuang Tzu sorely missed Hui Tzu‘s death (24/48-51). Chuang Tzu was accompanying a funeral when he passed by Hui Tzu‘s grave. Turning to his attendant, he said, ―There was a man of Ying who, when smeared with plaster on his nosetip as (thin as) a fly‘s wing, let carpenter Shih to slice-it-off. Carpenter Shih raised the wind wheeling the hatchet, following152 (the wind), sliced off every plaster bit, and the nose was not hurt (while) the Ying man stood (there) unperturbed. Lord Yüan of Sung, hearing of it, summoned carpenter Shih and said, ‗Try do it for me.‘ Carpenter Shih said, ‗Your servant did use to be able to slice it off (like that). However, my material-partner has long been dead.‘ Since your death, Mister (Hui), I have no one for my material-partner any longer. I have no one to talk with any more.
We can see that, after such a dazzling display of enjoyment in arguing with his friend Hui Tzu, Chuang Tzu then looked down at the ground in silence; he did not drum on an empty bowl and sing as he did when his wife died (18/15). Such touching storytelling is what constitutes the ―classic‖ out of the Book of Chuang Tzu. Telling stories like this, and telling about all this, bring out all this poignancy of life to make us ponder. In short, it is thus that storytelling works wonders—of life. Now, have we noticed it? We have just told stories about how stories work wonders; we have done metastorytelling on storytelling. What is meta-storytelling? Is it just another storytelling? Or is it something special? We must look into this fascinating territory.
META-STORYTELLING Look at how incessantly stories pour out in magazines, journals, and as bestsellers and long-sellers. ―Why do we keep telling stories of life?‖ we ask, and we tell stories about why/how we tell stories. ―What are good stories and bad ones? How do we tell stories to tell ‗good‘ stories from ‗bad‘ ones?‖ ―Are we not supposed to tell stories sometimes? When would that ‗sometime‘ be?‖ ―Is there an unethical storytelling?‖ We ask and ask, and we tell stories about narrative ethics to decide on the ethics of storytelling.153 One thing is clear. We never can get out of storytelling, for we never can get out of living, and storytelling is (part of) our living; we live on it. Cut storytelling, and we die. Answers to all above good questions matter little. We are simply awed and impressed by how 152 ―Listening 聽 [to the wind]‖ in the original. 153 Rita Charon and Martha Montello eds., Stories Matter: The Role of Narrative in Medical Ethics, NY: Routledge, 2002, is just that, telling stories about how storytelling helps medical ethics, not reflecting about how to judge what sort of storytelling is unethical and why.
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persistent and inescapable storytelling is, even here at the meta-level. It is simply awesome indeed, this storytelling. To think of it, though, storytellers themselves do not in fact raise the above questions, which lie outside storytelling itself; these questions make no sense. Now, the I Ching (Classic of Changes) and religions are made of stories and poetic storybits, and poetry opens out to its sense, to the future of its open-out sense, by opening out to its readers. For example, Aesop154 tells of a tree accusing two men of ingratitude who complain how useless the tree is, while the tree is sheltering them from the scorching heat. Chuang Tzu would softly mumble, ―It‘s tall tree‘s silence that speaks with jittery chitchatting magpies.‖155 Now, it is up to us its readers to see what this Aesop-Chuang story means. For example, ―trees‖ sheltering us from life‘s scorching heat are often natural, free, unnoticed, and even complained to their faces. It takes a sensitive Aesop to tell us this amazing truth/fact, and takes a no less sensitive Chuang Tzu to nudge us to note that such sheltering trees are silent, silently accepting our ungrateful complaints, as they continue to shelter us, in silence. We had better then be sensitive enough to be grateful. Gratitude takes sensitivity to pull off. Our further reading could see/hear the trees‘ accusation in silence very soon turn lethally loud as many species die one by one; remember ―silent spring‖! Even frogs cease to be around, before we humans vanish. Gratitude is due us and nourishing to us and to everything around whose inter-survival depends on gratitude. In the end, we realize that gratitude is the message of sensitive Aesop and Chuang Tzu. These are two among many meanings we their readers could see, sensitively, thanks to evocation by their sensitivity. Such evocation of sensitivity of storytelling is what makes life worth living, and Socrates‘ urging of self-examination could amount to an urging of evocation of life-sensitivity. This volume tells stories that evoke as story-thinking. The I Ching and religions are divinatory-future-telling and ontological now-telling, and so they cannot answer ontological questions about storytelling itself (Why tell stories at all?) and normative ones (Are we not supposed to tell sometimes? Is there an unethical storytelling?). We cannot ask which fortune-telling is correct to a fortune-teller, or which religion is right to a religion. ―Histories have no word ‗history,‘ as no self allows self to ‗self‘‖ (Chang).156 As the self is silent on the self, so history-storytelling is silent on itself. ―Does all this point make nonsense out of storytelling, fortune-telling, religions, and history that tells of all this?‖ Well, it may well do, but if they are nonsense, life is, for life is storytelling, and fortune-telling is concerned with future life and religions concern with ultimate matters of life—in the mode of storytelling as history. Life is at the rock bottom of normative and meta-reflections and storytelling exhibits to expand life. So, storytelling cannot be subject to normative or meta-reflections storytelling initiates, enables, and exhibits. Now, ―Is such reflection in this section itself a story?‖ Yes, indeed. We have told a story about storytelling, this time in the mode of meta-storytelling. ―Is meta-storytelling itself a 154
Themes of Aesop‘s fables overflow our daily lives to overflow every age and every place. Aesop‘s fables produce an unending flow of books. Here are just two of them. Aesop: The Complete Fables, NY: Penguin Books, 1998. Simon Stern, ed., The Life and Fables of Æsop, NY: Taplinger Publishing Co., 1970. Still, what we said above may be the first to think about Aesop, as Deleuzi was about Lewis Carroll (The Logic of Sense), and Wu about Chuang Tzu (World Philosopher at Play, Butterfly as Companion). 155 Chuang Tzu 2/73, 75. ―長梧子 ch‘ang wu tzu, Mr. Tall Dryandra,‖ could be a homonym to ―長悟子, ch‘ang wu tzu, Mr. Long (deep) Enlightenment.‖ This is one more example of how one Chinese character can be a compact story mutely appealing to our understanding. See my Chinese Wisdom Alive: Vignettes of Life-Thinking, NY: Nova Science Publishers, 2010. 156 」 says 章學誠 in 文史通義校注，葉瑛校注，北京中華書局，2005 p. 93 (經解上).
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storytelling?‖ Most definitely yes; we often tell stories about stories that tell about other stories, and this is one of such occasions. ―But then, haven‘t we done meta-reflection on storytelling that we said we should not do?‖ Well, Yes we have, for we did meta-storytelling indeed, yet No, for we did it not in reflection different from storytelling but as storytelling, albeit of reflective sort. ―But then aren‘t all reflections a storytelling, or at least a meta-storytelling?‖ We must admit that it is the case. We must take reflection as itself a storytelling, not as not-story. This is the point of this section. Life with its reflection is all storytelling that makes all generations of human lives a history of the world. What then is ―history‖? How does it come about?
Chapter 2
HISTORY To understand history, we begin with ―translation.‖ Translation is our labor to transfer us from the past to the future. We are transferred by imitating and learning of our forefathers who wait for us in the future. People in the past appear in (the historical context of) continual critical dialogues with us latecomers, by continual reenactment. One sad story of history is that of politics full of dictatorial disasters precisely in the name of ―people,‖ or of democracy. History makes no mistakes, however, for it continually exposes all things, and also exposes mistakes, and what exposes mistakes makes no mistake; if it does make mistake, then what exposes mistakes in that ―exposer‖ would make no mistake. The Classic of Change, I Ching, captures this powerful nisus of history for us and our future. The I Ching was numberstructured. We are prompted to see how numbers, humanly understood, were in the history of China. Here we must go beyond human numbers to consider translation as such.
TRANSLATION, TRANSPOSITION, STORYTELLING In order to see how history takes place, we must consider translation as transposition from one situation to another. We call it ―description,‖ more prevalent than we suspect. Whenever we spot something noteworthy we describe it. Description is ubiquitous; we are hard put to find things non-descriptive, for things appear only by recognizing their names, to recite their stories. Philosophy, unlikely as it may seem, is full of descriptions. Phenomenology is a description of things that appear as they are. Metaphysics describes basic stuff behind things, cosmology describes the world, ontology describes what it is to be, critical philosophy describes how we know, logical analysis describes the coherence of our knowing, and the list goes on. Name packs description, and description tells stories. Description tells a story, philosophy thinks, and so thinking is storytelling. Thoughtfully to tell stories gathers things into a coherent whole to make sense1; to gather to make sense is logic to make whole.2 In other words, we think by/in storytelling; telling stories, we think to make whole. We repeat: to think is to tell various stories, to variously make each life of a 1 Martin Heidegger, among many thinkers, thrives on this simple but spectacular realization, called ―logos.‖ 2 To ―heal‖ is to something ―whole,‖ to make it all of a piece.
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thing whole as this thing, each in its own way. Name packs such storytelling that makes whole each existence told of. Life continues to tell various stories to make whole various lives and things; thus history is continually made. Stories of lives then translate into other different lives, other cultures, and other times—by transposing themselves in more stories of more sorts and more cultures. Translation makes history to go around in time and in space. What is ―translation,‖ then? It is understanding that is quite complex. Let us put it this way. We have two ways of understanding a school of thought, from outsider and from inside. Outside understanding can be historical or philosophical. China‘s historical understanding is often from a specific standpoint albeit unawares. Western philosophical understanding is taken as itself above criticism, high up in Platonic heaven of eternity. One who understands from inside, in contrast, lives in that idea-climate, in which to look at everything around us. The person is incarnated by that idea-air, to bring all things breathing alive. Ch‘en Ku-ying‘s external approach, typical of all objective historical studies of ideas, has definitive enunciations, as if the historian were smarter than the sages commented on; here is no internal going-through. Munro and Ch‘en stand off from China, observe it from above, from nowhere, to render definitive (if not final) pronouncements on an exotic (if not barbarous, for Munro) culture, ―China‖; they are quite confident that they know-it-all above all things, seeing all things Chinese from nowhere.3 ―Know-it-all‖ sadly ciphers ―know nothing‖ unawares. Moreover, to complicate the matter further, China has ―I commenting on Six Classics 我注六經‖ and ―Six Classics commenting on me 六經注我.‖ ―I commenting Six Classics‖ can understand the Classics from inside and outside in my ―commentaries 注‖; ―Six Classics commenting me‖ uses the Classics to express myself. They thus seem to be in contrast, but more is involved than this contrast. Inside understanding involves I-development, not Classics, while ―involvement‖ in ―I commenting‖ is concerned with ―Classics,‖ and ―Classics commenting‖ is concerned with ―me.‖ So ―I commenting‖ and ―Classics commenting‖ have both internal understanding and external one; the relation of commenting with understanding is then quite complex, and leads to somewhere unexpected. Let‘s take an example. Tai Chen 戴震 advertised his ―objective/external‖ commentary on the Mencius,4 but actually he intended it to passionately correct scholarship of his day, i.e., his commentary was his inside understanding; he made Mencius as commentary to him. But of course he would be the first to deny such underhanded arrogance, and would insist that in his commentary he vanished in Mencius, who vanished in him. Here the inside and the outside fused in one. To all such happening, later commentators, advertising as objectively/externally commenting on Tai‘s commentary on Mencius, continue to do likewise, to the extent that the external vanishes into the internal to finally inter-vanish into one. All this provokes even later thinkers to do likewise. Such is what China cherishes as its ―commentarial tradition,‖ never to 3 To the same Chuang Tzu, Ch‘en Ku-ying and Donald J. Munro adopt external approach; I do internal. See 陳鼓應著，老莊新論，臺北市五南圖書公司，民84. Donal J. Munro‘s ―Afterword‖ to Tsai Chih Chung, Zhuangzi Speaks, Princeton University Press, 1992, pp. 127-142. Kuang-ming Wu, The Butterfly as Companion, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990. 4 戴震 (1724-1777) 著，孟子字義疏證。 Ann-ping Chin and Mansfield Freeman, trs., Tai Chen on Mencius: Explorations in Words and Meaning, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990.
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be mocked. Western interpreters neglect all this historical commentarial complexity at their own peril, as with Richards, Fingarette, Graham, Yearley, Hansen, etc., in their external observation. We will have occasion later to go into them all. Such is the Chinese ―intellectual history,‖ the story-in-time of the Chinese mind. This sort of inter-internal-external understanding had already begun in ancient days as transcription and translation of ―history‖ in the Tso Chuan 左傳 that often raises the Western eyebrows of objective and external historiography-scholars as ―arbitrarily subjective.‖5 In short, ―translation‖ is idea-transposition complexly inter-transforming, never a straight wordfor-word transference. We are surprised to find translation full of trials and errors, and going through this process, this history, is part and parcel of ―translation.‖ In the end, we will realize that this going-through is translation that is what history is about. But this is to anticipate. Let us cite another specific example. Here is a story of my long letter to an avid translator of Lao Tzu‘s Tao Te Ching. Dear John: Lao Tzu is translator‘s nightmare; I see four difficulties here, plus fifth and sixth points that are two unwitting and strange breakthroughs. One, Lao Tzu is ―ambi-guous‖ ―going-around‖ among a word‘s several meanings. When Lao Tzu uses it to mean, other meanings are ready at hand, quite inter-involved. In mutual meaning-resonance, the sentence rings powerfully convincing, subtly ineffable. Translator must negotiate the difference between Chinese meaning-cluster and English one. ―Tao can Tao, not always-Tao‖ that begins the Tao Te Ching is typical. The second ―tao‖ has been an enigma. Its usual interpretation, ―tell, say, talk 言, 云, 談‖6 may have emerged later than sixth century BCE when Tao Te Ching was written. Fukunaga inexplicably took it as ―stipulate 規 定.‖ Cleary took it as ―guide 導‖ to make of the whole sentence as ―A way can be a guide, but not a fixed path,‖7 taking ―always 常‖ as ―fixed.‖ This rendering flattens the sentence to trivial sense, violating Lao Tzu‘s second mystery, ―always.‖ ―Always 常‖ you rendered as ―common‖ has three meaning-involvements. One, ―common‖ means ―well trodden‖ and ―well-known,‖ but, two, in Lao Tzu, what is well trodden is not well known among us. However, three, what is well trodden is also that with which we are familiar or know well as our daily routine—we just don‘t realize it. Now, how can we pack all these meaning-involvements into one neat English sentence as Lao Tzu did in his Chinese? Two, Lao Tzu is so paradoxical as to self-defeat. He declared, ―Tao as Tao is no Tao,‖ yet the entire Tao Te Ching that follows talks about ―Tao as Tao.‖ His point is precisely to tout in our face such self-contradiction. To say, ―Ways we know are not the Way,‖ is so clear it dispels Lao Tzu‘s mystery, and leaving it as unintelligible gibberish doesn‘t help. We are damned if we make it intelligible, and damned if we don‘t. We have the worst of both worlds. 5 Both Wu and Watson cite such examples. See K. Wu, ―Distinctive Features of Chinese Hermeneutics,‖ Taiwan Journal of East Asian Studies, June 2004, pp. 233-247. Burton Watson, tr., The Tso chuan: Selections from China‟s Oldest Narrative History, NY: Columbia University Press, 1989, p. 80, cf. p. 217, index on ―Confucius.‖. 6 Stephen Addiss and Stanley Lombardo rendered the whole sentence as ―TAO called TAO is not TAO‖ and appended their explanation on it that seems quite unconvincing (pp. xviii-xix) in their Tao Te Ching, Indianapolis, Hackett Publishing Company, 1993. 7 Fukunaga took ―stipulate‖ to mean ―捉える, 定義 grasp, define.‖ 福永光司著, 老子, 上, 東京朝日文庫, 1978, 1992, pp. 31-33. Thomas Cleary, The Essential Tao, NY: HarperCollins, 1992, p. 9.
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Three, Tao Te Ching has the world‘s most numerous translations, second only to the Christian Bible. Why do you want to add one more? Yours will be as one-sided as they, and add to the cacophonous confusion out there, unless yours somehow, by some impossibility, pulls off a perfect English mirror of the Chinese original ambiguity. Four, we must go another way, for, as Chuang Tzu said, ―The Way walks it and forms.‖8 We are, then, to explain and paraphrase, not straightly translate. Sadly, as jokes explained are jokes no more, Lao Tzu interpreted kills him. But if we don‘t, Lao Tzu is left unapproachable. Again, we are damned if we do, damned if we don‘t. All in all, one thing is clear; the translator‘s task is not to translate but to transpose. How? Well, we see two ways. One way is to do indirection, as Tao Te Ching itself has done, to purposely contradicts itself, and throw the enigma at the reader. He contradicts himself with a wink at us. Kierkegaard retold us Christ by way of using pseudonyms, evoking Subjectivity, jotting down parables and short stories in journals, all against straight objectivity and systematic exposition. Nietzsche9 and many others do likewise. Another way is to propose contemporary sentences and stories parallel to Lao Tzu‘s, as pungent and poignant as Lao Tzu‘s. It requires a Lao Tzu of today. Where can we find such a Lao Tzu poet? Well, the Taoists other than Lao Tzu, and those later than he, did pull off precisely such stunt. Chuang Tzu packed ―Tao as Tao is no Tao‖ into ―Great Tao declares not 大 道 不 稱‖ and then elaborated on it.10 Then the entire book of Chuang Tzu has three genres of story-writings we call the Inner, the Outer rewording, and the Miscellaneous, rewording the reworded. Lieh Tzu and Huai Nan Tzu the other Taoists ―translated‖ Lao Tzu by stories transposing Lao Tzu. Huai Nan Tzu‘s story of ―Uncle Fort losing a horse 塞 翁 失 馬,‖ presents and illuminates Lao Tzu‘s (58) ―O, woe where weal leans! O, weal where woe lurks! 禍 兮 福 之 所 倚, 福 兮 禍 之 所 伏.‖ Similarly, Hermann Hesse wrote a novel, Siddhartha (1922), a new story to convey to us today ancient Buddha‘s timeless story; Leonard Bernstein produced a musical, ―West Side Story‖ in 1957, to deliver us today Shakespeare‘s unbearable poignancy in ―Romeo and Juliet‖ performed in 1594-1595 and published in 1597. Thus, clearly, the translator‘s task cannot be straight word-for-word transfer; it must be a sensitive transposition of the felt sense, intention, and various implications involved in the original. For this purpose, storytelling is an indispensable vehicle age after age, generation after generation, without ceasing. Five, now, here is a bombshell that smashes all above four hesitations, to redeem them all. Here it is. Lao Tzu himself says, ―Tao tao-able is no common constant Tao,‖ and then goes on to present all tao-ables—toward an exercise in self-wiping futility. Doesn‘t this very futility show how un-tao-able the Tao is, thereby negatively presents the common constant Tao? How beautiful this self-defeating performance is in all its roundabout way, its ambiguity! Isn‘t it ―wu-wei, no-do‖ and no not do 無為而無不為, neither do nor not-do in effective action all around! And isn‘t this ―all around‖ another way of putting ―ambi-guity,‖ driving 8 Chuang Tzu, 2/33. Line 112 in my Butterfly, op. cit., p. 141. 9 Besides his usual volumes, see Søren Kierkegaard Papers and Journals: A Selection, translated, etc., by Alastair Hannay, London: Penguin Books, 1996, and Parables of Kierkegaard, ed. Thomas C. Oden, Princeton University Press, 1978. Cf. A Nietzsche Reader, selected, etc., by R. J. Hollingdale, Penguin Books, 1977. Both volumes are packed with aphorisms and quotables. 10 Chuang Tzu 2/68f. Lines 183f, op. cit., p. 146.
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around all over, if not fooling around,11 to intimate? ―Have gun, will travel‖ used to describe the lifestyle of ―the wild, wild West.‖ Isn‘t this ―no-do driving-around‖ in ambiguity our only almighty ―gun‖ with which to travel the wild, wild lifeworld? It is how such a no-do and no not-do fares in translation of the untranslatable. Can‘t we, shouldn‘t we, follow this ―way‖ by laboring on ―an accurate rendering of the original‖ and fail? Irresponsible muddled mis-translations will not do in this wink at circuitous ambi-guity; we must strive, the best we can, at an ―accurate‖ rendering, and then confess to our failures. Can‘t our struggled translation, succeeding in one-sided clarity, likewise present in all its clarity at least one tao-able Tao, another not-Tao, to miss the Tao, to negatively intimate the common constant Tao? If we must tell a story and not directly translate, we must tell a story that does not tell, by way of straightly struggling clumsy telling. Isn‘t a clear telling—translating—of not-clear truth, itself one clumsy way of telling? Isn‘t the Way tacitly present here, with a wink, unsuspected, unawares, in our clear one-sided translation, which is a clumsy one after all? Six, here is another bombshell. Someone may wonder why we bother to translate at all. Well, to ―translate‖ means to ―transfer,‖12 and so translating an ancient story transfers it to our world today. Translating an ancient story re-describes it, thereby transposes it to us here now. Why do we do so? Because transposition of a story enables us to learn from it, act it out, thereby relive it our own way in our daily lives. We are then transformed by the great ancient. All this operation is an historical reenactment that is quite significant. How is it so? The Zen master kicks words away, and yet he is often most wordy with the koans handed down from the past. He kicks away words because he is intent on doing, not talking, and yet he is quite wordy because he word-does word-kicking. He does history, telling stories to reenact. To reenact the past is to act it out, act it forward in our lives our way, to live a new life inspired, breathed-in, by it.13 Space can repeat; ―here and there, funny things are everywhere,‖ said Dr. Seuss. Time cannot repeat, but can and does return rhymed, in writing and reading. Each time I write and read, the unique moments come back uniquely in me, rhymed to these moments. Writing keeps memories; reading visits and revives them. We say that ―history rhymes‖ in literature to make Chinese culture. I write/read history to live my ―same different‖ life here now. Their history rhymes forward into my future life. Thus Thucydides, the great ancient Greek historian, says,14
11 Thus, Chuang Tzu is frivolous when profound, profound when frivolous, as Lin Yutang said, though he did not say why. We supply one reason here. 12 Colossians 1:13, Hebrews 11:5. NRSV and Moffatt say ―transfer, take,‖ Phillips says ―reestablish, promote,‖ Revised English Bible says ―bring us into, take up to.‖ These are all significant renderings. 13 Despite his insight that history is a re-enactment, Collingwood shrank from such strange thought of unstable ―rhyming‖ and got stuck in reenactment as a mechanical repetition of thought—in political constitution, in mathematics. The Republican constitution of Rome he cited is the same then as it is now, in our mind. The Pythagorean Theorem in Pythagoras‘ mind then is same as the Theorem in our minds here now. See R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, Oxford, 1946, 1993, pp. 217-218. Such a mechanical repetition loses all the vitality of history pulsating/rhyming, reflecting/mirroring, in our collective life in time. 14 The History of the Peloponnesian War (431-413 BCE), Book 1, Section 22. Thucydides was defeated in the War he conducted. In exile as its punishment, he wisely wrote this magnum opus on the War. Later (85 BCE), his punishment paralleled Ssu-ma Ch‘ien 司馬遷 who wrote his magnum opus, ―Historical Records 史記,‖ and set a pattern for later historians. So, history rhymes/reflects itself even among the historians. Interrhyming/reflecting in time also enables their historical ―re-enactment.‖ Still, all this is our latecomers‘ aftervision; the two historians must not have thought so.
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Time goes to inter-resemble, inter-rhyming, inter-reflecting, and so knowing our past aids us to interpret our future, to know ourselves better, to plan our future better, and to live our life better and more confident. It is thus that reading a biography heals us,15 and keeping a journal makes an autobiography that also heals, to wit, makes us whole, integrated. Therefore, ―graphotherapy‖—reading and writing therapy—is an important therapeutic strategy, for to read life and write life is to shape life and put it together, whole. Now, the importance of writing/reading life as life-shaping goes beyond personal living. Thurlow said that myth is a tale of the supernatural, to reveal the divine in terms of this life, describing other-worldly matters in this-worldly concepts.16 Myth is the Beyond-us told for our understanding here now. Why do we bother to do so? We do so in order for life here now to partake in the Beyond, in what is beyond in the future. That is why the Christian myths, say, are constantly retold every Sunday. We usually say the primitive people reenact the cosmic events in rituals, and explain their meanings by telling myths. We do not realize that the primitive people perform rituals and tell myths for us today to pattern our lives after theirs, and that to tell in this context is already to do. We with them make myths to enact rituals; no, our mythmaking is itself ritual-enacting. To tell and recite is to act; we act-telling (ritual) and tell-acting (mythmaking). Performing acting-telling, we shape the world into a ―cosmos,‖ an all-beautiful orderly whole, to integrate and renew life. Thus to translate an ancient story is to re-describe it to transpose it here now, so as for us to imitate it (not repeat it), learn from it, and relive it in our lives in our own ways, refreshened and invigorated in the primal vitality of the ancient story. Here to learn is to imitate to reenact; that is what ritual performance is all about, i.e., reenacted in mythmaking, in storytelling our way. Translation of stories, again and again, is history-making and historyreading that is a sacred performance of mythical life-ritual, powerful, rejuvenating us and our lifeworld. The key here is to imitate to learn; to imitate is to learn and follow an example—in action, in life.17 ―Monkey see, monkey do‖—children are experts in learning by imitating, and Mencius assures us that the Great Ones lose no heart of their own baby (4B12) who constantly imitates and learns. Learning does not prepare for life; learning is life itself. They say that every portion of Shakespeare can be traced to his predecessors; it is imitation that made Shakespeare what he is, with the greatness all his own. Furthermore, imitation is no repetition. Japan imitates other cultures differently from the way USA imitates. No single imitation is identical with any other; each subtly differs from all others, including the original that appears to each distinct imitator. No two students grow alike under the same teacher, nor do they achieve alike. Imitation implies some subtle 15 Reading Eisenhower American Hero: The Historical Record of His Life (American Heritage Publishing Co., 1969) stirs our hearts. Four stories of Jesus‘ life are bequeathed to us in the New Testament, and there has been endless outpouring of the ―life of Jesus‖ since then. 16 Thus begins Gilbert Thurlow, Biblical Myths and Mysteries, NY: Crown Publishers, 1974. 17 A well-known classic in this context is Thomas à Kempis‘ (1380-1471) Imitatio Christi that is no imitation.
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incongruity from the original.18 It is because imitation is a controlled creation—controlled both by the original (so it is an imitation) and by the imitator (so it is a creation). Ironically, the imitator may have to deny that his imitation is his. In imitating A, A appears in the imitator, not the imitator appears, as praising A promotes A, not the one who praises.19 An openly admitted imitation, as ―mine,‖ is a contradiction; or perhaps, once admitted, it is no longer imitation but learning, for all learning begins with silent imitation to end in creation that is by definition beyond the original. No wonder, in his passionate exhortation to learning with which he began his writings, Hsün Tzu 荀 子 says, ―The blue issues from indigo and is bluer than indigo‖—bluer, purer, and more brilliant than the original indigo. A learner goes as the teacher points to, and soon goes beyond the teacher whom she leaves behind. Thus the true teacher is a dead one, to wit, a dated one.20 Teacher is a history, a story to start, to take off into our own stories. This is as it should be. Imitation staying imitation stunts originality; it is learning stunted, stopped. Imitation must be ingenious and creative to be enjoyable. All comedians and cartoonists in high creative IQs are imitators openly touted to evoke laughs, and great painters, calligraphers, and storytellers (novelists, journalists) imitate the situation to reveal and evoke learning. Exact repetition is a fiction cranked out of machines; no human is capable of ―imitating‖ machine. To ―imitate nature (天 倣)‖ is unintelligible unless it means ―nature let go of (天 放).‖21 But how could we imitate nature, how could we let nature go, and how could ―imitating‖ be ―letting go‖ when it comes to imitating nature? Aren‘t we duplicating nonsense with nonsense? Well, the impossibility disappears if we note that we have in us an urge to imitate what is there in nature, in us or outside, and to satisfy that urge, we let go of nature, both within us and without. This is the origin of art as imitation,22 children‘s especialty—―monkey see, monkey do,‖ and monkeys are everywhere, for ―here and there, funny things are everywhere,‖ as Dr. Seuss wisely said for kids. We are profound when we return to this kids‘ primal urge. Exposition, exegesis, history, they are all imitations of actuality. Phenomenology is descriptive metaphysics, a re-description as they appear; it is an imitation of the nature of things. Each description differs from every other, uniquely revealing the world. Creation imitates as imitation creates. We have just described and traced imitation, and we feel good; to live is to imitate, creatively. All this human creation-imitation constitutes a continuous story. Now, here is a storytelling about life-stories of imitation description in ―history.‖ What is history? In a way, 18 So says Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, 2001, VII: 677. 19 In In Praise of What Persists (NY: Harper and Row, 1983), its ―editor‖ Stephen Berg disappears. 20 Jesus began his ministry at John the Baptist, who pointed his disciples to Jesus and in joy yielded them all to Jesus. No wonder, Jesus said John was the greatest among men. Jesus died and rose for us, and vanished, leaving us to do the Acts of the Apostles. 21 I considered this play on words, a pseudo-homonym, from a different perspective in ―Learning as a Master from a Master: ‗Chuang Tzu‘ in University General Education,‖ Journal of Humanities East/West, December 1998, p. 178. 22 Aristotle is the first person to claim art as imitation, but he is not responsible for this insight in this context in this manner. For a magisterial albeit wordy study of Aristotle on art, see S. H. Butcher, Aristotle‟s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art with a Critical Text and Translation of The Poetics (1894, 1897, 1911), Fourth Edition, NY: Dover Publications, 1951, pp. 116, 122, 150, 198, et passim. Jones saw how rhythm relates to imitation and praxis, but he is more provocative and controversial than elucidating, much less enlightening (John Jones, On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy, Oxford University Press, 1962, 1968).
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we have been rehearsing history, reshaping history, by telling stories about history, for history is storytelling in human time. To this thrilling query we turn, where our ―forefathers‖ appear.
OUR FOREFATHERS What is history? Our expressions of it tell us a strange paradox. On the one hand, as the phrases ―before the common era‖ and Chinese ―i ch‟ien 以前‖ say, the past is before us, in front of us. On the other hand, the past is what is already passed-and-gone, ―kuo ch‘ü 過去,‖ what is gone-on, ―i wang 以往.‖ As what is passed away, the past is dead, nowhere; as what is before us, the past continues to lead us on into the future, what-is-to-come. Combined both points above, history amounts to being our ―forefathers,‖ our past (―father‖) in front of us (―fore-‖), showing us what would happen if we do A, not B or C. The true teacher is a dead one. As ―dead,‖ the past does not obstruct our prospective vision of the future. We can freely decide to act in whatever way we wish, for the past is dead, and yet history is a ―teacher‖ to admonish us not to act in a certain way. Socrates‘ Daimon that admonished him must have been the daimonic power of history. Thus the past, the history, has a strange power over us at present. The past does not control us, yet we are strangely drawn to it by our own adoration and reverence to it. The past at the back leads us on in front by attraction, not by oppressive control. History is an excitement without obstruction. An example at hand—no need to go to ancient Sisyphus yet—shows how exciting history is. We all have our forefathers who have passed on. Recently my brother Jung-ming brought our father‘s ashes from Taiwan to rest with our mother in Long Island. Here is what I confessed to everyone in our family on that glorious day of celebrative memorial. Thanks to Uncle Jung-ming and Auntie Norma‘s historic struggles of love, we all see today this momentous Joy of A-kong joined with A-má in the USA. To understand this Joy, we must gaze at our Lord Jesus Christ‘s Resurrection from the dead. Three things show the Joy through the young man: (a) Jesus is going ahead of us to (b) Galilee where he made us (c) the children of God‘s family. (a) The dazzlingly white young man23 told us that ―He is going ahead of‖ us with our Akong and A-má (Grandpa and Grandma), who want us to go see them. They are ahead of us in time! Today begins tomorrows; every today we die into new tomorrow. (b) Today is our empty tomb showing that they are ahead in the Galilee of tomorrow. Its ―linen cloths‖ are what ―wrap‖ our today‘s ―body‖ of plans, pleasures and sorrows, to be left with A-kong and A-má‘s precious ashes, all testifying to tomorrow, and another fresh tomorrow. (c) Galilee is where we are forever the children of God and of our A-kong and A-má. Kids are fresh, living for tomorrows. We are kids to A-kong and A-má who are with Jesus 23 The person, who brings us from past Jesus we remember to the resurrected Christ ahead of us, is a ―young man.‖ The One who translates our life to the future, where our forefathers are waiting for us, is forever ―young‖ because the future is young. That Young Man is Jesus himself resurrected, and our A-kong and A-má are with Him.
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ahead of us, waiting for us as we live today, one at a time, for the Galilee of tomorrows with A-kong and A-má, with Jesus. That is why we are so glad here today hugging A-kong and A-má‘s ―linen cloths,‖ testifying to the joy of tomorrows. All these words are our conviction, expressing my actual daily experience. I am sure they are of yours also.
A-kong and A-má our grandparents, who have passed on, beckon to us to pull us ahead toward tomorrow. Their ―linen cloths‖ of stories that wrap them in our remembrances do so. Those linen cloths are our historic dawn today toward our tomorrow. To make a long story short, in Sisyphus‘ dark pit, at the bottom of the hill, is our dawn with Sisyphus‘. The childhood dawn in life everyday—especially the dawn of every today— is a given, a historical boulder. We would always gladly carry it with us as long as we always push the boulder as the day grows, today, for the boulder is ―us‖ given us by our A-kong and A-má. The rest is history, unending. Thus to live along in history enriches the history endlessly. How could the story of our history be endless? One reason is that the very telling of the story of history is itself history, as a telling of history-storytelling makes its own story. Unlike Gödel who said that any system—a stand-together of ideas—is incomplete, provable only by other system(s), no problem we have here to show that the telling of history is history itself, for we are proved by those beyond-us, our A-kong and A-má. Gödel is wrong (history self-proves) because he is right (we are proved by forefathers). Three explanations can be given of above. One, the dawn is nothing and everything; it is self-creative. Storytelling describes the dawn of things. It invokes, via description, to establish the Thou (as Buber proposed) of things, not flatly describing them to destroy the Thou into an It (as Marcel cautioned). Two, story is both coherent and open, ready to go on out in any direction, ready to take in anything described as a part of the story, and anytime a story is told, things whatever gather to come out coherent and meaningful. Three, painting snow-shadows paints snow un-paintable; story paints things, and their milieu shows. We cannot point at a milieu in which we point at things. Story induces a milieu by describing things that are in the milieu yet not the milieu. Story describes things that then naturally manifest their milieu; thing-description indirectly creates milieu. ―Story‖ is thus a portmanteau word-world to mirror a protean milieu-world, thereby the lifeworld; mirroring is indirection of storytelling. All three points indicate that storytelling is a loose coherence; we tell story to make some sense (coherence) out of whatever things that come, often senselessly, and yet the story-sense we make is flexible (loose), a coarse-meshed net ready to change to accommodate whatever changes that come. How could insane Neroes and Hitlers make history? But that is what they do; that is the only ―sense‖ they make. Gödel was correct in the spatial things-standingtogether, systems; his theorem works in the world of time, history in storytelling, only indirectly, one story linking to another, each changing into and by the other. This is because the sort of system he had in mind stays put and does not change, while story-in-time, history, is a system on the go that keeps changing. As time goes, our history gets more things in, and its perspective on things and on itself keeps evolving, changing, turning wider. The later history is the same as and differs from the previous one.
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History is the ―same different system,‖ which is possible only in time. Because the previous history and the later history are the same history, the later history knows enough about the previous one to judge it; because they differ, the later one has a different wider perspective with which to judge the previous one. At the same time, the pre-vious history is ever before (以前, 前世, as the Chinese say) the later one for it to learn from. We learn from our ―forefathers,‖ who serve as our pristine vision and direction, if not our ideal to follow, yet attended with our loving modifications with our hindsight wisdom. After all, Charlie the young lad and Charlie the grown-up are a ―same different person,‖ and so he can correct himself. At the same time, ―Great Ones lose no baby heart of theirs‖ (Mencius); all religions teach us to learn from the child in us and in front of us. All religions say the child is our Beyond. By ever accommodating those events without rhyme or reason, wherever they come from, storytelling weave them into a coherent rhyme called ―history.‖ Thrillingly, we the storytellers and story-hearers become part of this rhyme, this history. We can show this point by two themes, how we together identify a historical personage, and how we continue history by reenactment. We first go to our identification of a historical person. We would be surprised to find that in history, identifying a person amounts to identifying an idea, or idea-trend, or ideology as it comes out and matures, that is, history of a person is a history of ideas. Ideas are alive in history and its persons.
HISTORY OF IDEAS AND STORYTELLING Of course, there are stories and there are stories. Wrong stories of ―war on terrorism‖ can be cured only by right stories of ―compassionate conservatism‖ of ―war on poverty.‖ Stories can be corrected by telling more and different sorts of stories. An example—a story—of this telling of different stories is the task of history of ideas, and history of ideas amounts to history of persons who incarnate these ideas. Studying these ideas amounts to dialoguing with persons incarnating these ideas, and dialoguing with the person is important, not (just) ―finding the person as he is.‖ We usually think that to study history is to ascertain a ―real thinker,‖ ―a past thinker exactly as he was in his own historical setting‖ by ―textual criticism,‖ and so on. My professor, Dr. John Wild, rejects this approach—―antiquarian‖ storytelling—for ―living dialogue . . . with the past in (our) own point of view,‖ another sort of storytelling. Wild says that the ―real Plato‖ is nowhere after he is gone. Each Plato reconstructed later is different from all others and we vainly fight for one against all others. Our fight mistakenly takes Plato as ―an isolated individual,‖ not ―a communicating agent who spoke to many persons . . . , stirring them to living dialogue . . . throughout history to further reflections and questions. (We must not) make an arbitrary cleavage between all this and the real Plato . . . who initiate(d) this ever expanding flow of thought and meaning . . .‖ To an objection that ―other men, not Plato, carried it on,‖ Wild replies that ―dialogue is precisely a fusion—a confusion—of the two. . . . a living tissue (that) belongs to both of us. . . The real Plato, in his essential being, is to be found precisely in the ongoing history of
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Platonic criticism and commentary,‖ and Platonic criticism and commentary are dialogues with Plato. Plato is unintelligible without these later critics as they are without him. ―Objective‖ investigation of the meaning of Plato as if it were facts about Plato (dates/places of birth/death) neglects its own historicity, with new horizons of interests/questions. To try to be ―objective‖ about Plato reduces him to an object, bypassing his subjectivity. Criticism of the text and factual study of its time prepare Plato studies; they are not their center/goal. 24 To bring out Wild‘s contention and substantiate him, here is a proposal,25 to see an individual as a story or a series of stories. Two stories about an individual would help us understand this proposal: a ―tree‖ as different showings-to-beholders, and a ―child‖ as a constantly growing/changing dynamics. Story One: When two persons, A and B, look at a tree and talk about it, ―this tree‖ is the tree-as-shown-to-A in contrast to the tree-as-shown-to-B. Both A and B recognize these showings, in all their differences, as veritably ―the same real tree,‖ and yet in fact there exists no ―real tree‖ separate from these showings. Their common observation of and discussion on ―this tree‖ is impossible otherwise. At the same time, both persons also realize that these showings, for all their differences, are sufficiently coherent and distinctive as to make ―this tree,‖ not ―that tree.‖ This tree is the same-different tree, for ―to be is to be perceived.‖ Story Two: A child is a newborn, a three year old, a teenager, and a husband, a father, and then a grandfather, all of these different persons. He still remains, however, this same dear child to his parents and this same dear friend to his friends who know him through his lifechanges. ―This real he‖ is nowhere to his friends apart from these different persons at different times. There is no ―real child‖ to his parents apart from all these different growth stages. This person is a same-different person. Combining these two stories, we now realize that ―Confucius‖ is the record of his conversations by his disciples called The Analects of Confucius, and Chu Hsi‘s impressions of Confucius that differ from those of Wang Yang-ming and many others in the history of Chinese thought. ―Confucius‖ is none other than (Story One) what appears, and how ―he‖ appears, throughout the ages, (Story Two) growing and changing as ―our Confucius,‖ as (One and Two) we ourselves in later ages grow and change with him.26 In all these changes we can distinctly recognize Confucius as ―Confucius,‖ not any other person such as Socrates. In all this, further, the distortions or misunderstandings are so labeled because of wide (not just slight) deviations from a broad (not narrow) consensus among later historical impressions of ―Confucius,‖ including the consensus on the texts. Furthermore, a defense of a new view is conducted by appealing to the same broad consensus on subsequent impressions of Confucius throughout history. It is thus that storytelling of history is refined and corrected by more and different storytelling. As part of Confucius, his ideas grow and shift as he does, with later interpretations of those ideas of his.
24 Sydney and Beatrice Rome, eds, Philosophical Interrogations, NY: Harper Torchbook, 1964, pp. 121-123. 25 This proposal continues my reflection on ―correspondence‖ and ―objectivity‖ in On Metaphoring: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 2001, pp. 84-89. 26 Michael Nylan & Thomas Wilson catalogue many images of ―Confucius‖ in Lives of Confucius, Doubleday, 2010. Raynmond Dawson also sees Confucius‘ images as ―vague and shadowy‖ (Confucius, Oxford University Press, 1981). It is an interesting chase after a will-o‘-the-wisp, unless we have other purposes in mind, as here.
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Mind you, we the latecomers are an integral part of this process. Confucius thus shaped the whole China, as Wing-tsit Chan correctly said.27
HISTORY THE HUMAN DRAMA OF REENACTMENT History is a story, humanly lived, ever continuous. Its dramatic significance is never more illuminated than by a single word of Collingwood, ―re-enactment.‖ History is the human drama of reenacted understanding. Sadly, however, his belabored explication of this notion risks distortion. Eager to show how the dead past can and does reappear now, he appealed to our mental capture of Rome‘s Republican Constitution and Pythagorean theorem, exactly as ancient Romans and Pythagoras entertained them in their minds.28 Here Collingwood committed an overkill to collapse human reenactment into repetition, cognitively legal-logical and mathematical. We must nudge him to be wary; reenactment is no repetition. We must now explain how they differ. Argument goes in self-replication that describes how we come to understand to rehearse a complex logical argument; this process of subjective growth in understanding and rehearsing belongs to history.29 Still, logical argument as such objectively remains unchanged out there, ready to repeat itself indifferently in many minds across time and space. In contrast, interpersonal understanding goes by reenactment, subject-subject coresonance. History is a river whose water of each moment, one experience, differs from the water of any other experience. Co-resonance of human experiences, diverse, interrelated, is a peculiar river that flows on self-recursively.30 Experiences inter-reflect, co-resound (影 響) ―breath to breath‖ (息 息 相 關), birthing unceasing (生生不息), day after day ever novel (日日新又日新), to reenact into ―history.‖31 Two examples may help to concretize the matter. My reading of fatherhood logically infers what fatherly love is, but I perceive what it really means as I hold my own baby in my arms. I now say, ―Aha, this is fatherly love. I now understand how my dad loves me,‖ yet I know my love to my baby is not my father‘s love of me; they differ in character, in circumstances. Their interaction of similarity and difference makes the history of fatherhood to tell its story deep in our souls. Again, I go visit my dear friend to weep with him whose wife has just been declared to live for six more months. I weep because he is my dear friend, and in my love of my wife I do understand his sorrow in his deep love of his wife. I know I do not love his wife and his
27
Wing-tsit Chan said so in A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, Princeton University Press, 1963, p. 14. 28 Collingwood, Idea of History, op. cit., pp. 217-218. 29 We have a ―history‖ of the development of logic and mathematics, to be sure, but it is a story different from the one we are considering. The history of logic-development is a part of human history, and its consideration should be reserved until we have ascertained the nature of history itself as dramatic reenactment, not automatic repetition. We will consider repetition in science at the end of this section. 30 That the world is a river is a familiar perception of ancient Heraclitus and Aristotle (Metaph. 987a32, Meteor. 357b30) and ancient Chinese Confucius and Mencius. Heraclitus said that one cannot step into the same river twice, and the river itself is ―change‖ produced by strife (The Pre-Socratics, ed. Alexander P. D. Mourelatos, Anchor Books, 1974, pp. 189-213 [G.S. Kirk and W.K.C. Guthrie]). Confucius and Mencius stood in awe at the riverbank (Analects 9/17, Mencius 4A18). 31 These Chinese phrases are cited because Chinese people are deeply history-conscious.
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spousal love differs from mine. My weeping historically reenacts experiences; history is human drama of reenactment, not bland logical self-repetition. China is historical in reenactment. Three Confucian examples suffice. One is Confucius‘ three sighs that begin his Analects. He sighs, ―Oh isn‘t it rather pleasant to learn and practice it time and again!‖ Learning follows the teacher to grow beyond him in daily practice. Isn‘t this process an historical reenactment so pleasant? Then he sighs, ―Oh isn‘t it rather delightful that classmates come from afar (to interlearn)?‖ Friends give-and-take in inter-sympathetic differences. Confucius finally sighs, ―Oh isn‘t it rather princely of a person whom people ignore, and never sours?‖ Doesn‘t Confucius personally reenact his own princely composure as a climax of learning from teacher and friends? The entire Analects go on in such historical reenactment. Two, later Mencius (2B13) yearned impatiently after the reappearance of legendary princely rulers such as T‘ang and Wen, for the customary 500 year cycle for the return of princely rulers had long been reached and gone. Still, he could not have imagined that the new emerging princely rulers to be identical with rulers T‘ang and Wen. Three, Mencius (1A7) urged Duke Hsüan‘s heart unable to bear the sight of a bull, in mortal jitters being dragged to a sacrificial slaughter, to apply to people; the unbearable heart at the non-human bull is reenacted into the unbearable heart at the human. History is a threefold verb; it reenacts, rhymes, and develops. The Duke‘s act to a bull reenacts it on people. His-act-to-a-bull rhymes with his-act-to-people, to develop princely rulership, to become historic. In contrast, science treasures exact repeatability of its discovery as its proof and confirmation. Logic allows no deviation from the strictly prescribed steps. Still, logical repetition has its place in the historical dynamics of reenactment. Geometrical proof is historical performance that goes from this point to the next; the necessity of 7+5=12 is not analytical, for ―12‖ cannot obtain by analyzing, ―7,‖ ―+,‖ ―5,‖ and ―=,‖ but by adding 7 to 5, historically.32 Kuhn also describes ―scientific revolution in paradigm shift,‖33 history in scientific reenactment. It is time to take stock. All the above Chinese examples have been paradigms rekindled again and again in the souls of subsequent generations—till today. No less exciting is the history of scientific revolution rehearsed by Kuhn, whose slender volume is justly hailed as one of ―The Hundred Most influential Books Since the Second world War‖ by The Times Literary Supplement.34
32 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976, pp. 384-286. See my On Chinese Body Thinking, Leiden: Brill, 1997, pp. 300-302. The same historical-bodily performance is seen in the synthetic a priori calculation of 7+5=12 in Kant‘s Critique of Pure Reason, B15-17, as I explained in History, Thinking, and Literature in Chinese Philosophy, Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1991, pp. 1617. 33 Newton‘s absolute space/time gave way to Einstein‘s relativistic warps in time, and then to self-recursive superstring theory and beyond. On today‘s physics, see Michio Kaku‘s popular Hyperspace, Oxford University Press and NY: Doubleday, 1994. The book adopts a fashionable title ―hyperspace,‖ perhaps showing the science as spatial, as if to say that our going-beyond in ―hyper-― is not historical. We have no ―physics of history‖ but a history of physics, as here, showing that history goes beyond physics. 34 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Third Edition, The University of Chicago Press, 1996. The quotation from The Times Literary Supplement appears in its back cover. We won‘t be surprised if someone claims that the root cause of our continuing attraction to the notion of ―evolution‖ lies here; evolution is reenactment marching on in history.
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―Rekindling‖ and ―excitement‖ here are reenactments that make history. History is our collective melodious performance of the life-music of human nature, each life-performance of which differs from all others.35 History is the human drama of rhymed reenactment, never bland self-identical replication, although reenactment includes repetition as its part, as rhythm and rhyme. Rhythmic rhyme composes ―reason‖ in logical thinking. Reenactment is presented in one life-story after another—in history, as history. To tell countless stories of human experiences is itself to relive and reenact them to continue history. We live to tell stories of life-experiences, to reenact them to relive them, to perform and create an exciting music of history, and thereby to become history. The music of history is humanly, socio-culturally orchestrated in ―politics.‖ Human history is typified by political history. Thus we cannot help but at least peep into the history of politics.
HISTORY OF POLITICS Mind you. The purpose of this section is not to present an exhaustive scholarly treatise on political theory but to tell stories of politics to tell of the power of storytelling, its cash value in communal living. By its nature, this section is an impressionistic overview, a rough story, of the sad stories of human politics. It is likewise with all other sections on all other themes of life. Stories are told of them, to tell stories of storytelling, not of those themes told of. Let us take a look at a concrete story of mankind, as to how powerfully storytelling governs the world. One of humanity‘s most complex and depressing stories is that of politics, and no politics is without an ideology, that is adherence to a myth, a story. Politics as government entails two parties, ruler and ruled, and stories weave their interactions, wrapped in stories called ―ideologies‖ that govern the community‘s constitution, convention, and common sense. Why do we need governance in the first place? Answering this question rehearses familiar stories of human nature, in China and the West. China appeals to natal ―family‖ ruled by the father with parental care and guidance. Rulership must be insistently, consistently fatherly, caring for all family members of the state, especially the injured and the helpless, and such parental care originates in the human heart that cannot bear people suffering. So, the inherent necessity of political governance originates in our human nature of family tenderness, to dictate how government should proceed. World politics is thus home economics of all under heaven. This is politics 政 rightly 正 handling ㄆ res publica, affairs of the public realm. Departing from this norm of humane natural law of politics departs from orderly cultivation of the human world, and everyone is destroyed, the ruler with the ruled, in bloody revolution after revolution.36 Sadly, the ideal of ―(all) under heaven, one family 天下一家‖ all too soon turns into the desire, ―(my) family (over) all under heaven 家天下‖; attention now shifts to how the ruler can effectively govern to effectively benefit the ruler alone. ―Family politics‖ now turned a 35 All religions have musical scores for humanity to reenact and to play repeatedly, but perhaps Buddha‘s is the clearest and best known—―birth, senescence, sickness, and death.‖ 36 Confucian political ideals have just been quickly rehearsed. Taoist revolts are unintelligible without this common understanding of Chinese politics.
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clever political campaign to dupe people into blindly obeying him as their ―father,‖ no matter what.37 As a result, devastating dictatorship dominates Chinese history. In the West, Plato also had a natural necessity of politics with the three parts that constitute a person, the rational governing the voluntary and the nutritive; ―body politic‖ is and is to be similarly constituted by rational ruler, military guardians, and productive farmers and sustaining artisans. Public ―health‖-under-reason was ―justice‖; administering public justice is healthy politics.38 Sadly, the ―rational necessity‖ of the ruler soon turned into ruler‘s rationalization to devise to benefit him alone, and propaganda tricked his people into following his dictates, as the Machiavellian prince. Disasters ensued.39 Interestingly, the above quick survey shows that all dictators had to persuade their governed populace; government depends on the governed to work. An unabashed promoter of rulership if not dictatorship, Hobbes, placed its origin in people who consent to yield part of their individual sovereignty to their common ruler.40 The public monster ―Leviathan‖ is people‘s creation, and an absolute monarchy is ironically based on democratic principle. All politics is people-supreme. Naturally democracy flourishes, yet ―people government‖ is a contradiction of the ruled as the ruler. So Plato condemned democracy as mob-rule of chaotic desires. No wonder, odd as it may sound, John Locke‘s classical rationale for democracy has to continue the rulerruled framework, on the then common idea that our Ruler is God in natural law that includes reason, to equally rule people. Human ruler is viceroy of Supreme Ruler, heaven and nature.41 Oddly, democracy is rationalized by the divine right of kings, God and natural reason. Interestingly, China parallels Locke by taking people to be under ―Father Heaven‖ whose viceroy is the ruler the ―Son of Heaven‖ to administer the heavenly responsibility of nurturing, protecting, and caring for people the Heaven‘s children 天民. The state is centered in the ruler who is responsible for people‘s welfare, as the family is centered in the father who is responsible for children‘s welfare. God and nature are one as ―Heaven.‖ What do we say to all this? Democracy literally means people-power, not people-rule, for the people means the ruled (Plato42). God and Heaven are invisible, so natural reason must be that under which people are to be ruled. Concretely, Americans are under the law and statutes. Their ruler the president is chosen by the people by the principle of—what? It must be ―by natural reason,‖ which does not come naturally,43 but must be taught. Hobbes‘ people prudently give up some of their sovereignty to be ruled under a ruler, but their prudence must come from education. 37 Arthur Waley has a handy description of the sad affairs in Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China (1939), Stanford University Press, 1982, pp. 151-196. 38 See the Republic 434d-445b. Francis MacDonald Cornford‘s translation is perhaps the clearest (Oxford University Press, 1941, pp. 129-144). 39 Why violent disharmony erupts against rational natural necessity of political harmony belongs to the mystery called ―akrasia.‖ Violence is everywhere, interpersonally (violence) and individually (misfortune, depression). Various sections in the present volume describe this mystery. 40 Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan (1651), edited with an introduction by C. B. Macpherson, London: Penguin Books, 1985. Laslett devoted a considerable space (pp. 67-93) to denying that Hobbes was Locke‘s primary target of attack (Filmer was), but doubtlessly Hobbes was involved in Locke‘s attack of Filmer (cf. p. 70). See Locke: Two Treatises of Government (1960), edited by Peter Laslett, Cambridge University Press, 1988. All this however is a side issue in the history of ideas. 41 See ibid., especially pp. 93-122. 42 Plato‘s people are the voluntary-appetitive part of body-politic. Aristotle just repeated Plato, saying that those fit to rule must rule and those fit to be ruled must be ruled. 43 People were not born with natural reason as animals were with instinct.
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No wonder, as Plato stresses education, Jefferson insists that democracy can properly operate only as people are educated. Confucius says that it is joy to learn from teachers, classmates, and people around, and we must be princely enough not to be offended by people ignoring us.44 That is the sign of an educated person.45 If uneducated, we take offense at people and begin to take the law into our own hands. Violence ensues. As O‘Neill said, Dictator Bush is a blind man among deaf people.46 Bush was quite a poor student at school,47 and American people honor education with their mere lips.48 No wonder gun control is quite unpopular in USA and its National Rifle Association rules supreme as a member of ―international rifle association‖ where various weapons trades thrive. Raw violence is popular. Democracy is in a shambles now, for no one takes serious education seriously. Many dictators today thrive under the name of ―democracy,‖49 including brutal plutocracy of which USA is preeminent with its unabashed dictatorship, and Bush bullying everyone with worldunilateralism. Since democracy thrives on capitalism50 (like it or not, justified or not) plutocracy easily takes over democracy in the name of ―democracy.‖51 Democracy is thus gutted empty, leaving its hollow name, ever dangling to entice people. Churchill famously said in 1947, ―(D)emocracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.‖ What he said is apt if ―democracy‖ were replaced with ―wolf dictatorship‖ under the sheep-hide of ―democracy.‖ 44 ―O, learning and often practicing it, isn‘t [it] rather delightful? O, having classmates from afar [to mutually learn], isn‘t [it] rather pleasant? O, people-ignored and not offended, isn‘t [it] rather princely [of] man?‖ ―Among three people walking must be my teachers.‖ (Analects 1/1, 7/22) 45 No wonder, the father of legalism Hsün Tzu insists on education to shape us into obeying the law. Sadly, later legalists insist on education of the people, not of the ruler, i.e., shaping people to obey ruler, not shaping ruler to care for people. 46 Paul O‘Neill, Bush‘s former Treasury Secretary, said in ―60 Minutes‖ (1/11/04), ―In the cabinet meeting, Bush is a blind man among a roomful of deaf people.‖ 47 Bush was a C- student (got D- in philosophy) at Yale; it is not proud of him. Worse, he is a born-again Christian who wants simply to bask in God‘s cozy acceptance as he is, refusing to be under the dictates of God‘s law of compassion. He is now a law unto himself and flaunts his money and military might over the whole world. 48 The dumber you are, the politically better you are; it is the worst of ―American egalitarianism.‖ Eisenhower beat Adlai Stevenson who spoke too well, an "egg-head." See Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, NY: Vintage, 1966; ironically, an American intellectual has written on American anti-intellectualism. It evokes many thoughts. [a] Plato is right to see democracy as the worst mob-rule of unbridled/uneducated desires, as Jefferson is to stress education as the backbone of democracy. [b] How the educated can live in the stuffy uneducated air without suffocation is a marvel. [c] How ―dumb USA‖ is the richest in money and science is another marvel. 49 Fareed Zakaria portrays a deterioration of democracy in the name of ―democracy,‖ from Peru to the Philippines, in ―The Rise of Illiberal Democracy,‖ in Foreign Affairs, November/December 1997, pp. 22-43. Sadly, he did not note USA as the highest hijacker of democracy with ―money democracy.‖ 50 Perhaps this is because money is power anyone can get in a free market, capitalism is free-market economy, and democracy is people-power. Communism has equality of the people but no equal opportunity for the people, democracy and people‘s equal opportunity to make money is capitalism. Such is how reasoning on paper goes, but in fact money-power is not free for everyone, for capitalism turns into money-elitism, plutocracy, to oppress people. 51 Someone may say, ―Democracy is associated with capitalism that is money-operated, and so plutocracy, moneyrule, is at the center of democracy.‖ We must disagree. Capitalism is money-democracy; plutocracy is moneydictatorship. People in democratic capitalism freely compete in money-enterprises, while people in plutocratic regime are suppressed by money-tyranny. We must admit, though, that the two tend dangerously to collapse into each other, and democracy easily slides into plutocracy, while it is quite hard if not impossible for plutocracy to ―climb‖ up to democracy, simply because competition selects the winner who dominates the rest. Look at how often the Republican Party, money-party, elects the president. Cf. John W. Gardner, Excellence: Can We Be Equal and Excellent too? NY: Harper, 1961, and Theodore J. Lowi, The End of Liberalism, NY: W. W. Norton, 1969.
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The revolt came in Henry D. Thoreau‘s ―Resistance to Civil Government‖ (1848) closely followed by John S. Mill‘s ―On Liberty‖ (1859).52 Sadly, however, eloquent as they both are, they are more of powerful tracts against government abuse than careful theoretical essays elucidating what true democracy consists in. Theoretically unstable and devoid of solid rational basis, democracy flourishes today all over the world, to enable catastrophic confusions to rule supreme. This phenomenon would have dumbfounded if not confounded Locke and Jefferson whose promotions of democracy were precisely in order to stem such catastrophes. True reflection on democracy, truly effective, is yet to appear53; such a sad story of world democracy! But then, how do we know all politics as dire? We do so by history of politics that judges all politics wrong. What is it that judges history, then? It is history, and in fact history makes no mistakes. All our sadness must not blind us to a solid base of life that is infallible through histories of all ages, history itself. This surprising fact we must consider now.
HISTORY AND THE I CHING 易經 MAKE NO MISTAKES The original Aesop‘s fables are a rough mirror of the rough world in the sixth century BCE Greece and its environs, mixed with eye-catching wits and clever jokes. People later trimmed them to charm us, instructing us in our moral standards. This is the story of ―progress of mankind,‖ history improving on history. China goes the same way, just more self-conscious of history with grand historians judging the events as they record the events, as with the Tso Chuan 左傳, the Shih Chi 史記, and so on. Thus human behaviors continue as they are but standards to judge them change as history progresses. To ―continue as they are‖ is Akrasia, describing nature as mix of compassion and cruelty mirrored by the original Aesop‘s fables; humanity tells compassion from cruelty, and comes to choose compassion as a ―moral standard.‖ The reason is that compassion lasts (it is ―proper in situ,‖ yi2 宜, so it is ―right,‖ yi4 義), while cruelty does not last (called ―violence‖). Thus we humans are part of nature to follow the nature of things. Our story of naturefollowing is called ―history,‖ human-natural, to judge human behaviors. Such history―judging‖ with its standards changing as it progresses shows that history makes no mistake. Aesop‘s fables are pretty but ―complete Aesop‖ is not pretty, out of which pretty Aesop is born. Such birth-story is history, and so history makes no mistake. The same historical progress is told by ―complete Grimm‖ and ―complete Andersen.‖54 Let us concretely see history as storytelling by considering the I Ching 易經 the Classic of Changes Confucius admired. We ask, ―Does the I Ching ever make mistakes?‖ Before answering this fascinating question as point (3), we must see (1) what mistake in life is and
52 Walden and Resistance to Civil Government: Henry D. Thoreau, Second Edition, ed. William Rossi, NY: W. W. Norton, 1992, and John Start Mill: On Liberty: Annotated Text, Sources and Background Criticism, ed. David Spitz, NY: W. W. Norton, 1975. 53 Plato correctly said that democracy is the worst form of government and education is the cure, but his ―solution‖ of philosopher-king is empty of content and has fostered dictatorship of dunces. 54 On the not-pretty story of the original Aesop‘s fables, see Olivia and Robert Temple, trs, Aesop: The Complete Fables, NY: Penguin Books, 1998, pp. ix-xxiii. See also The Complete Grimm‟s Fairy Tales, NY: Random House, 1972, p. xiii, and The Complete Hans Christian Andersen Fairy Tales, NY: Random House, 2006, p. xi.
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then see (2) what the I Ching is. We will then (4) conclude that history makes no mistakes, and derive some benefits from this point. (1) Western thinkers have long been so preoccupied with ―mistakes‖ as a central notion,55 to miss the ―knowledge‖-forest for the ―mistake‖-trees. Let me explain. We sense in life; as sensing is direct, so knowing is. Knowing things is direct, starting at knowing that I am hungry.56 Of course no direct human sensing of knowing is immune from taking things amiss; such mistaking is part of humanity that yet does not take away the directness of sensing that induces knowing. Knowing directly contacts things that include my self, and directness is an ingredient of 57 ―truth.‖ Without such directness as truth there can be no human life. Directness is primary; occasional mistakes are secondary. In the final analysis, we must follow our heart, our inner conviction—it is directness. Such thickness and depth of actuality make us. We must check our conviction against outside actuality, to check against self-infatuation; an unexamined life such as Hitler‘s is not worth living. Checking yet remains a subordinate, a servant, to conviction, not its substitute. One enslaved to endless checking eviscerates oneself soulless. An unexamined life is less worthless than a life lost in endless self-examinations, forever uncertain. Hitler at least earned his foul name in history; a man lost in examination, confirmation, and verification has lost his human identity, even a ―bad human.‖ 58 After all, ―to err is human,‖ we say to express our self-knowledge that betokens our 59 knowledge of no-mistake, knowledge of truth, without which we cannot ―err.‖ This fact indicates that truth is inextricably involved in our very ―erring‖; we betoken truth in and via error. We are in truth by way of being in error, often truth-ing by erring. Now, we note here many action-words. These words prod to warn us that the above paragraph does not mean that to correct mistakes we must pre-suppose truth. Saying so arranges ―mistake‖ and ―truth‖ as static pieces, concepts, and concludes backward to their logical relation. This is a static thinking, spatial, observing, and detached. We leave such analytical and objective inference, and claim that detecting mistakes, that 60 is, perceiving that we have taken things amiss, leads us to correcting them, and in correcting 55 Western philosophy is a series of inter-pickings-apart of mistakes. The possibility of mistakes has fascinated Western thinkers since Plato (the Theaetetus). Josiah Royce built his idealism on it (The World and the Individual, 1900-1901). We consider this question concretely by considering the I Ching in China. 56 Descartes convolutedly shows it in the Cogito; Royce elaborates it into a complex system of pragmatic idealism. 57 Bertrand Russell contributed to philosophy with knowledge of acquaintance distinct from knowledge of description, the latter being based on the former. Sadly, he takes ―acquaintance‖ as that with ―sense data‖ alone, and has hard time inferring direct self-knowledge from knowing sense-data. The supremacy of contrived sense-data and logical inference haunted his philosophy throughout life, confusing such contrived supremacy with ―clarity‖ of thinking. See his The Problems of Philosophy (1912), Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 46-69. Cf. his Preface to The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell 1903-1959, eds. R. E. Egner and L. E. Denonn, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1961, pp. 7-8, and my comment on it in ―‗Emperor Hundun 渾沌': A Cultural Hermeneutic,‖ Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, September 2007, pp. 263-279. 58 We follow Alexander Pope who said so in his ―An Essay on Criticism (1711)‖ (line 525). 59 How we could do so at all is a mystery, performatively expressed as ―akrasia.‖ E.g., Japan cherishes China‘s cultural treasures and despites ―dirty Chinamen‖ (akrasia-1), yet does not consider why Japan can cherish and despise at once (akrasia-2), why ―dirty Chinamen‖ could have produced such treasure (akrisia-3), and why producing elegant treasure, Chinamen remain so ―dirty‖ and uncouth (akrasia-4), and so on. 60 How can we detect mistakes in the first place? This is the mystery of being historical, that we are wiser after the fact. We have a mysterious intuition to detect mistakes after the fact. See my Ph.D. dissertation, ―Existential Relativism,‖ Philosophy Department, Yale University, 1965. We intimated its solution as we mentioned ―more rhetoric cures rhetoric‖ when this volume began, and then cited history as correcting history.
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ourselves there emerges truth, post factum, historically, performatively. ―Truth‖ here then is a historical performance of detecting and correcting ―mistakes,‖ what has been taken amiss. Here ―truth‖ and ―mistakes‖ are concrete descriptions, telling stories of our thinking process in time, not static concepts. We do not analyze ―time‖ as an object; we are one of all 61 existents that are in process, in action in time, in ―history.‖ This is a dynamic story-thinking time-ly, historical. But all this is to anticipate. (2) Now in this dynamic light, we can consider what the I Ching is. Scholarly Freud 62 quipped, following splashy Wordsworth, ―The child is the father to the man‖ who has 63 obviously fathered the child. Human actuality is made of such inter-parenting, essential to the Yin-Yang interacting to structure the I Ching thus schematized. Beware, however; its logical binary schema is not abstractly analytical but thoroughly concrete, that is to say, enfleshed with poetic story-bits that shimmer forth various tangible meanings at every meeting with every wayward contingency, the concrete specifics of the situation of a specific person-milieu, and a specific ―self.‖ Western binary system (11 and 10, 01 and 00) is abstractly concocted to apply mysteriously to actuality. In contrast, I Ching‘s Yin-Yang mirrors natural mountain shade and its sunny side, existentially inter-fighting in inter-parenting, reflected in story-bits of the poetry of five factual trends. The I Ching is a poetry of nature spontaneously no-does (wu-wei 無為), inclusive of the reader, and is open to the future that simply dawns ―without rhyme or reason‖ yet captured in the Yin-Yang web. Here is a non-analytical scheme, its sense is non-logical, to tell fortune-future. What comes we can only meet, helped by the I Ching in the time-river.64 We cannot push the river; we can only swim in it. Swimming and not pushing, meeting and not controlling, we simply no-do wu-wei 無為. How? Tommy shouts, ―I don‘ wanna sleep!‖ Mom says, ―OK, don‘t sleep. Just sit here beside your pillow. Mom will tell your favorite story, OK?‖ He nods. ―Once upon a time . . . ,― And he hits the pillow. Mom did no-do and nothing not done.65 (3) Now we can ask, ―Does this I Ching make mistakes?‖ Incredible as it may sound, it does not, as nine points here explain. One, the I Ching is a poetry, which makes no mistakes, for Two, poetry opens out to the human situation for sense, and it makes no sense to say that the situation makes mistakes, for situation simply situates us, beyond sense or no-sense, and ―mistake‖ is possible only in the context of sense-meaning. Three, the I Ching‘s composition includes history and the history of its interpretation. Helmut Wilhelm said,66 61 On how time-as-object to analyze differs from time-as-lived to undergo, see my On the “Logic” of Togetherness: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 1998, pp. 342-385. 62 Wordsworth said so in his ―The Rainbow‖ (I.7). Freud‘s psychoanalysis that digs out the client‘s past is based on this idea that childhood-features continue on in life to beget all adult consequences. Japan also says, ―The soul of three year-old till one hundred 三つ子の魂百まで.‖ 63 Chinese thinkers‘ ―actuality‖ is inter-opposing and inter-parenting (相剋相生), and such opposing and parenting inter-parent! Western ―actuality‖ is linear, not inter-recursive. Kierkegaard opposed Hegel but not the other way around, nor did the one parent the other; nor did Nietzsche parent Christianity as he demolished it. 64 On ―time‖ in China as seasonal timeliness, see Kuang-ming Wu, The “Logic” of Togetherness, Leiden: Brill, 1998, pp. 342-385. 65 We will come back to this irresistible story later. 66 Helmut and Richard Wilhelm, Understanding the I Ching: The Wilhelm Lectures on the Book of Changes (1966 and 1979), Princeton University Press, 1995, p. 51. This is extraordinary in the West, where no books would be made of its interpretive history.
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Kuang-ming Wu But the essential thing is to keep in mind all the strata that go to make up the book. Archaic wisdom from the dawn of time, detached and systematic reflection of . . . the Chou era, pithy sayings from the heart of the people, subtle thoughts of the leading minds: all these disparate elements have harmonized to create the structure of the book as we know it. Its real value lies in its comprehensiveness and many-sidedness. This is the aspect under which the book lives and is revered in China, and if we wish to miss nothing important, we must not neglect the later strata either. In these, many of the treasures of the very earliest origins are brought to light, treasurers (treasuries?) that up till then were hidden in the depths of the book, their existence divined rather than recognized. When the occasion arises, we shall follow the lines leading back from the later to the earlier elements, in the hope that from the study of the living development of the book itself we may also derive insight into its meaning.
In other words, the I Ching is the book of changes of the times; it is the book-of-history. It is itself made of history, an accumulation of the transpiring of the situations, and as no situation makes mistakes, so no history does, nor does the I Ching make mistake of its story. Four, thus, the I Ching describes and tells the story of history. History in Chinese is lihshih (歷史); ―lih‖ is ―footprints‖ of what continues dripping and ―shih‖ is ―(human) handling of the records (on bamboo strips).‖67 So, history in China is natural goings-on plus human meaning-giving (hermeneutics) following it; history unites the natural and the human in it. For Hegel, world history is world judgment; China adds, ―World history is world meaning, which the I Ching describes.‖ A ―game‖ evolves out of how its rules naturally evolve in its constant playing, and the evolving is history; so did the rule of life‘s game. The I Ching is a poetic storybook of rules of life‘s game, and its storytelling makes no mistakes, for the rule-story is the rule by which we spot mistakes. Now, in all this time-process, as the situation from past to present is history, so the situation from present to future is ―destined (天運),‖ not fated (命定). ―What is their difference?‖ Well, if we so love birds as to make a big birdcage for them, to enjoy them. Then we expand the cage into an aviary for them to fly freely in it but not outside. We realize then that the fields and skies are a natural aviary for all birds, with us with them, and so we let them go, knowing that they won‘t fly out of this Globe, on pain of perdition. This Globe is the aviarymilieu where they move, live, and have their free being. Clearly birdcages and aviaries confine birds, ―fated‖ to live in a determined way, but can we say that these birds with us are ―confined‖ in an ―aviary‖ of this Globe? Are we fated to live here? No, for we all cannot freely survive outside this Globe. The Globe is the home that enables us all freely to sing, soar, live and thrive. Here we are ―destined,‖ not ―fated,‖ to live, and our Globe-in-time is ―history‖ where we are ―destined‖ to move and have our free beings. Thus history is destined, and destiny is historical. We know our destiny after we have been through it all and look back at it as history. The I Ching in contrast looks forward to the future and enables us to know what ―it‖ all is, destined, before we live it; as the I Ching says, ―By managing historical goings-on, the Princely People clearly perceive the timely 君子以治歷明時.‖68 The I Ching renders the future as definitively destined as history is set
67 藤堂明保著, 漢字語源辞典, 東京學燈社, 1965, pp. 477, 480, 106. 68 周書 in 禮記 says, ―易曰, 澤中有火. 革. 君子以治歷明時.‖
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and mistake-free. So the I Ching is as mistake-free as our past-and-future is destined, for ―mistake‖ is senseless in destining. Five, human understanding of the times can be mistaken, and human mistakes are part of history that makes no mistakes, for in history the notion of ―mistake‖ makes no sense. The witches told Macbeth that no man born of a woman could kill him, so he thought him invincible, yet Macduff who killed him was not ―of woman born‖ but ―was from his mother‘s womb untimely ripped.‖69 Macbeth made a mortal interpretive mistake, but not the witches telling of future destiny as sure as past history, whose part Macbeth‘s interpretation became. In general, a definite affirmation, ―It is A,‖ can make mistakes, but future prediction is no definite statement but hypothesis awaiting future confirmation or disconfirmation. A hypothesis is a probable statement, ―It may be A or not-quite A‖; if this hypothesis turns out to be ―not-quite A‖ it is not ―mistaken.‖ Thus future prediction makes no mistakes, and the I Ching is a poetic guide to future prediction, therefore the I Ching makes no mistakes. Six, the I Ching (a) blends natural transpiring of events with human understanding, and (b) such human reasonable blending composes a pattern (structural hexagrams, 64 arranged in a rhythmic poetic pattern) that opens out in time, and (c) the timely, structural, makes no mistakes, for (d) this structure is no mathematical repetition, for life-patterns structurally return to offer a fresh beginning at each moment in each situation, enabling life to produce significant diaries and journals, each different from others. In difference is no mistake that exists in repetition alone. ―Repetition‖ in life is significant. We can learn from the mystery of children‘s love of repetition. Adults welcome things fresh, the familiar renewed that refreshes, not novelty that threatens with unfamiliarity; we smile at things fresh each morning but shrink from challenges in new places and new jobs. Children in contrast have no such luxury. For them, everything is novel for the first time in life, and repetition is one way to turn it into the fresh, to ease them into things novel in life, as the fish take to fresh water. Something similar happens in music, where repetitions and variations abound to help us dwell in the memorable rhythm and tunes we love. Children particularly love music; they live in its rhythm to learn and thrive in things novel. Stories have a musical rhythm; storytelling makes music-in-events, and children of all ages love stories. Following children, we adults can/should repeat the routine activities to savor their unsuspected depths as every morning refreshes itself. Seven, history says, ―That is the way it was and is, and there is no room for mistakes or no-mistakes.‖ The I Ching records history as structured in 64 ways of Yin-Yang opposingparenting, in 64 hexagrams.70 Someone may say, ―History may make no mistakes, but the I Ching that describes it may.‖ Our answer is No, for the following reason. To begin, the I Ching‘s description is couched in poetic story-bits that are open to the situation and to the reader in the situation, and so the I Ching‘s meaning is a blend of the 69 Macbeth, 5.10 (lines 10-15). 70 Numbers and mathematics are envisioned in the West as a mechanizing force of human life, as with decision theory, game theory, and economics. In contrast, China has humanized mathematics and mechanics throughout the entire universe, in fiction, painting, calligraphy, healing arts, martial arts, arts of war, culinary arts, and so on. Such humanistic application of numbers and mathematics is quite powerful indeed. We cite only one example, in the I Ching, of the cosmic, sociopolitical, interpersonal, and personal application of numbers and mathematics. We note its one surprising feature alone, that the I Ching makes no mistakes in history any more than history does. Interestingly, backed by mistake-less mathematics, human time-journey, in history or into the future, makes no mistakes, and this feature is what the I Ching captures.
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―suggested‖ meaning of poetry and the reader‘s interpretive decision. Thus, the reader decides on the definite meaning of the I Ching. From the objective interpreter‘s side, then, the I Ching is obscure in meaning, and its obscurity prevents it from the reader judging that it has made a mistake. Thus we cannot objectively see if the I Ching, in itself, has made mistakes or not. This is not to say that history is purely subjective, for there is no such thing as ―pure‖ or ―in itself alone‖ here. The true enough statement, ―All history is contemporary,‖ does not deny that history is also about the past toward the future. This is because actuality is concrete, and concreteness is an interwoven concresced71 composite, where ―objectivity‖ is subjectively perceived and constituted and ―subjectivity‖ is objectively constituted by the past to compose the present and the future. Natural science in the West says, ―Whatever has been will be‖; it is a science of the past, to tend to fatalism. The I Ching says, ―Whatever goes on will become‖; it is a science of the future (what is to come), to destine us to destiny. How? Since whatever goes on now will become, the I Ching helps us to discern the trend now, the Way things are going, and helps us on how to act accordingly, as we drive safely by ―watching out for the other guy‖ on how he drives. ―The other guy‖ is the future in our life-driving; future is mine, and so future the other guy is my brother. The Chinese people for millennia have constantly patterned their lives after the I Ching to tend their future. History is an ultimate judge; it has consigned Babylon to oblivion and now judges the I Ching mistake-less, as our constant use of spinach from time immemorial judges spinach to be our unmistakable food. Eight, in this connection, the notion of ―mistake‖ is crucial and interesting. The Western thinkers often take it to be a noun, and tread backward to get to that because of which mistake is made possible. So Plato had to assume the eternal Idea, and Royce had to go to absolute idealism. Now, such a treatment of mistake is either trivial or senseless. It is trivial because mistake-as-wrong does assume no-mistake-as-right; what else is new? Such a treatment of mistake is senseless because one cannot make a mistake when one knows it to be a mistake, when one knows ―what is not mistake.‖ One cannot take something wrong if one knows what is right that ―wrong‖ presupposes; in other words, one cannot make a mistake if one knows what makes it possible, this backward way.72 To put it another way, this sort of oddity happens because we treat mistake spatially. We would be puzzled on why two cars can tread the identical crossroads, if we do not take into account the traffic light that tells one car to go through a spot at one time in one direction, another car to the same spot another time in another direction. If we do not consider the phenomenon in a time-ly way, we would be puzzled on why two cars can go across the same crossroads at all. Besides, we are curious. How did China, being human, come to hit upon the eternal Something, the I Ching, so comprehensive and divinely unmistakable as to reign over all our life, activities, and mistakes, and make sense of them all? The question contains its own answer, in the little phrase, ―come to.‖ History, our retrospective survey, realization, and
71 ―Concrete‖ is concrescence done, a togetherness. See Kuang-ming Wu, On the “Logic” of Togetherness: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 1998. 72 This is the real cause for an extraordinary contortion Plato/Royce had to undergo in considering ―mistake‖ in the Theaetetus. The contortion is not because the problem of how making mistakes is possible is difficult, but simply because the problem of mistake is approached in a mistaken manner.
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storytelling, mysteriously reveals to us an amazingly accurate panorama of what was the case, impossible while we are undergoing the situation. Let us come back to our original theme of mistake. Observing how we come to make a mistake, we see that ―mistake‖ is a verb, to take-amiss, to take something to be other than what it is. The ―Eternal Idea‖ or ―All-Encompassing‖ describes what we realize to differ from what we did after we did it. How do we realize that we have made a mistake? We find it later that we took something in error. It is the finding-it-later that makes mistake possible, and finding-it-later clearly tells a story-of-how we first think of A to be B, and then come to realize that A is not B, to wit, that we mistook A to be B. This story-of-how, this finding-it-later, is history. ―Mistake‖ shows a dynamic history, not a static substance of what makes mistakes possible. Mistake is an historical notion, a storytelling, and the story of mistake-making makes no mistake, for otherwise ―mistake‖ would be impossible to make. Perhaps this story of mistake-making is what is indicated (not told) in the ―story‖ told in Plato‘s Idea, Royce‘s ―an infinite unity of conscious thought,‖ and Jaspers‘ All-Encompassing. So, in asking the question, ―Can the I Ching make mistakes?‖ we unwittingly but inevitably connect the I Ching to history, which we later find is the core of the I Ching. Thus, asking this question answers itself in the negative. If the I Ching reflects history, making mistake is history, and what makes mistake possible does not itself make mistakes, then the I Ching cannot make mistake, for history does not. Nine, now, we are ready to see the point to which our consideration of the I Ching has been leading us. How is I Ching a book of history? We have seen that it is its poetic storytelling hooked on and open to the situation-as-it-transpires. We have seen that this storytelling composes the I Ching. The situation-as-it-transpires is history. So the I Ching is a book that is history, which makes no mistakes but is that in which mistakes make sense, and so this is also what makes the I Ching mistake-less but makes sense of mistakes, transpired as history description. In other words, it is storytelling-open-to-actuality that is solidly mistake-free to enlighten us to our future to tell our fortune (i.e., destiny), to make us prudent, worldly wise. Is all this a story told? Yes it is, all of it, as long as we keep firmly in mind (without letting it slip into the mistake of taking all this as eternal unchanging truth, a noun) that we have gone through a process of inferring that is a process-in-time, our situation-as-it-transpires into understanding. It is our history, our story, of how we came to realize all this. Thus history is more significant than we realized. Bacon said,73 ―(N)o pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage-ground of truth (a hill not to be commanded, and where the air is always clear and serene), and to see the errors, and wanderings, and mists, and tempests, in the vale below; so always that this prospect be with pity, and not with swelling or pride.‖ Little did he realize that ―the vantage-ground of truth‖ is no other than the story told of these ―errors, and wanderings . . in the vale below.‖ It amounts to saying that ―the vale‖ is not ―below‖ but itself the ―hill‖ of ―truth‖ once it is told as history, ―always clear‖ but its air not
73 Francis Bacon: Essays and New Atlantis, ed. Gordon S. Haight, Toronto: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1942, p. 5. Cf. Selected Writings of Francis Bacon, ed. Hugh G. Dick, NY: The Modern Library, 1955, p. 7.
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serene. In all, the gentle almighty power of storytelling impresses on actuality that is ours, that is history that is a storytelling after all, and such a history makes no mistakes. (4) Now, is this conclusion surprising? It is surprising at first, but on second thought it is as it should be, for all this just straightly tells the story of life of existence, and since the story of existence is history, we can simply say that history makes no mistake, so its mirror the I Ching does not. This is because history is the process of humans re-enacting (Collingwood), that is, they re-act, reactivate, and reanimate what they have lived to relive their lives anew in time, and the process makes no mistake. Thus history is truly a process to ―warm up the old/past and know the new 溫故而知新,‖ as Confucius said (2/11), where ―and 而‖ is the process from the ―past 故‖ to the future inherent in ―knowing the new 知新‖ itself. And beware. The new 新 differs from old in the past that is imperfect, full of mistakes. Is the new filled with mistakes as well? It is another story of reenacting what is said here, thanks to its being a verb; the new renews itself. The ―knowledge of the new 知新‖ here is a self-corrective act of new creation 創新, always ―new from day to day, and daily anew 日日新又日新‖; here ―new, anew 新‖ is a selfreflexive verb, self-adjusting, self-correcting, thereby daily, constantly, self-renewing. History is a verb, an unbroken act of renewing, new-(新)-ing, repeatedly. History is the story of humanity‘s process of reprocessing, of self-renewing. This is literally the process of ―threading (with the time-thread) the gone to open the coming 繼往開來‖ that life itself inherently implies. To live life is to engage an unbroken activity of time-threading the gone to open the coming, for life is a continual living, living is to ―open the coming‖ that is to ―open the yet-to-come,‖ the future. The future cannot come without ―time-threading the gone,‖ for this ―continuing the past‖ is itself the very process of ―opening the future‖ we are currently going through. For Collingwood, only humanity has history. Pace his objection, we must say that every life, not just human life, is historical, whose story Darwin‘s ―evolution‖ graphically tells. All living existence is such lived historical story, and in fact all existence in nature is 74 such a historical story. This is because existence literally stands-out of its past to constitute nature, and ―nature‖ is natura naturans (nature naturing) emerging out of natura naturata 75 (nature natured), future emerging out of past. Existence is renascence in process, constantly rebirthing and re-evolving, literally rollingout of itself again and again, to weave out a situational context, a tapestry of the story of natural history, of the history of nature. As long as history re-enacts itself, that is, reacts, reactivates, and reanimates itself, history is the story of self-adjustment and self-correction in time, including us ourselves correcting ourselves. In fact, to realize a mistake is to have gone beyond what is done and see, looking back, to realize that what was done has missed the target. ―Mistake‖ is a historical performance of retrospection. Every ―mistake‖ betokens a re-enacting, re-evaluation, of what-is-gone, the
74 ―Existence‖ is made of ex-histemi, to stand-out. 75 The twin phrases were made famous by Spinoza who, elaborating on his forebears, Vicente Beauvais and Giordano Bruno, took them to mean the infinite essence and eternal principle and finite temporal existence follows, by necessity from this principle. Thus the West destroyed the living historical rhythm of these twin phrases, even though this very process of philosophical reanimation aptly tells the story of historical process.
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past, to re-correct itself into the future. World history is world judgment of itself, the world self-correction, again and again, forward. Therefore history makes no mistakes. Perhaps we can have a final refinement here with the help of our imaginary critic. He may say, ―Wait a minute. You said history makes no mistakes because it corrects itself, but ‗correction‘ makes no sense unless there are mistakes to correct. As long as history selfcorrects, history does make mistakes, then.‖ Our reply is, ―Of course, but correction itself is no mistake, and history self-corrects, so history makes no mistakes, after all. But you are right. It is not that history makes no mistakes but has no mistakes after self-correction, as we are wiser after the fact, and this dynamic ‗after‘ is history. Thus the statement, ‗History makes no mistakes‘ says, not that history is a static perfection, but that history constantly moves to having no-mistakes, dynamic moving to and into the no-mistake realm. History moves, history moving is no-mistake, so history makes no mistakes.‖ Our dear critic would not give up so easily. He continues, ―Let me put it from the other end. Your ‗self-correction‘ presupposes mistake-making. This claim goes contrary to Plato (Idea), Spinoza (God), Hegel (Absolute Spirit), Royce (Being), Collingwood (Absolute Presupposition), Jaspers (the Encompassing), and the list goes on, all saying that ‗mistake‘ presupposes Truth (no-mistake) to obtain. Your statement, ‗History makes no mistake,‘ then, turns upside down the world of Plato, and so on.‖ We answer, ―Perhaps so, but our saying all this merely describes how history operates, showing history as a how, a movement of ‗turning‘ the time-less world of speculation (Plato, and so on) ‗upside down.‘ We tell presupposition-thinkers that ‗history‘ as time-dynamics has nothing to do with their spatial thinking; and such a ‗turning upside down‘ is what we described as ‗self-correcting‘ of the world, of Plato, and so on. History simply corrects wherever mistakes are found to have been made, by Plato, and so on, who thereby become parts of history. The claim, ‗History makes no mistakes,‘ shows history as a dynamics-in-time; the statement is itself an historical statement. In fact, our very dialogue so far on this statement—and ‗so far‘ here is historical—is itself part of history that presents such fact of history, thereby demonstrates this dynamic truth of history.‖ This is why great reflective people of ancient times have all thoughtfully appealed to history to justify things and their performances, at least to their satisfaction at the time. Later generations continue to correct their corrections to the latecomers‘ best knowledge and in their good conscience, and Chinese people are people of such historical conscientiousness on the go. Sadly, however, we today, perhaps including Chinese people, tend not to realize, at least not quite as much as ancient people did, how essential history is to us,76 because we are influenced by the Western spatial thinking static, and so we are very clumsy at handling history. Philosophy of history is one of the weakest disciplines in the West, together with philosophy of arts, but both are the warp and woof of humanity and of their history. All such 76 Sadly, even today‘s arch-historian, Jaroslav Pelikan, is no exception. His spirited The Vindication of Tradition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984) is just that, cleverly spirited. He merely touched the hem of history; he failed to carefully reflect on what ―tradition‖ is, to wit, how history goes. He draws exclusively on the funds of Western ideas on history and tradition, thereby violates the universality of history as the history of all human cultures, not just the West. Worse, he takes history as objects of our reflection, not our reflective [a] process itself that is [b] our very livings-on. His thinking is curiously spatial, not in time, as dynamic as time‘s ongoing. His reflection on history is not historical but anti-historical.
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reflection, however, belongs to history, and to another essay another time, and another story of human history. Our critic finally says, ―History without mistakes is a cake painted on the wall, filling no hunger of mine, for I would not live to benefit from history; posthumous benefit is no benefit.‖ We nod, ―A good point you raised, pal. Still, our knowledge of infallible history does give us two strengths to go on now while alive. One, we can be sure that things we feel ‗wrong‘ now would be exposed as such later, so we need not fret. Two, we can ‗warm up the old‘ now to discern and steer our living better, now. So this section has cash value, thanks to storytelling history!‖ Meanwhile, we cannot ignore numbers and mathematics since they are so fashionable today. We must tell their story in the context of human history and cultures. We must see first how numbers and mathematics were originally humanly understood in the context of human affairs and human world. The I Ching as mathematical poetry of human time is instructive.
HISTORY, NUMBERS/MATHEMATICS, CULTURES No human culture, however ―primitive,‖ is devoid of numbers and computation, mathematics. The West has been so obsessed with them that numbers are alive in thinking (―number mysticism‖), and anything learned (μάθημα) amounts to thing mathematical. This has been so in Plato whose poetry was inspired by mathematics mystically spread wide, in Aristotle and in the vast majority of Western thinkers whose thinking is ―logical‖ as mathematical. All fields in science and technology today are thoroughly mathematical. We all recognize this ubiquitous presence of numbers and mathematics among us. What is less evident yet just as factual, is that the ―story of lives‖ of numbers and mathematics, that is, their history, tells a fascinating story of cultural differences.77 Five points below tell how it is so. One, today numbers and mathematics are supreme; calculation infuses all things. ―Mathematics‖ is supposedly poetry and mysticism united with mechanics. Now, math drops poetry and mysticism and parades itself everywhere as proud comprehensive metaphysics of mechanics of impersonal calculation. Two, worse, business, socio-ethics, and psychology are construed in terms of mechanical mathematical metaphysics in stories of ―efficiency,‖ ―calculation,‖ ―precision,‖ and ―management‖ to dominate academia. Psychology of persons is now sociology of statistics, physical science of behaviorism, brain physiology, and chemical pharmacology, all strictly computed in numbers. Metaphysics is mechanics-physics; humans are stones. If someone socializes mathematics and understands stones in human terms, it is ―anthropomorphism,‖ superstition quite unscientific. Three, we forget that it was naturally the other way around in former days. Things and numbers were alive as humans in Plato, Aristotle, and this sentiment was carried almost to the present day, such as once quite popular Lorenz Oken (1779-1885) whom the
77 Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (1988), London: Verso, 1993, is instructive in this context, as is Morris Kline, Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty, Oxford University Press, 1980. Both books tell of the lively story of mathematics throbbing, and its throbbing decline, quite fascinating.
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transcendentalists (e.g., Emerson) praised and admired.78 Yet even Oken did not personalize numbers and mathematics, which he made cosmic, quite impersonal; and even he died out of fashion. He was dated, to be demoted into wastebasket. The number ―zero‖ has much bedeviled and fascinated thinkers from ancient Athens to Los Alamos today; it collapses the sun into a black hole, was hated by the Romans, feared by Catholics, revered by Muslims, and turned inherent in modern physics.79 Still, zero has never entered the human world in the West, never making itself an ethical or social force. Numbers and mathematics in the West remain impersonal albeit cosmic factors. Four, in contrast, zero in China is Taoist roominess (hsü) that accommodates, and Buddhist nirvanic emptiness (k‘ung) of our very beings; in both worlds zero is something cosmic, socio-ethical, and personal, all at once. To simplify the matter, let us take examples from philosophical Taoism alone. For Lao Tzu, the Heaven and the Earth work like an empty bellows (5). The mysterious Female is the empty birth-gate of the Heaven and Earth (6). Nothingness (wu) at the hubcenter, in the vessel, and in the room, is what makes the cart, the vessel, and the room useful (11). In fact, the entire Tao Te Ching elaborates on this zero at every juncture of the cosmos and our living. It is no less so with Chuang Tzu. The Cook‘s knife carved in exquisite dancing through an ox for nineteen long years, while the blade remains as sharp as fresh from the grindstone. Why? Because ―joints have spaces; the blade has no thickness. Enter the space with the thickless, and there is space to spare for the blade to leisurely play around in.‖ Hearing of such story of thick-less playing blade in ample joint-spaces, the Duke sighed, ―I have heard the words of the Cook, and got my life nourished!‖ (3/12) The delightful mutuality of zeros nourishes us. Five, it is likewise with numbers in China. They in their nimble combinations throb in living bloodstream through Heaven and Earth, flowing pulsating in human lives personal, interpersonal, and sociopolitical. China has humanized mathematics and mechanics throughout the universe in fiction, painting, calligraphy, healing arts, martial arts, arts of war, culinary arts, and so on. Such humanistic application of numbers and mathematics, living them, is quite powerful an argument indeed. We cited only one example, the I Ching, of cosmic, sociopolitical, interpersonal, and personal living-applications of numbers and mathematics, and noted just one surprising feature, that the I Ching makes no mistakes in history as history does not. Interestingly, backed by mistake-less mathematics, human journey in history and into the future makes no mistakes, as captured by the I Ching. Sadly, however, the West turns numbers and mathematics into the mechanizing force of human life (decision theory, game theory, economics) and the predominant force in nature. We have bewailed mechanism with personalism, to redress today‘s trend of panmechanism. Numbers and math can go either way but must not go one way alone. Machine alone kills humans into stones; personalizing stones deifies in superstition. Personal mechanics in machine-infused persons is natural sanity of myriad all.
78 Lorenz Oken‘s story on numbers is in Paul Edwards, ed., The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, NY: Macmillan Co, 1967, V: 535-536. See also ―Mathematics in Cultural History,‖ Philip P. Wiener, ed., Dictionary of the History of Ideas, NY: Charles Scribner‘s Son, 1973, III: 177-185. 79 Cf. Charles Seife, Zero: the Biography of a Dangerous Idea, NY: Viking Press, 2000.
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Cultural stories of numbers and math reveal this crucial point. The next chapter tells the story of how ―science‖ today fares in nature, physical and human, in the West and then in Japan that naturalizes/humanizes science and technology.
Chapter 3
SCIENCE: STORY FACTUAL AND FICTIVE This chapter goes as follows. One, science today cannot understand things that just happen; psychology is a disaster. Two, an event is no brute happening but has three stories of three meanings; natural science today is mythological. Three, Japan tells its story of ―agrarian‖ science in Shinto love of land, in loving care of soil in ecological technology; it is based surprisingly on ―idleness,‖ just letting things be with the self. Thus culture is at the base of science, so we consider interculture in next Chapter IV.
HOW TO MANAGE THINGS HAPPENING WITHOUT RHYME OR REASON As nature has few straight lines in space, so it has few predictable happenings in time. Things just happen without rhyme or reason, but we must manage them with rhyme or reason, for both methods are all we have to manage things, that is, the methods of making literary sense or logical sense. We love to make logical sense and we would have loved to manage nature—things that just happen—by law. This is why we keep trying to find ―laws of nature,‖ but things just happen; we cannot indict/punish earthquakes, tsunamis, or tornadoes ―violating their laws.‖ Our reasoning by law does not work on nature, so we try mathematics. We say ―natural law‖ ciphers statistical average of things that just happen, and statistical measurement of things now helps us manage them. Statistics can handle accidents, tabulating sea battles won in history and sea battles lost, and take random samples, polling pre-election opinions. Statistics can even create incidents in scientific experiments. Statistics calculates random happenings to make some logical sense; scientific tryout checks, probes, and controls to manage random accidents. Thus ―randomized trials‖ is the most ―powerful‖ of our tools to logically manage things that just happen without rhyme or reason. Unfortunately, this tool is not as powerful as we wish it to be. 1 Take a scientific nightmare, missing data in randomized trials that generate missing data to haunt statisticians, the problem inherent in scientific exploration. The very purpose of 1 See ―randomization,‖ ―randomization test,‖ etc., in Andrew M. Colman, Dictionary of Psychology, Oxford, 2001, pp. 613-614, and ―Random Samples‖ in Edward W. Miniu, et al., Statistical Reasoning in Psychology and
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randomized trial is to explore, fish up, whatever we may have missed in our allegedly scrupulous coverage of an intended research area, making the area exceptionless, yet randomness by definition entails missing of potentially crucial data. In other words, randomization by nature hits or misses, and so a randomized trial that hits always is not random but comprehensive, and yet randomized trial is designed to cover comprehensively the territory. It is scientific randomness that generates two results mutually opposed—obtaining new data otherwise would be missed and potentially missing relevant data. Exploration entails randomization in novelty and slippage and, in fact, novelty entails slippage. Exploration, the soul of scientific research, is incorrigibly messy, if not contradictory; its ―solution‖ is twofold. One, there is no way to totally cut slippage—missing data—in randomized trials, and yet we cannot cut randomization from scientific research, for research is exploration entailing randomized trials that entails potential missing of data. So, all we can and should do is to minimize (not eliminate) the slippage and narrow down (not close up) the range of possibilities of data-missing—as best we possibly can. Two, this methodological maxim suggests a way of dealing with the problem, to wit, we must have more randomized trials. Why? As perceptual errors are corrected by more perceptions and logical errors straightened by more numerous and more careful arguments, so randomized trials can minimize their potential missing of data by more trials. Randomized trials must be conducted more often, in more diverse directions, in more extensive areas, and with more researchers in more diverse fields. In this way, we must spread our net of research by randomized trials as far and wide as possible to find more data to detect and correct errors in them. We fully use statistical apparatuses to help reduce potential missing, fully aware of their strengths and weaknesses. While not 100% foolproof, our cautionary tactics saves us from unnoticed blunders, as best we can. Scientific research advances this way, ever exploring virgin territories, ever vexed with mistakes and missing data, to ever find new truths by randomized trials, finding new errors even in these precious new truths discovered. Things are ever messy in science, for logical exploration in science has no convincing frame2 to unify its two opposing tendencies, finding in missing, missing in finding. All this while, things keep just happening randomly. Randomness at the core of things can never be completely managed by logic, for randomness is by nature beyond logic. ―Randomized trials‖ remain in the realm of ―inexact science,‖ a term unpalatable to scientific logical reason, for randomized trial tries to be both mathematically coherent and open to embarrassing adjustments to accidental happening, and logic allows no tight coherence coupling uncertain openness to unpleasant surprises. Accidents, random happenings, remain beyond logical reason. Now we know things just happen without rhyme or reason, and ―without reason‖ describes as above how hopeless management by logical reason is—and description is storytelling. If so, then we can manage accidental things happening ―without reason‖ by storytelling that is both coherent and open—the coupling that is an embarrassment in science and logic. Education, NY: John Wiley and Sons, 1993, pp. 16-17. Books on statistics in psychology are cited, for the ―science‖ of psychology cannot avoid statistics, and the strict science of statistics cannot avoid randomization. We will soon look into the disaster of psychology as such science. 2 We know that the ―convincing frame‖ is storytelling, both coherent and open, both systematic and exploratory.
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With storytelling we can now describe and comprehend—embrace and understand— cases of things that just happen. This is how history thrives to ―rhyme‖ with things just happening to reenact and re-enrich living in time, for us to sense their ―reason.‖ The story of history keeps telling to comprehend things that happen, without rhyme or reason. How does all this happen? Watching events, we come to realize that ―randomized experiments‖ constantly happen to make up life. They are all quite inconceivable, often tragically unspoken. Young Ann Frank wrote in her diary, ―I still believe people are basically good,‖ as she perished in people‘s hand in Auschwitz. Such tragic incongruity is unthinkable until told as a story. Life has many tragic Auschwitz‘s so unspeakable and so persistently repeated in so many lands, so often in history of the world. What perishes without rhyme or reason sometimes produces paragons and no-paragons. Viktor Frankl‘s Auschwitz-loss of all his family produced his ―search for meaning‖ that heals people, as Socrateses and Jesuses came of sad events, Monicas pray for her sons Augustines, and many Neroes‘s mothers perished in her sons‘ hands, all again without rhyme or reason. We have no way of making sense of them until hearing their stories that give them rhyme, for us to sense their reason. In deep sighs, we appreciate that such is life. If beauty is in the beholder‘s eye, then justice is also, and so we can understand beauty and justice only by knowing whose beauty and whose justice they are—and ―knowing whose‖ comes only by telling and hearing their stories. That is what towering storytellers Victor Hugo, Leo Tolstoy, Jane Austen, and countless others in other lands, are for. Storytelling alone does justice to events just and beautiful. Why does storytelling do justice to actual events? How does storytelling do so where logical reason fails? Let us take a concrete example of ―wavicle,‖ an entity with properties of both waves and particles. Joseph Needham said of ―wavicle‖3 that Old Chinese philosophers . . . thought of chhi as something between what we should call matter in a rarefied gaseous state on one hand, and radiant energy on the other. Though all our assured knowledge gained by experiment makes us infinitely richer than they, is the concept of ‗wavicle‘ in modern physical theory so much more penetrating?
Needham claims that China‘s ―ch‘i 氣‖ is more ―penetrating‖ than the West‘s new concept of ―wavicle‖ that is conceptualization of nature, for ―chhi, ch‘i 氣‖ is natural description of nature,4 a story of moving vapor or active breath of life. It is instructive to consider how this is so. ―Wavicle,‖ combining two abstract concepts wave and particle, is another abstract concept uneasily hovering over actuality it is designed to explain. It is a theoretical construct unstable, logically contradictory, each ingredient excluding the other, as ―wave‖ is no ―particle.‖
3 Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, Cambridge University Press, 1962, IV.I:135. He collects gadgetry, no scientific frame/attitude peculiar to China. See his interesting biography by Simon Winchester, The Man Who Loved China, HarperCollins, 2008; its pp. 191-194 have a theoretical frame of this massive collection of ―Chinese science,‖ all in a Western perspective of Whitehead‘s process philosophy. 4 Does the West have something similar? M. Merleau-Ponty said (The Visible and the Invisible, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, pp. 139, 147, 267) that Greek ―elements‖ are between objects and fields, before being. Cf. F. E. Peters, Greek Philosophical Terms: A Historical Lexicon, New York University Press, 1967, pp. 70-71, 180-185, on ―stoicheia (elements).‖ This is the closest the West came to Chinese ―ch‘i 氣.‖
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In contrast, ―ch‘i‖ describes a thing that constantly happens as natural vapor and life breathing, a not-thing breath of things, to compose things‘ life, a combination-activity of notthing and thing, to story-describe a common situation of concrete things, a notion performatively capturing an actually contradictory situation of nature. This is what storytelling does; where logic says no, storytelling says yes. Logical inconsistency in things ciphers randomness of concrete happenings captured by storytelling. How5 does storytelling comprehend random things? St. Augustine says, ―The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.‖ Another way of reading the world-book besides travel is to read its stories. Emerson says, ―Life is a dictionary‖6; we add, ―The world is a dictionary behind life-dictionary. We live by opening the world dictionary, taking in its word-things. Words compose our frame, perspective, and horizon to pull in random things, and they come in as our words coherent, rhymed and reasonable to become our world. Words are supreme, telling the story of the world, and our world merges with the world, whatever it is. Let us put it another way. In the beginning are words that organize into word-tissue, word-tell to make stories. In the beginning then is storytelling where words enflesh the world, to create the world; in storytelling the world begins. The world is story-shaped or it is nothing; such is how we word-shape the world. We open our dictionary of random things to read them, take them in, and organize them into one coherent world. ―Hazard a big guess, check on small details,‖ Hu Shih famously said.7 We boldly propose to open out to things, and carefully confirm them to cohere into one single world to make sense. We do both by means of ―stories.‖ Knowledge of science comes by randomized trials random-open to events to turn “coherent as random-ized.‖ This is our story of scientific trials, and things cohere randomized, events turn rhymed and reasonable. ―Randomized trial‖ is scientific experiment, knowledge-exploration; we have just performed its storytelling. To concretize all this, we zero in on a tough territory, studying human awareness in all this, ―psychology as science.‖ All sciences of things begin here, and it is precisely here that science in the West bankrupts.
EMOTION PSYCHOLOGY AS A SCIENCE Nothing is more tragic than sticking to science as straight mathematical calculation to study the incalculable realm of human awareness in mind and emotion. Reading books on ―emotion psychology‖ as ―science‖ of emotion makes us feel that feelings are straitjacketed there, where emotions are not allowed their full expressions but looked at, inspected, investigated, tabulated in scientific frames, and explained, and explained away. The fault is not in such a scientific methodology but in how aptly it is used and, more generally, how ―science‖ is understood. 5 This description—story—of how storytelling proceeds defines what storytelling is. This is an operationalperformative definition of storytelling. Storytelling unifies the how and the what, as life does. 6 St. Augustine‘s quip appears on a page after p. 32 in Foreign Affairs, March/April, 2010. Emerson‘s appears in ―The American Scholar‖ his 1837 address at Harvard (The Complete Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Brooks Atkinson, NY: Modern Library, 1940, p. 54). 7 胡適 quipped, 「大膽假設，小心求證。」 I translate it as ―Hazard a big guess, check on small details,‖ and ―Boldly propose, carefully prove.‖
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―Science‖ means ―knowledge‖ that accurately fits the nature of what is to know, and knowing is not just to know ―objects‖ alone. ―Natural science‖ in the West is a branch of science that deals with what is to know, strictly as object to be known by its separate subject. Such ―objectivity‖ is attained by objective treatment of the object of knowledge, that is, experimentation, ―trial and error‖ at manipulating data, the given, from outside, according to a set theoretical frame concocted by the subject, the frame and flow-chart of quantification. Crucial here is treatment ―from outside,‖ in studying what has happened, and remote from the subject. Thus the remoter the objects, the more effective such objective methodology is. Inanimate objects are most amenable to such treatment (physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology), lower animate beings come next (botany, biology, physiology), and the higher the living beings, the less amenable to such treatment they are (animal science, medical science, economics, sociology, cultural science, psychology). We often call the last bunch of sciences ―soft science‖ or, worse, ―inexact science,‖ as if they were less scientific, simply because they are not amenable to the patterns of physical studies of inanimate objects. Such calling exposes our partiality to physical sciences, which we take as the standard of ―true science.‖ Our partiality is our prejudice, blind to the simple truth that true ―scientific objectivity‖ lies in tailoring our standard and methods to fit the nature of what is to know, so various in nature. Our blindness leads us to simply identifying ―science‖ as ―natural physical science,‖ ―scientific methodology‖ exclusively as ―quantifiable repeatable trial and error,‖ and ―accuracy‖ as one mathematically measurable by these methods alone. This situation fares the worst in ―psychology,‖ the science of our psyche, the inner core of the subject‘s felt core, and ―science‖ in the sense of ―physical science.‖ We at once feel where and how it pinches, for we study human feelings with the method to study wholly unfeeling stones and sticks. Feeling feels actively as emotion that e-motes, ―moves‖ us ―out‖ of the status quo, spontaneously. It is not structure-less yet ―structure‖ is a notion too 8 structured to fit felt emotional core of human subject. Let us look elsewhere than stones. Music expresses emotion naturally. Music is not at all structure-less, yet musicology should not be dominated by structural mathematics of ―music theory‖ but rather to be helped by it. The music of emotion can be understood as its inner rhythm, which objective 9 methodology can help us understand but should not dominate as our frame of understanding. Moreover, importantly, as music creates its own melody and rhythm, so emotion has its own rhythm and pattern, to understand which requires not fixed external ready-made 8 Gendlin and Schrader may call the ―structure-less structure‖ of emotion ―prereflective,‖ ―preconceptual,‖ and ―prelogical‖ meaning, ―felt,‖ ―primitive‖ and ―primary‖ to mean emotion that is ―determinate,‖ so ―structured‖ in some sense. See George A. Schrader, ―The Structure of Emotion‖ in James M. Edie, ed., An Invitation to Phenomenology, Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1965, pp. 252-265, esp. p. 256-258. Schrader‘s is the most ―accurate‖ (though somewhat wandering) thoughtful treatment of emotion I know of, although his view that in human existence feeling is thoughtful and thought is feeling-filled (my words) would have difficulty, without further elucidation, and ―prereflective,‖ ―preconceptual,‖ or ―prelogical‖ smacks of taking ―reflection,‖ ―conceiving,‖ or ―logic‖ as external objective operation.. 9 A recent example is Tracy J. Mayne and George A. Bonanno, eds., Emotions: Current Issues and Future Directions, NY: The Guilford Press, 2001. Almost at every step I feel pinched by their approaches and conclusions. Just to cite an example, a conclusion is drawn from two rather commonsense facts that social experience influences expression of emotion, and emotion has social functions, both of which ―scientific researches‖ document ad nausea (p. 234). Those ―scientists‖ are blind to the simple fact that emotion is not a function of its social influences. To deny emotion as ―a natural category‖ because of social interactions in emotion confuses a thing‘s influence/function with the thing itself. The confusion stems from studying feelings from outside, as if studying stones by a subject separate from stones.
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methodology of quantification and experimentation but inner personal empathy, as with musical appreciation. Empathy has a definite methodology to ascertain the empathized structure that cannot be missed, yet harder to ascertain than investigating crystallography. It is precisely this inner idiosyncratic ―structure‖ of emotion that distinguishes it from predictable calculable logic. Describing emotion need not be emotive, but it must be properly congruent with emotion. Studying Auschwitz as if studying dinosaur-extinction is improper; improper also is Kipling reporting with equanimity a British soldier beating a ―nigger‖ to 10 extract money. In contrast, the author of The Rape of Nanking committed suicide ; our tears admire her integrity, for her report-content cohered with its report-impact on her. This is a fair desideratum, and storytelling flexibly fulfills this requirement. Storytelling does justice to emotion that is not structure-less yet not structured in the mode of physical science. Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Hugo, Dickens, and many other literary giants, great storytellers, tell us more, and more directly, accurately, and poignantly, of human emotions than objective, roundabout, external, and quantitative research of emotions with methods of natural science. Perhaps we should say that natural science tells best stories about stone, while literary writers tell best stories about human emotion, and one sort of storytelling cannot apply to both sorts. Stories of human reactions to (precious) stones are stories of human reactions, not of stones. We should not tell stone-stories of natural science about human felt psyche, nor should we tell literary stories about stones themselves. ―But can‘t we ask for how stories of all existents tell?‖ I suppose we can. Let me try.
EVERY EVENT HAS THREE STORIES Every existent has three stories: (a) what it is, (b) what it means, and (c) what it means for us storyteller(s) and their listeners, and these three stories inter-involve.11 Seemingly colorless, this simple observation has crucial life-implications to be developed by storytelling alone, as can be seen in four examples below of meaning-imbued facts. Example One: Here is a fact, (a), that human genes are said to be 99.4% identical with chimpanzees‘. (b) What this simple ―scientific fact‖ means is staggering. It can of course mean that studying chimps would benefit our knowledge of the human and promote the progress of medical science to benefit mankind. Humans are not supposed to be monkeys, though, and so how they differ becomes for us a problem. If humans do not differ from monkeys, there would be no ―species‖ of humanity. If, as China traditionally says, humans are the spirit of myriad things (人為萬物之靈) and ―spirit‖ is no ―animality,‖ then genetics gives us nothing specifically human and ―spiritual.‖
10 To study Nazi atrocity ―with scholarly composure‖ is insanity, not scholarship. James H. Cone‘s Black Theology and Black Power, HarperSanFrancisco, 1969, is written in such legitimate anger. On Kipling, see A Collection of Essays by George Orwell, Doubleday, 1954, pp. 123-124. Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking, Penguin, 1998. 11 This is a shorthand elucidation and illustration of my four-level story-thinking in ―Chinese Philosophy and Story-Thinking,‖ Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, Summer 2005, pp. 217-234, and ―Distinctive Features of Chinese Hermeneutics,‖ Taiwan Journal of East Asian Studies, June 2004, pp. 233-247.
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So, the ―fact‖ that humans and monkeys share 99.4% of genetic structure can mean that ―humanity‖ overflows if not eludes physiology and medical science of the West.12 Skin-down gaze misses skin to miss elephant with butterfly13; skin-up expands skin to sociopolitical lifeworld. Thus lifeworld overflows physiological skin. Science says human brain has been alike for 100,000 years; if so, then, why ancient myths are so preposterous compared with science today is a mystery.14 Culture thus overflows brain. (c) What humanity is, then, can only be discerned apart from genetics. For example, Five Social Relations (五倫) can be said to constitute humanity that physiology and medical science of the West cannot describe. ―Sociobiology‖ that explains human sociality by ants‘ is invalid, then, for ants‘ ―sociality‖ is only analogized from humans‘; sociobiology is anthropomorphism pretending to biology-morphism. Human arts—poetry, fiction, sculpture, painting, and music—would evoke humanity, thereby capture it, genetics does not, but arts are not unrelated to genetics. The arts-genetics relation may be best—artistically—expressed as lotus flowers blossoming out of mud-humus of physiology and genetics. How genes-mud relates to arts-flowers remains unknown, but they remain related, as mutually different. Example Two: Let us pursue further the (c) pondered above. The arts as a whole that are crucial to humans are, to think of it, much more pervasive than the specific ―art‖ connotes. If humans are by nature social, then we live on communication of self-expression we casually call ―arts,‖ and the (c)-level of life-stories, occupied by the arts, pervade our entire human life. This point itself raises three points on three levels. On level-(a), Professor Gene Barabtarlo contends that poetry with its peculiar music of a specific culture is untranslatable into other cultural medium; Professor Lin Huo-wang (林火旺) wonders aloud how the image of Chuang Tzu or Confucius produced by a scholar can fit in with another different image of another scholar.15 We can see, on level-(b), what both scholars contend means; they have raised an important enigma, on the feasibility of art as artistic communicability among humans in general. On level-(c), we realize that their enigma is a caution/problem within human communication, not a challenge to communicability itself, for if it were the latter, their own raising of the challenge doubts its own communicability and cuts down the very possibility of their raising itself. Thus two points are here. One, we must personally and culturally inter-translate to inter-learn to be human at all; we are no human if we are cut off from communication. Thus the necessity of communication dictates the imperative of inter-human and inter-cultural learning/communicating; translation in a widest sense is our existential imperative to be human. 12 As an example of how humanity overflows science, here is a scientific measurement on how we cannot tickle ourselves; subjectivity evaporates in objectivity. 13 Buddhist would of course nod, saying, no elephant or butterfly exists. They are puffs of wavicle-wind blown by my desire into empty ideas, empty wind blowing over empty chaos; ―all actuality‖ is vanity. This route silences all. All Buddhist discourses so massive are actually so much engine-idling tautology, signifying literally nothing. ―Nothing signifying‖ is the Buddhist pride and glory. If this is a contradiction, so be it, for nothing can be said, and so anything said is contradictory. 14 Elizabeth W. Barber and Paul T. Barber bravely deal with this problem with scientific analysis. Whether they succeed or not remains to be seen. See their When They Severed Earth from Sky: How the Human Mind s\Shapes Myth, Princeton University Press, 2004. 15 I treated this problem of ―objectivity‖ from another angle in On Metaphoring: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 2001, pp. 85-87.
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Two, yet inter-learning is full of difficulty of missing the communicated content and, if ever communicated, its misunderstanding. What we can/should do is to make a virtue out of the necessity and make a creative use of the predicament of misunderstanding, to, if possible, ―improve‖ on the original message, as if we could improve on Mozart! In fact, Mozart ―imitated‖ Bach and Haydn, and his ―imitations‖ remind us of Bach and Haydn in Mozart, what is a delightful ―enrichment‖ of Bach and Haydn. Communication of the music of poetry in cultural media other than music is then eminently possible, even desirable in all its altered forms and sentiments. How to do so is another theme no less eminently worth developing, all dependent on a Mozartian ingenuity of the poetic translator. The history of ideas is rife with, in fact, amounts to, such creative misunderstanding of the great thinkers.16 Example Three: (a) A researcher at Medical School, NYU, proposed in June 2003 to create an individual called ―Chimera‖ of human-chimpanzee genes-mix. This is a fact. (b) If successful, this project means two things. One, genetic miscegenation shows that humans and monkeys are not just inseparable but also not even distinguishable. Two, it is a human who proposed to wipe out the distinction, not a monkey, and this ―not‖ shows that the very wiping-out of distinction establishes the human-monkey distinction. (c) Observing the above, we realize that life is after all such radical mixing. We have four examples. One, health is kept up by ―balanced diet,‖ a wide mixture of vegetables and meats. Two, incest depletes life; exogamy, mixed marriage, propagates healthy species. Three, the future is vigorous only by learning from history, for forgetting the past differing from now repeats it. Four, a culture is healthy only by learning from other cultures; the Nazis refusing other cultures committed suicide. These four examples show mixture to invigorate life. Lifemixture lives better. Example Four: Have we noted above a curious ―mix‖ of fact (genetic-mixing) and value (ought to)? The mixture smashes away the notorious fact-value dichotomy of fact-(a) from what it means-(b) and what it means for us-(c), establishing their interrelations, how (a) inevitably leads to (b) and (c), while (b) and (c) thoroughly shape the manner and direction of (a). There is no (a) without the interest of (b) and (c), no ―pure‖ fact-description without extra-factual axes ((b) and (c)) to grind. Russian geography, say, is not Chinese or American one. The very structure of today‘s psychology is patterned after Anglo-European natural science. The Western medical science is not Chinese medicine or Indian. Journalism is often a political/cultural mouthpiece, conscious or not. Each culture is a specific journalism that tells a story about life different from other cultures, that is, different sorts of ―journalism.‖ A ―culture‖ means a specific sort of ―storytelling,‖ nothing else.
EXISTENCE AS THREEFOLD MEETING Now, to say that an event has three stories, what it is, what it means, and what it means to us, amounts to saying that things and events ―exist‖ only as the subject notes them. The falling tree on the mount no one sees neither exists nor makes sounds; the sight, sound, and 16 I touched on this problem from the angle of ―objectivity‖ and ―relativism‖ in ibid., pp. 119-124, 180-183, 338345, etc. Cf. our Section later, ―Writing China in English.‖
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indeed the very existence of a tree (falling) on the mount does not lie in the tree (―objectivity‖) nor in someone close-by (subjectivism) but in their meeting. So, to exist is to be perceived (Berkeley) and existence is a subject-object inter-existence. Subjective under-standing composes objective substance (stand-under). The three-story structure of a happening indicates that ―actuality‖ is a subject-object meeting, that there exists no subject or object, pure and simple; and such a ―meeting‖ is three in kind: (1) I-Thou, (2) I17 It, and (3) I-Milieu. To the story of this exciting threefold meeting we now turn. (1) In the I-Thou realm, we see how opposed ―infatuation‖ that burns the self to death is to ―concern‖ for others that lasts forever, as Paul vividly tells us in his ode to charity. 18 I wrote to John my son as follows.19 Dear John: I admire you as a deep thinker, profoundly reflective. I wish you would calmly consider with extreme care what I tell you now. Take time to read it. Important! There is a big sharp difference between ―infatuation‖ and ―concern.‖ ―Infatuation‖ is infatuus, fatuous, in folly (as Webster‟s Dictionary says). It is a silly trap in the ―self‘s‖ heat. Heat is blind. Infatuation blindly burns the self to death, a great life-danger. Paul‘s Poem of Love (1 Corinthians 13) warns that love is not giving the self to burn (v. 3). Love is not blind giving, not infatuation. ―Concern‖ is for the ―other,‖ as you are for your son David. You do not burn yourself, you calmly perceive him; you are concerned with him. Paul‘s positive picture of love (vv. 4-7) describes perceptive concern. It begins with patience (v. 4), and ends with endurance (v. 7); love takes time. Concern-full love lasts (vv. 8-13). So, love is perceptive of other‘s true situation; love takes time and lasts and lasts. To know takes time. It took you eight years to know son-David. It takes as much time to know friend-Mary. Never burn; never blindly give. Calmly take time to perceive Mary. She is not going anywhere. If you love Mary, never be infatuated, OK? Please calm down and take time. Please. Praying. Love, Dad
(2) It is important to note that I-Thou relation alone has concern vs. infatuation, and nothing else. In the I-It realm, our pro-attitude takes on different feelings and features, with different shades of intensity, from an indifferent nod at it to liking it, through being possessed with its sentimental values, being a favorite, a treasure, to being an overwhelming fetish. IThou infatuation and concern are both intense but inter-differ; one burns, the other does not. I-It indifferent nod lacks the intensity of obsessed fetish. An example of I-It attachment to the extent of fetish obsession is a sad story entangled with the calligraphic Sage of all times, 王羲之‘s (Wang Hsi-chih, 303-379) legendary brush
17 Cf. my ―The I-Milieu: Its Implications for Culture and Thinking (I), December 2007, pp. 1-60‖ and ―The IMilieu: Its Implications for Culture and Thinking (II), June 2008, pp. 1-68,‖ Journal of World Religions. 18 1 Corinthians 13:3, 8. My letter to John soon explain this point in detail. 19 Later I told him instead of writing to him, for intimacy and effect.
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piece of his ―蘭亭集序 Preface to Orchid Pavilion Collection.‖20 This long story shows the length of several life-involvements in a fetish It, ―the Preface.‖ The story has it that Wang once went on a boat trip with many literary notables for an exorcise ritual (祓褉). On the boat they variously composed poems, and Wang composed a poetic introduction to the anthology and wrote it with a mouse-hair brush. This is the celebrated ―Preface.‖ This calligraphic piece was so divinely inspired that Wang himself could not reproduce it later, and it became Wang‘s own treasured piece. It was handed down to posterity till it reached Wang‘s seventh generation Chih-yung (智永) who, on deathbed of almost 100 years old, bequeathed it to his disciple Pien-ts‘ai (辯才) a literary genius, who carefully hid the precious piece in a hole in a beam above bedroom. Now in Pien-ts‘ai‘s days there was an emperor T‘ai Tsung of T‘ang dynasty (唐太宗, 627-649), an avid collector of Wang‘s authentic calligraphic pieces. Overhearing that Pients‘ai had that ―Preface,‖ the emperor invited Pien-ts‘ai to three, four sumptuous dinners, politely asking him about the ―Preface,‖ but Pien-ts‘ai kept insisting on his ignorance. Further reconnaissance assured the emperor of Pien-ts‘ai‘s possession of it; his eagerness for it made him lose sleep, appetite, whereupon someone recommended Inspector General Hsiao I (蕭翼) to obtain the ―Preface‖ by hook or by crook. Hisao I requested some minor calligraphic letters of Wang‘s, changed his attire into a student‘s from Shan-tung area, visited Pien-ts‘ai‘s temple, and ingratiated himself with Pients‘ai in ten odd days. The two intimate literary friends now discussed literary matters day in and day out, composing poems over drinks. One day when conversation went to calligraphy, Hsiao casually mentioned his family inheritance, some authentic Wang pieces. Delighted, Pien-ts‘ai pressed him to bring them over. Gazing at them, Pien-ts‘ai calmly said, ―Very good, although not the best of Wang. I also have Wang‘s piece, not at all anything commonly seen.‖ ―What letter pad of Wang‘s is it?‖ ―The Preface.‖ ―Ha, ha! You are kidding. After these long war years, such real Wang cannot be in existence now. Yours must be a copy or a fake.‖ ―O, yes. It was my beloved Teacher‘s treasure; he personally bequeathed it to me; no mistake about it. I will show you tomorrow.‖ On seeing the Preface the next day, Hsiao purposely pointed out its defects, insisting that it was a tracing, and Pien-ts‘ai no less vehemently insisted its authenticity. Since then, however, Pien-ts‘ai left the Preface on the desk with Wang‘s calligraphic letters that Hsiao brought over, practicing on them. Thus it was that Hsiao‘s intimate comings and goings were taken for granted in the temple. The time was ripe, Hsiao thought. When Pien-ts‘ai was out, Hsiao came claiming to fetch for him something he forgot, let a boy-guard open the door into Pien-ts‘ai‘s study, and took all Wang‘s pieces. Hsiao then went to the local authorities, announced his identity and his royal mission, summoned Pien-ts‘ai to his august presence of Inspector General, and said goodbye. It was too much for Pien-ts‘ai in his eighties—he fainted, and within a year, he died, without eating much. Hsiao on his part was greatly rewarded and promoted. The emperor then ordered the Preface to be copied by several notable calligraphers of the day and distributed to the luminaries of the day. This was a story 20 See 伏見冲敬‘s summary of it in 東晋王羲之蘭亭叙七種, 東京二玄社, 1988, pp. 60-62. It is taken from one of the oldest legends on the matter, 何延之‘s 「蘭亭記」.
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supposedly told by Yüan-ssu (元素), a disciple of Pien-ts‘ai‘s; a sad inhumane story it was indeed.
This long touching story conveys, as no other medium can, the long unbearable pathos lasting more than ten generations and beyond till today. To balance off this sad story, here is one healing story on Chih-yung (智永) who devoted thirty years to writing 800 copies of ―Thousand-Word Poem 千字文‖ and deposited them in 800 temples. Its one version has been my personal intense delight. This version makes me gaze and gaze at it, till I get so relaxed as to facilitate my bowel21 movement. So, ancient calligraphy has deep effects on bodily health today; it is my season of spring. Even Needham in England fell in love with calligraphy, and then with China, as to devote his life compiling China‘s gadgetry,22 and also so much so that removing calligraphy removes Pien-ts‘ai‘s life. (3) Such a story of the touching I-It attachment simply brands itself into our hearts and bodies. It is no longer a simple It but consumes and heals our whole beings, as the Preface and Chih-yung did in above stories. The It shades into the I-Milieu where a thing to which one is attached is the world wherein one breathes and is invigorated, so much so that removing it removes one‘s life, as the story above shows. ―It‖ is now ―milieu‖-environment. The senior folks deprived of their job-environment upon retirement are as mothers deprived of their babies in whom they live—they die early. The Milieu of life is life itself to any living being; yet it is itself hidden as air from one‘s awareness, until it is removed. Culture shock suffered by moving somewhere else than one‘s birthplace is as painful as a fish thrown into alien water. Everyone knows when the spring comes, even kids welcome it singing, ―The spring came! Spring came! Where has it come? It comes to the hills, it comes to the villages, it 23 comes to the fields!‖ Still, no one can exactly point at it, for the spring is not an ―it,‖ an object to be separated, specified. Wild flowers say, ―The spring is here‖ but they are not spring, or are they? Spring is ―here‖ showing in them; spring-―milieu‖ just enfolds us all, and birds chirp spring, grass turns green shy and tender. I take my cap off, and spring warms up into me, as I walk on breathing birds and grass. The spring is that in which we feel we are, all balmy, when/where we relax, smile, and take a deep breath afresh, alive out of chilly winter. The season is such a life-milieu, as unmistakable as it is elusive, impossible to objectify. So is every morning, the tender dawn of myriad all. To be a friend to someone is to be the dawn of the spring in which someone springs into herself. Friendship is a spring to inter-existence to authentic existence. We shifted our gaze from our hugged It to our enwrapped Milieu, and It-in-Milieu leads us to friends to make us be. If friends inter-birth our beings as spring, then loss of friendship is loss of life in winter, even if those persons are still alive. We attend their mourning again 21 The version is 「智永草書千字文」 published by 臺南市大眾書局，民72. It is my treasure. Oddly, the same version, 隋智永：關中本千字文，東京二玄社，2007, is more expensive and less good for my taste, at least. 22 Joseph Needham compiled 24 volumes of Science and Civilisation in China (Cambridge University Press) since 1954, still adding. His project began at him practicing calligraphy in England, told of by Simon Winchester, The Man Who Loved China, HarperCollins, 2008, p. 45. Sadly, he collected gadgetry, not theory. His ―dexterous China,‖ not inept mandarin, gives us smile; his China as hand-nimble and theory-blind sheds our tears. Our tears in smile began at Needham‘s practice of calligraphy. 23 ―春が來た! 春が來た! どこに來た？ 山に來た，里に來た，野にも來た!‖ sing Japanese kids!
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and again, silently bewail their absence, so sad; we cannot even cry. While describing friendship, China is silent about this sad incident, while Thoreau expresses it this way, 24 perhaps hiding his sobs : We lose our friends when we cease to be friends, not when they die. Then they depart; then we are sad and go into mourning for them. Death is no separation compared with that which takes place when we cease to have confidence in one with whom we have walked in confidence, when we cease to love one whom we had loved, when we know him no more. When we look for him and cannot find him, how completely is he departed!
It is an eternal winter when everything withers, no life but a blanket of chill, of snow. Spring cannot be found here. It is sad chilly winter-milieu. Friendship is weather of personal living. It can vanish. We cannot directly describe how indispensable the Milieu is, however; we must appeal to indirection via storytelling of things in that milieu, and those ―things‖ are things of I-Thou and I-It. The I-Milieu appears only via I-Thou and I-It, to which we attend. They are the objects of our intending; in our awareness that we are; we are aware of Thou and It, in a certain Milieu. The Milieu does not exist without Thous and Its, while Thous and Its do not exist without their Milieu. Asked how he could live in din of horse buggies and not hear it, poet T‘ao Ch‘ien said ―heart distanced, place self-retire,‖ and casually picked flowers at eastern hedge, gazed long at southern hills in dusk air suffusing hills, dotted by flying birds paired encircling, and sighed, ―herein is real sense, want to explain, already forget words.‖ Two points appear. One, the ―place‖ and the ―sense‖ is the milieu of the heart, and two, the milieu can be intimated only by describing casual incidents in it. So here is an interesting situation. As soon as we are aware of our Thous and our Its, they surround us to become our world/environment/Milieu in which we are. It now infuses us with Thou-ish style and It-ish atmosphere, and that in our own way, and then we note that all these Thou, It, and Milieu inter-infuse. Two examples may help to explain this strangely complex yet utterly familiar ordinary life-situation. Example One: This was how I enjoyed the spring. As I was enchanted by springchirpings of the birds, I realized that I was unwittingly switching back and forth between listening to their songs and letting go of them, as it were. I allowed them to seep into me while I merely steeped myself—bathed—in them. Whereupon I suddenly realized that I steeped myself in them as I listened to them, and listened to them as I was engulfed in them. Here I was in them without losing me as I listened to them; in fact, my attention was sharpened by being thus enchanted. Both were there with me—my awareness of them and my enjoyment in them unawares. The in-milieu enjoyment attends the enjoyment of-Thou-It of my attending. For me the birds are my Thou and my It, to compose my milieu that is my spring all over me. This is the case now even when birds are not singing, as they sing silently in me. No birds singing for two mornings now. What happened? Silent spring is no less dreary than silent winter. O I hear some! Ugly cute squawking! But how rare, in the first warm sun, 24 ―1850: age 32-33: After January 5‖ in I to Myself: An Annotated Selection from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau, ed. by Jeffrey S. Cramer, Yale University Press, 2007, p. 44. This is the only description that I could find of such loss, anywhere.
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the morning sun since after several days of chill! Now, I hear one faint chirp, and one more! O how I missed you, birdies! There they are again, chirping! My god, they are chirping! And then they stopped. Dogs keep barking. I have found my own rhythm walking, slow at my pace. It‘s getting warm, in my winter morning walk. Dried leaves on sidewalk have now been swept away clean. I miss them. Birdies are nowhere to be heard. I miss doves cooing the other morning as I walked right here. They are so loud in their silence. They are my Thous my Milieu. Example Two: Now we can understand the mother-child relation, the basic originative human relation of humanity. The mother is both the Thou-meeting and the Milieusurrounding the baby, both vital to him. The baby is in turn both the Milieu where the mother breathes her life and the Thou to whom she attends with constant caring solicitude; her cares It-arrange for his growth in which Mom grows, and their Thous and her It blend into a unique Milieu, as their air to inter-enliven their Thous. Thus in It-birds in Thou-birds Milieu and mother-baby as Thou-Milieu inter-growing, they tune in Thous and Its, to gently shape a specific Thou-air and It-style of life we live. These relations can negatively extrapolate into a network of conspiracy to 9/11 Tragedy. Importantly, storytelling alone can evoke these life-and-death relations, pro and con. Journalism is a poignant art of daily storytelling. Now we are convinced of a right answer to our old persistent question, ―Why do we tell stories?‖ Our storytelling somehow makes deep sense of all this life drama; storytelling makes a felt story-sense of all life‘s routines and even absurdities. We cannot help mumbling about what goes on, and our mumble makes a story that somehow comforts us by giving us an orientation inexpressible otherwise. That was what happened to the story of Wang‘s ―Preface‖ cited above, and since then we have been rehearsing stories one after another. Today journalism is the science as science is the journalism—of storytelling of life. Journalism journeys through life as science knows life, both spinning out a new story a day. Kids do so at the crack of every dawn, to powerfully pulse into tomorrow. I dreamed of telling a tiny boy to use his tender palm to cup and reflect his warm breath into his freezing nose. He did, clumsily, and I awoke. His wobbly palm is still here, and I am so very happy. His palm is my dawn. Now, to mix palm-It as kid-Thou in my Milieu of Nature is agrarian revolution, of today‘s technology in Japan.
AGRICULTURE IN TECHNOLOGY IN JAPAN25 Here is an amazing story of today‘s Japanese technology as agrarian. We often take agriculture as a dated primitive engagement now replaced by efficient industry and technology today. This section contends that precisely this ―dated‖ agriculture is the green salvation of today‘s technology the destroyer of nature and humanity. Japan leads the world in infusing the spirit of agriculture into science/technology/industry. Japanese farmers treasure land as gold, cherishing the ―family‖-community in loving land-cultivation together. Such agrarian sensitivity pervades Japan‘s ecological industry. Agrarianism is an agricultural way of life, to love/respect Nature, to live with it on it, not off it over it; the land is an undercurrent that nourishes its science/industry today. This section 25 My dear student Miss Jessica Pue‘s permission to adapt her detailed essay on this theme is deeply appreciated.
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tells this exciting story of ―agricultured‖ technology in ecological industry, for our whole world to follow to thrive together in nature. Agrarianism is our global future. Ancient Japanese lovingly cultivated their precious land for centuries, and their agrarian attitude survived nineteenth century industrialization that killed traditional institutions to create an industrialized veneer. We now tell the story of (1) Japan‘s traditional agrarianism, (2) destruction of its agrarian institutions by industrialization/urbanization, and then (3) the persistence of agrarian traits/attitudes today (4) to nourish Japanese science/industry, based on (5) agrarian principles that forebodes well for (6) the future green world.
1. Respectful Oneness with Nature—Japan’s Traditional Agrarian Lifestyle Japan‘s ―agrarian attitude‖ is a respectful intimate identification with nature as typified in its sociocultural life, rooted/thrived in ancient times, and went underground in the Tokugawa era. Japan‘s rocky, mountainous terrain limits cultivation to a fraction of its tiny islands; people developed an intensive small-scale agriculture to treasure Mother Nature. Because life totally depended on scarce arable land a tiny plot was prized as gold.26 Intense cultivation familiarized farmers with their land, and many generations‘ landcultivation intensified oneness with the soil. All this led in turn to close family ties working together and their cooperation and sharing resources led to village camaraderie. Treasuring Nature led to its reverence in nature-religion, and they appealed to Naturedeities kami to protect them from sickness/catastrophe and for good harvest. Thus geography shaped Japanese agrarian life-patterns far back in history, deeply attached to land, and tightly bonded them as family-community of intensive land-cultivation, in a filial religion of the spirit of Nature-reverence.
2. Destruction of Japan’s Agrarian Institutions by Industrialization/Urbanization Meiji Restoration (1868) swiftly industrialized Japan into Western lifestyle, uprooting the above traditional agrarian institution in the family, rural villages, religion, and annual events. One: Agrarian kinship bonds assured support of cohesive farming community, and then, outside hirelings came in to loosen family farming,27 and individualism came to choose one‘s own work.28 Young folks moved to cities en masse for lucrative factory or office jobs. New city-dwellers with different work-styles separated rural families spatially and then culturally. Families fell apart. Two: Family land-ownership vanished in government annexation or administration under new townships to benefit a few VIPs.29 Three: Modern transportation brought new culture, and belief in ―taboos‖ on childbirth or death faded, for urban situation prevented their observance, and village taboos lost authority as no harm came on their violation.30 The 26 Shoichi Watanabe, The Peasant Soul of Japan, NY: St. Martin‘s Press, 1989, p. 10. 27 Kunio Yanagida, ed., Japanese Manners and Customs in the Meiji Era, Tokyo: Ōbunsha, 1957, p. 105. 28 Ibid., 109. 29 Ibid., 78-79. 30 Ibid., 305-308.
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government banned ―socially disruptive‖ beliefs of fox-messengers of agriculture-god, Inari, to possess people, to pit ―possessed‖ houses against ―unpossessed‖ ones31; Western education of mechanism dismissed spell-casting. Finally, the government dropped traditional lunar calendar for Western solar calendar and created new less meaningful national holidays, e.g., Emperor‘s Birthday.32 Traditional agricultural festivals lost fascination for city-dwellers who with a little money could easily afford entertainment any day.33 The ancient festivals and holidays on the lunar calendar were essential to marking seasons and giving relief from taxing farmwork. Stopping farming stopped observing these special events, severing vital links to Nature.
3. Agrarian Undercurrent in Modern Japan Yet agrarian attitude continued in clan loyalties in city, village spirit of cooperation, religious practices, farming holidays, and old festivals. Clan loyalties stayed. Young people in cities still felt obligated to fight for financial success to bring honor to families.34 They preferred hardship to bringing shame to the family. City employers preferred applicants from their own villages to strangers.35 Villagers formed cliques in companies, schools, and political parties in the same city. Provincial rulers in the city sponsored education of youths from their own villages.36 Religious practices survived despite government proscription and education. People observed ―immoral‖ bon festival (when spirits from hell roam about the earth), carried talismans or held rituals to fend off bad fortune (―small pox deity‖). They developed new festivals of old village in schools (organized sports, picnics), new conscripted army (feasts for new recruits).37 Fortunetellers advice on decisions to build a house, change residence, or adopt a new method of tilling38; fortunetellers fulfill old needs that new institutions could not satisfy. It is thus that Japan retained ancient agrarian values within modern industrial society, with closeness to Nature at the base, which have positive impacts on Japan‘s industry.
4. Japanese Industry Nourished/Directed by Agrarianism These agrarian life-patterns merged with Western cultural elements to distinctively shape Japanese industry. Japanese industry now has ―quality in meticulous details‖; agrarian kinship bonds re-configured modern workplace; Japan molds the society to fit traditional values; love of Nature ecologically shapes industry; and infusing industry, technology, with such love of Nature would lead modern world to an ecological future. Japan‘s detailed quality in manufacturing industrial products came from ancient smallscale, intensive farming, where attention to details gave quality on the smallest scale. In 1979, 31 Ibid., 309. 32 Ibid., 255-257. 33 Ibid., 273. 34 Ibid., 113. 35 Ibid., 78. 36 Ibid., 102. 37 Ibid., 267. 38 Ibid., 315.
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Hewlett Packard reported that Japan‘s microchips had a defect rate one-tenth of US ones. 40 Sony introduced its revolutionary pocket-sized transistor radio. Detroit faced competition as American consumers turned to fuel-efficient Japanese cars after the Arab oil embargo in 41 1973. American auto industry collapsed in early 2000s, survived by Japan‘s Honda, Toyota, and others. In the past, working on tiny plots, Japanese farmers had to coax every bit of soil into productive harvest, and so learned to appreciate compactness, high quality, and the greatest yield, to pervade ingenuity with tight quality control. This effort at quality control is now the entire workforce‘s duty, not just overseers‘. Employee loyalty to their own company is a legacy of farmers‘ tight kinship bonds; 42 workers often forego vacation to show devotion. Japan has the fewest strikes, often symbolic, than other nations. Art Buchwald was surprised to see employees with red headbands showing dissatisfaction with the management, yet continue to be hard at work; 43 ―they work even harder and with more proficiency‖ to appeal to their bosses‘ consciences. Executives look out for employees‘ interests to assure company cohesion and loyalty; 44 employees are never asked to serve under someone their age or younger. Lay-offs are avoided in the lifetime employment system, and top management suffers the largest pay cuts 45 in tough times. The management is head of the family, directing family activities to protect/promote the clan. Employees are family members, hard at work for the defense/prosperity of the clan. Company‘s farmer-family security fulfills the amae-need, our desire to presume another‘s goodwill, to enjoy an innermost circle where we are permitted some self46 indulgence, perhaps because (though Doi did not say so) of Japan‘s agrarian family cohesion, a must for collective survival. Employees see themselves as members of a team, identified to outsiders not by position but by company name. 47 Company sports teams, vacation resorts, and field days foster familial solidarity. Group cooperation is encouraged by ringisei, conducting meetings for consensus over personal 48 opinion. Such agrarian shaping of modern industry beckons Japan to many unique prospects industrial, technological, and scientific. Japanese resentment of Western modernity originated in agrarian environmental respect. As gaudy Western products offend Japanese aesthetics, so must Western industry‘s disregard 49 of the environment, for profit at all cost (a contradiction!) offend Japan‘s historic love of
39 John Hunter Boyle, Modern Japan: The American Nexus, Ft. Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993, p. 378. 40 Ibid., 374-375. 41 Ibid., 368. 42 Edwin O. Reischauer, The Japanese Today, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988, p. 324. 43 Boyle, Modern Japan: The American Nexus, op. cit., p. 378. 44 Reischauer, The Japanese Today, op. cit., p. 321. 45 Ibid., p. 321. 46 Takeo Doi and John Bester (trans.), The Anatomy of Dependence, NY: Kodansha International, 1973, p. 28. 47 Reischauer, The Japanese Today, op. cit., pp. 323-324. 48 Takeo Doi, tr., Mark A. Harbison, The Anatomy of Self: The Individual Versus Society, NY: Kodansha International, 1986, p. 35. 49 Profit cannot obtain by costing it. Besides, as we short-sightedly abuse our planet today to secure our own comfort, convenience, and wealth, we most assuredly risk destroying our future in which to enjoy them.
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Nature. Against them, Japan can draw on its agrarian roots to prosper nature-loving technology, to prosper all. Japanese scientists have dedicated shrines to laboratory animals, honoring them as ―comrades‖ who sacrificed their lives to scientific progress. Were this attitude to pervade all science/industry, Japan would change our views and behavior toward Nature where we breathe. Japan is ready to lead the world to ecologically sound technology in auto-industry, transportation industry, factory designs, and government policies. Japan produces fuel-efficient hybrid gasoline-electric cars that combine an efficient gasoline engine and an electric motor to emit one-tenth the pollutants of standard cars, and fuel-cell vehicles that produce electricity by mixing hydrogen and oxygen electrochemically 50 to emit the ―waste‖ of water. The continuance of this trend in auto-industry and its further application to other clean, energy-efficient technologies shows Japan‘s environmental 51 concern in industry. The 500 Series shinkansen between Tokyo and Hakata in northern Kyushu maximizes speed, safety, and comfort, and minimizes environmental impact with a novel aerodynamic 52 design and reduced noise. Japan plans an Intelligent Transport System to connect people, roads, and vehicles via a data communications network, cutting exhaust gases by reducing acceleration/deceleration. Drivers could pass through tollgates without stopping, for the 53 transaction occurs instantly by on-board equipment with a roadside computer. By 1998, Asahi Breweries had converted all its plants to zero-emissions by recycling 54 excess yeast for use in foods and pharmaceuticals. The Ministry of International Trade and Industry gives tax incentives to research to find energy efficient technologies. In 1993, the government initiated ―The New Sunshine Program‖ to speed development of renewable energy sources and advanced fossil fuel use. Relatively high energy prices and 3% consumption taxes on refined oil products, natural gas, and electricity, urge responsible 55 energy use. Thus with environmental respect Japan surpasses the West in reducing industrial pollution and in conserving energy. Their automobiles run cleanly, public transportation combines speed and safety with energy-efficiency, and factories produce little pollution. Government policies reinforce technological innovations, for people and corporations to use energy prudently. Reverence for Nature sustains environmentally sound science, technology, and industry. Western technology is based on abstract objective science to separate human subjects from Nature, to exploit/manipulate, to ruin Nature and humans. Japanese technology should continue to build on concrete human-involved nature-friendly science. Concrete theories or 56 perhaps meta-theories (Shinto Kamis) show human intimacy with Nature, Nature-dependent 50
Yahoo! News: Asia, ―Asian carmakers tout weird and wacky designs‖ 25 Oct. 2001
53 Ibid. 54 Ibid. 55 Environmental Review: Japan, June 1995 56 Wu shows how to concretely theorize space (313-42) and time (342-85) in On the “Logic” of Togetherness, Leiden: Brill, 1998.
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humans tilling soil, managing matters, thriving with and within Nature. The true scientific spirit is agrarian, following Nature (―objectivity‖) and becoming its part to prosper with it (―ecology‖). Ecology is agrarian.
5. Conclusion: Future World Significance of Japanese Agrarianism In conclusion, two caveats must be entered. One, concrete evidence for Japan‘s agrarian science/technology is purposely drawn from the relatively early period of the Meiji era, the beginning of Japan‘s modernization, to end in 1990s before the bursting of the economic bubble—to point out Japan‘s undeniable cultural roots, its agrarian tradition. Two, we admit that Japan is one of the world‘s worst polluted nations. Technological reclaiming of natural environment is like firemen belatedly facing forest fire. Industrial and commercial wastes pile up all over these tiny overpopulated islands; agrarian technology seems a rearguard spraying of water drops on the raging fire. For all this, being not far behind Japan in environmental devastation, the West has no historical/cultural basis on which to repair horrendous damages inflicted by its technological disregard of Nature. Japan has; its agrarian roots infusing respectful harmony with nature into calculative/mechanical technology, is not only unique to Japan, but the one essential to, and humanity‘s sole history-rooted hope for, saving the eco-fragile global tragedy today. We fervently hope that Japanese age-old love of Nature would vigorously spread to the entire 57 world in technology. The pivot of modernity, in Japan and in the West, turns on attitude and perspective. The West dropped, in the humanistic Renaissance, the classical notions of things‘ desire to ―fall‖ to reach the center of the universe (Aristotle), or things having the ―conatus‖-desire to be as they are (Spinoza). The West now takes nature to be a big machine to objectively observe, conquer, and manipulate (Bacon), that is, to exploit to benefit its human master alone. A machine is made of disposable, dispensable, and displaceable/replaceable parts, each bit as separate and alone as every other. From such a mindset came the Western ideal of clarity, objectivity, analysis, manipulation, and individualism, and soon came the culture of throwaway disposables and planned obsolescence, i.e., planned wasting. The recent vogue of recycling shows a belated awareness of the disastrous consequences of such cultural attitude and lifestyle that governs science, technology, and industry. An alternative mindset is a sense of belonging, a pride of being an interdependent indispensable part of a respected Whole, eager to blend in, contribute to and be nourished by the Whole. This Whole is Nature, expressed in Japan as an age-old agrarian reverence. From such respectful attachment to Whole Nature comes many a distinctive trait. In a holistic attitude, I always watch out for the other guy my brother to care for him. I am distinctly free within my group my community, averse to being at liberty (to stand out) 58 from my family my fatherland. This is group spirit, laboriously building up consensus in 57 Despite such ―pep-talk,‖ a gaping mystery stays on why agrarian Japan was the world‘s worst polluter in the first place. Still, as long as Japan is trying to redress itself with its agrarian attitude, our eyes must be glued to its future; its past Akrasia must yield to its theoretical lament. 58 David Hackett Fischer said, ―The Latin libertas implies separation and independence. The Indo-European root of ‗freedom‘ meant rights of belonging in a community of free people.‖ See his Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History of America‟s Founding Ideas, Oxford University Press, 2005.
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good ―group think,‖ not blindly following the mob in pecking order. It is a rainbow coalition blending varied hues into a multicolored kaleidoscope, much more than coming to be a 59 monochrome society, in fact, distinct from such society. As a result, people see each other as comrades and fellow partakers of the community of Nature. They share destinies to co-thrive, respect one another and work together. Communal spirit flows through companies and research teams, and is extended to non-living things, including machines, garbage, and cars, to extend to myriad all in Nature. Care is expended on each machine, even each part of each machine, as if it were a part of human life. Machines are made for safety and built to last to zero-waste. Garbage is carefully managed to generate heat for the city. Environmentally friendly cars and gadgets are produced. Environmental pollution is a serious public felony (kōgai), a crime against Nature. 60 Of course, American Indians, Indians, and Chinese also have such an agrarian mindset, but only in Japan does this attitude infuse, nourish, and direct today‘s science and technology. In sum, beneath a modern veneer, Japanese people are basically agrarian. During the Meiji era, the nation drastically altered its course to avoid Western domination, changing countless aspects of daily life to accommodate the broad institutional changes that would make Japan an industrial power. Yet Japan‘s autochthonous needs and attitudes have persisted as its agrarian roots that nourish us, to link people to Mother Nature. The old agrarianism remains in Japan intertwining with modern Western elements, shaping Japan to ecologically manage Nature. An agrarian attitude of reverential attachment to Nature has transformed modern Japan into one both agrarian and industrialized, providing unique prospects for the ecological future of Japan. This Japanese appreciation of Nature can transform science, industry, and technology worldwide to save nature and humanity. Perhaps this ―postmodern revolution‖ will show in industrial products designed to suit the Japanese love of the environment, or the investment of science and technology with reverence for the sacred Nature and all beings sacred, sentient and non-sentient. This new Post-Industrial Revolution is a movement away from our modern destructive course, with Japan leading the West. Yet, paradoxically, Japan‘s scrupulous reverence of Nature and its cooperative cultivation comes from its ―idleness‖ to give room to others and letting things be. This is because ―respect‖ of others implies letting them be while one stays behind, and staying behind is an attitude of idleness, i.e., not moving on one‘s own, but support others to work together. Respectful camaraderie shows itself in ―idleness.‖
ON IDLENESS Suppose we ask what it is that enables Japan to engage in ecologically conscientious science and technology. An answer to it is quite refreshing: It is that Japan can afford to love nature, for Japan is infused with reverence to things that simply are there and just happen.
59 This is to oppose taking holism as agreement by Amitai Etzioni (The Monochrome Society, Princeton University Press, 2001). 60 As an emerging superpower in science and technology, China is also exerting its autochthonous influence on world science and technology.
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Such sensitivity often has action prudently idled. An idled activity is not lazy inaction. Idleness here finds rich funds of stories. To begin, we are amazed at having so many synonyms on idleness—idle, indolent, lazy, 61 and slothful—yet no dictionary to my knowledge notes the distinction among them. Still, China and Japan note that their distinction critically sobers us. There is ―sloth,‖ the last deadly sin, that rots the self, and there is ―idleness‖ judiciously refraining from vain struggles to cultivate authenticity, never ―help growth,‖ Mencius warns (2A2). Sloth decays; idling can edify. The distinction is subtly crucial. Chinese people idealize and perform ―idleness.‖ In Confucius it became the princely one retiring from the world-in-chaos, not irritated at being unrecognized. Impressed, his disciples let it be the last of the triplet sighing long to initiate his Analects. Chuang Tzu went further, with two stories toward the end of Chapter Seventeen, ―Autumn Waters 秋水,‖ as follows. Chuang Tzu was fishing at the P‘u River. King Ch‘u dispatched two officials to him, saying, ―I wish to encumber you with my realm.‖ Holding the fishing-rod, without turning, Chuang Tzu said, ―I heard that Ch‘u has a sacred tortoise already dead for 3,000 years. The King keeps it, clothed, boxed, on top of the ancestral temple. Now, would this tortoise rather be dead bones and honored, or would it rather be alive and drag its tail in the mud?‖ The two officials said, ―it would rather be alive and drag its tail in the mud.‖ Chuang Tzu said, ―Go away! I‘ll drag my tail in the mud.‖ Hui Tzu was a chief minister of Liang; Chuang Tzu went to see him. Some told Hui Tzu, saying, ―Chuang Tzu is coming to replace you to be the minister.‖ Alarmed at this, Hui Tzu searched three days and three nights throughout the state. Chuang Tzu went and saw him, saying, ―In the south there is a bird whose name is phoenix, do you know of it? Starting at South Sea to fly to North Sea, it rests on no tree but the Wu-t‘ung, eats nothing but the Lien fruit, drinks nothing but from the sweetest spring. Just then an owl that got a rotten rat, looked up at the phoenix flying by and glared, saying, ―Shoo!‖ Now, having your state of Liang, do you want to shoo me?
We have overshot ourselves. We have unwittingly surveyed two fascinating implications of ―idleness,‖ both subtly cultural—Judeo-Christian, on one hand, and disarmingly SinoJapanese, on the other. The active Judeo-Christian tradition has a periodic practice of the ―Sabbath‖ rest from work, yet, surprisingly, Christian ―theology of the Sabbath‖ is yet to emerge out of millennia of reflection. To Jews‘ angry query on why he healed on the Sabbath, Jesus said curtly, ―My Father is at work even till now,/ and so I am at work too,‖62 his healing merely reflected God
61 ―All the heat of the Day they idle it under some shady Tree.‖ ―Plough-Monday was an idle day,‖ a day of celebration. ―A good idle ashore would be very pleasant.‖ ―Cecily let her fingers idle upon the keys.‖ ―A clear brown brook idles through the pastures.‖ Ms. Pue surmises ―idle‖ as verb can connote something positive, negative, or neutral, but she can not find its adjective use as anything else than negative—at most frivolity, quite different from the Chinese/Japanese take on idleness. All are examples of positive connotation on ―idle‖ from Oxford English Dictionary. Also, ―Let the car sit with the engine on ‗idle‘ for a while so the heater will warm up the car.‖ Sadly, examples on positive use of ―idle‖ are so few and far apart in English. I had to rely on Dr. E. Bowers and Ms. J. Pue to find these precious few examples. 62 John 5:17, Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John, The Anchor Bible, 1966, p. 212; his exegesis on the Sabbath (pp. 216-217) has no Sabbath-rest as work—the central enigma in this saying of Jesus. God‘s work feeds (John 4:34), so do Jesus works on the Sabbath; its rest is acts of love, says William Temple
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the Father‘s customary work on the Sabbath his rest, for ―sabat‖ ―rest‖ conduces creative work. No thinker has even noted this obvious paradox: Why is work-stop ultimate work? What does it mean? 63 Well, Sabbath has a surprising wealth of implications. The Sabbath Year releases debtors and bond-slaves, rests the land from sowing, reaping, or pruning. Rest restores, to renew, release, and resurrect, in short, to make whole, i.e., to heal and save. Jesus releases us from years of bondage in illness, to heal us. During the Sabbath period Christ died and resurrected to grant us life into our resurrection/salvation, ―today.‖ This is the time of arrival, of final harvest, of final judgment, of ultimate Paradise, New Jerusalem night-less.64 Sabbath rests us to new active life. Thus the God of Sabbath-rest never slumbers so we can sleep in peace; Jesus has nowhere to pillow his head so we can go to him as our bird-nest and foxhole. The Lord of Hosts, Sabaoth God, is really the Sabbath God who hides his right hand behind the left, our Shade secretly birthing, nurturing, and rebirthing us.65 Daily healing, medical or mental, re-creates life, life-rejuvenation is the first-fruit of the final New Creation, and both events are cosmically synonymous with the Sabbath that is the crowning creation of the Six Days of Divine Creation.66 Sabbath crowns creation, the height of activity that goes on to create and re-create. Armed with this Christian meaning of ―Sabbath,‖ we now enter the world of Asian ―idleness.‖ We feel a sea change, a continental shift, as we read Tanizaki.67 ―To be forewarned is to be forearmed.‖ So I forewarn you, his reader; you cannot be forearmed! Tanizaki meanders
(Readings in St. John‟s Gospel [1939, 1940], Wilton, CT: Morehouse Barlow, 1985, pp.107-108). No explanation is given. 63 Dear Pastor Chuck: I am sure you know this book (a bit wordy) that I read yesterday, The Sabbath, by Abraham Joshua Heschel (NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1951). He claims (p. 22) that the Sabbath calmly culminates the Divine Six Days of Creation. The Sabbath is the day of His crowning Creation, ―menuhu,‖ the blessed, sanctified ―stillness‖ as it is described in ―the still waters‖ of Psalm 23. For us Christians, Christ died on Friday to calmly lie during the Sabbath, for ―It is accomplished!‖ (John 19:30, Revised English Bible) His Resurrection begins ―the first day of the week‖ (Mt 28:1, Lk 24:1, Jn 20:1) of the New Creation. His Resurrection invites us to partake of his New Week of Creation, and ―the Acts of the Apostles‖ describes its ―First Day of the New Week‖ of the New Creation with us! The ―New Six Days‖ lead up to the cosmic Good Friday in Christ (Mt 24, Mk 13, Lk 21, Rev 1-19) to culminate in the Sabbath of all Sabbaths of All New Creation. Rev. 21-22 describes that Day of ―a New Heaven and a New Earth,‖ ―the New Garden-City in Eden‖ that has the River of Life and the Tree of Life (cf. Gen. 2:9-10) under God the glorious Sun. That will be the Day! The Death of the Messiah by Raymond E. Brown (NY: Doubleday, 1994, two vols.) is too bogged down in exegetical details to note this connection of Christ‘s Death-Resurrection-Eschaton with Sabbath-―the First Day of the Week‖-―the Sabbath of all Sabbaths.‖ Sad. Kuang-ming 64 Genesis 30:22, Deuteronomy 15:1-12, Leviticus 15:1-7, 26:34-35, Ezekiel 37:13, 2Chronicles 36:21, Luke 13:15-1, John 7:23, Mark 16:1, Hebrews 4:7-10 (Eugene H. Peterson), Revelation 22:5. 65 See Psalm 121:3-5, Matthew 8:20, Job 23:9, etc. 66 ―Shabbat‖ is from the verb ―to desist,‖ freeing us from the slavery of daily toil as in Egypt (Deuteronomy 5:15) into being fellow-laborers with God whose work is creation (Exodus 20:8-11) (H. L. Ellison, Exodus, Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1982, p. 110). This interpretation fits with one here on Jesus‘ healing on the Sabbath, that he desists daily human work to do God‘s creative work, i.e., making people whole. Dr. Bowers said that during the Orthodox Shabbat observation no work is done, not even cooking (done in advance), no electric appliances used, and no outside social engagements made as they focus on the family. The family talks and sings together for maybe 24 hours. It helps people iron out family difficulties without distractions; they are forced to get along. Thus the Sabbath creates concord. 67 See 谷崎潤一郎‘s ―懶惰の說‖ in his 陰翳禮讚, 中公文庫, 1975, 2000, pp. 66-91. I considered this fascinating essay in ―Tanizaki‘s ‗Theory of Idleness (Randa no Setsu)‘ and ‗Japanese Philosophy‘,‖ in Why Japan Matters! eds. Joseph F. Kess and Helen Landsdowne, BC, Canada: University of Victoria, 2005, pp. 703-716.
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into an ―idle river‖ meandering in an unsuspected direction, to disarm you into chuckling surprises all over, all the way. He insists that Japan-idleness is not Taoistic or philosophical but ingrained in his cultural soil among common folks, and cites casual examples from China.68 Fastidious cleanliness69 imported from the West denatures us. Pearl-white teeth neatly aligned, forever smiling, bite off our natural tendency to be comfortably dirty—and relaxed. At dinner in formal attire with etiquette at the appointed hour, kills appetite and us. Busily doing self-sacrificial good to the poor, as Salvation Army does, is alien to our Buddhist way of quietly conforming to nature as we idly are. Rousseau‘s aggressive ―Back to nature!‖ is not our relaxed idleness. Do you consume rich beefsteak, then vigorously exercise for stamina? Look at our old ladies sitting motionless in the house all day, on a modicum of pickles barely enough for birds, to live much longer than men. Straining to sing? Isn‘t it comical to strain after playing the music that is supposed to relax listeners? Hum your own tune to enjoy yourself, or better, just hum it in mind, no voice-singing.70 Tanizaki then, surprises us by concluding the essay denying that he is selling idleness, for he himself is studious!71 Studious or no, he is himself. So, now, Tanizaki‘s series of arresting oddities climaxed in such a resounding non sequitur, so openly unadorned and unarmed, to wham us on our clever head. Loitering, he disarms us and makes us laugh—as we wonder what he is up to, and we find nothing. He just comes to us so untidy that we feel we can be untidy as he is. Unhurried, he is all over in nature to put us at ease with ourselves. His essay thus relaxes and refreshes us—naturally. Yet we read it again, and we, without warning, feel its subtlety shimmering throughout in the wisdom of a wrinkled grandpa, untaught, uncouth, an uncarved blockhead.72 Defenseless, he needs no defense, and we simply cannot win him; we are won over. That‘s the disarming power of powerless idleness, this Tanizaki‘s rejuvenating essay, dawdling along. For all his stunts, Tanizaki is just following the age-old Japanese tradition shown in Tsurezuregusa (idle-grass).73 This is in line with China where we all find the secret irresistible strength of no-do, wu-wei 旡為, merely flowing along with the tides of nature inside and out. Our no-do is a discerning idleness that follows nature naturally, fully aware unawares. In all, we feel—not see—the atmosphere shift. The Sabbath is rest from work to rejuvenate for work. The Lord of the Sabbath is Luther‘s deus absconditus (hidden God) who works incognito, letting his Son be buried on the Sabbath to heal us into the Final Judgment. Sino-Japanese people idle 懶惰 in indolence, slackening, sloppily attentive-inattentive, and slow to move (怠けること, 物臭さ, 億劫がり). Sages hide among thugs, as Nature thrives 68 They are further lustily enriched by Lin Yutang, though Tanizaki did not mention Lin. See ―The Cult of the Idle Life‖ in Lin Yutang‘s The Importance of Living, NY: John Day, 1937, pp. 152-165. 69 ―Cleanliness is next to holiness‖ is simply an anathema to Tanizaki; it kills us into holiness. 70 This confession reminds us of Chuang Tzu‘s (2/43) saying, ―‗No completion, no defect‘ is Chao the musician not drumming, not strumming.‖ 71 To think of it, we cannot ―sell‖ idleness any more than we can command our friend to be on her own! 72 Lao Tzu‘s ―uncarved block 樸‖ has this human implication of being a blockhead (chs. 15, 19, 28, 33, 37, 57). Cf. a subsequent masterpiece, Pao P‟u Tzu Mr. Hug-Block, or Mr. Blockhead, 抱朴子, 臺北市三民書局, 民90, in two thick volumes. 73 吉田の兼好著, 徒然草, 西尾實, 安良岡康作校注, 岩波文庫, 1928, 2001. Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenkō, translated by Donald Keene, NY: Columbia University Press, 1967, 1998.
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in no-do 旡為, even in tsuanmi! Sabbath-rest acts to nurture74; Sino-Japanese idleness excludes acts, with a wink. Now, what does it mean to have ―idleness‖ in life-as-activity? Idleness is free leisurely storytelling, continual telling, forever evolving as history does. It must imply that life is always on its way on its own, not to be disturbed; this ―not‖ is what being idle is, our life moving on its own. This is the paradise of the ―underachievers.‖75 Many so-called ―underachieved people‖ want to simply have an ―easy job that pays well,‖ meaning they want to enjoy being on their own, easygoing as they develop themselves. Such a lifestyle does not go well with fidgety toil-and-moil trifles of the Western world. The challenge here is to adjust the dominant culture in the West by designing our easygoing to adjust to it.76 Someone may say, ―But all these are cultural matters; Tanizaki‘s idleness applies to the inscrutable Orient alone, as Judeo-Christian ‗Sabbath‘ belongs to the West.‖ This response shows cultural relativism, a copout from hard thinking. The whole ―cultural‖ issue can redound to our mental health, i.e., life‘s health, and the ecological health of nature. This crucial point has an important bearing to Japan‘s agrarian technology. Japan‘s ―idleness‖ amounts to a revolution in Western science and technology that continues to ruin nature, both of Mother Nature and of us people. Intercultural adjustments are significant quite beyond mere cultural realm. Culture mirrors nature in more than one sense. Before going into ―interculture,‖ though, we must take a final look at ―science‖; it surprises us by showing itself as mythological, connecting itself to the ancient roots of humanity.
SCIENCE AND MYTHMAKING We cannot live in incongruities for long; we must connect them in some order out of chaos that ruins things. This ―ordering‖ is done by storytelling to result in cultural mythology and ideology. To describe a culture is to tell its ―story‖ in myths and legends, and even its ―scientific description‖ is a storytelling.77 All this is a given. We are surprised, however, that when such story-order comes about, some sort of novelty to the point of ―revolution‖ also comes about. ―Scientific revolutions, almost by definition, defy common sense,‖ so begins Michio Kaku in his interesting story of theoretical physics in Hyperspace. I cannot distinguish playful Escher from theoretical Hawking; both are fantastic cartoons.78 Facts are stranger than fiction,
74 This is why Bertrand Russell‘s ―In Praise of Idleness‖ merely goes as far as opposition to work beyond necessity and promotion of pursuit of tastes in leisure time, neither of which has much to do with idleness. See his In Praise of Idleness, London: Unwin Books, 1935, 1967, pp. 10-21. This volume has fascinating titles and delivers little. 75 Cf. Benjamin Anastas, An Unachiever‟s Diary, Picador, 2000. It has a slight inconsistency to it, for how could an underachiever manage to write such a great book? 76 This reminds us of a bum in a Tokyo Park challenging a workaholic company executive, told in a 1960 Wright Lecture at Yale Divinity School, quoted as Story Three, in our later pages. 77 Henri Frankfort, et al., Before Philosophy, London: Penguin Books, 1954, pp. 15, 25, 27, 29, 42f, 53f, et passim. 78 Michio Kaku, Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and The Tenth Dimension (Oxford University Press, 1994), NY: Doubleday, 1995, p. vii. M. C. Escher: His Life and Complete Graphic Works, ed. J. L. Locker, NY: Harry N. Abrams, 1992. Stephen Hawking, The Illustrated Brief History of Time and The Universe in a Nutshell, NY: Bantam Books, 2008.
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for fiction is contrived while fact is fashioned natural unawares to stun our awareness; but even fiction is surely stranger than common sense.79 Two points are here. One, science that describes facts must be stranger than common sense. Two, straight folktales and legends are stranger than common sense. Two questions remain, that is, how similar science is to legends in being strange, and how science differs from legends in their shared strangeness. Yet surely all are storytelling stranger than everything we know. M. C. Escher consciously joins fantasy and fact-description, saying,80 I try in my prints to testify that we live in a beautiful and orderly world, not in a chaos without norms, even though that is how it sometimes appears. My subjects are also often playful: I cannot refrain from demonstrating the nonsensicalness of some of what we take to be irrefutable certainties. It is, for example, a pleasure to deliberately mix together objects of two and of three dimensions, surface and spatial relationships, and to make fun of gravity.
Escher‘s graphic works tell stories; each wood block tells an indefinite number of stories. Escher is not alone in mixing ―fact‖ we know and ―fancy‖ we like. Fantastic ancient mythology and tales of The Classic of Mountains and Seas, for example, yields us today veritable ethnological harvests on rituals, medicine, botany, zoology, natural history, and ethnic peoples of the ancient world. Thus we freely make sober academic uses of mythic sagas and legends to gain precious information on ancient days.81 To wonder how ancient bombastic tales could yield to modern scholarship any ―decent academic ethnographical harvests‖ at all is to assume that science and fiction never mix, and this assumption is wrong. Michio Kaku reports that ―Steven Weinberg, who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1979, . . . commented recently that theoretical physics seems to be becoming more and more like science fiction.‖82 In other words, science is advancing toward fiction. How? By ―daring to hypothesize, carefully to demonstrate‖ (Hu Shih) that the hypothesis proposed would simplify, cohere, and unify disjointed theories of science to explain all ―laws of nature.‖ What distinguishes science from fiction, then, is that science proceeds in demonstration of a certain sort while fiction does with another sort.83 The process is the same, from fictive hypothesis to demonstrated science, from science fiction to science that advances to fiction; it is a hermeneutic circle with a vengeance. What excites us is that for Weinberg science is advancing toward science fiction, not the other way around. We can see that the very demonstration process that turns fictive hypothesis into solid science is itself an odyssey of a saga, a story as fascinating as fiction. In
79 Anyone who reads Martin Gardner, The Annotated Alice by Lewis Carroll: the Definitive Edition (1960), NY: W. W. Norton, 2000, and The Lord of the Rings trilogy by J. R. R. Tolkien (1954-1956), will agree. See also Michael Page and Robert Ingren, Encyclopedia of Things That Never Were, NY: Viking Penguin, 1987, 1993. 80 This is quoted in the book cover of F. H. Bool et al., M. C. Escher: His Life and Complete Graphic Work, NY: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1992. 81 See 袁珂譯注, 山海經, 臺灣古籍出版社, 上下卷, 1988, 臺北市里仁書局, 民84, 山海經，臺北市三民書局, 2008, and Anne Birrell, The Classic of Mountains and Seas, London: Penguin Books, 1999. Cf. Elizabeth Wayland Barber and Paul T. Barber, When They Severed Earth from Sky: How the Human Mind Shapes Myth, Princeton University Press, 2004. Not many scholars would use the book of Chuang Tzu, though, as sources of ethnographic studies, it being so ―out of line‖ of everything! 82 Kaku, op. cit., p. 9. 83 It may well be that fiction-writing and storytelling does have its own ―demonstration‖ of at least its internal coherence. It is fair, however, to alert ourselves that story-demonstration is more elusive, if not more complex, than the scientific one, though no less strict and rigorous.
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fact, Kaku‘s description of science is absorbing because it is itself such a fascinating storytelling.84 It is a soberly exciting story telling an excitingly sober story of science. Thus in more storytelling of more demonstration, the more will chaotic hypotheses and disjointed sciences cohere. This process of science is completely open, ever cohering; in science our ―laws of nature‖ turn simpler and more elegant when expressed in a higher unified story, such as a unified field theory of higher order, as stories of ―open coherence.‖85 Does open-endedness mean, then, that all things cultural—Judeo-Christian and SinoJapanese, scientific and mythological—are relative? Are ―all things‖ relative? What does ―relative‖ mean? What does relativism look like from the perspective of cultural storytelling? Let us probe this fascinating twofold theme, culture and relativism, in an intercultural context.
84 Some of other examples of good storytelling on today‘s science are Gary Zukav, The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of New Physics (1979), NY: Bantam Books, 1980, Philip and Phylis Morrison, The Ring of Truth: An Inquiry into How We Know What We Know, NY: Random House, 1987, Robert Gilmore, Alice in Quantumland: An Allegory of Quantum Physics, NY: Springer, 1995, and Stephen Hawking, The Universe in a Nutshell, NY: Bantam Books, 2001. 85 Cf. my The Butterfly as Companion, op. cit., pp. 67-68.
Chapter 4
INTERCULTURE, RELATIVISM Cross-cultural dialogues on values moral and non-moral are rife with problems, and naturally what has been produced so far is quite unsatisfactory.1 Their insufficiencies originate in ―cross-culture‖ that assumes cultures as ―isolated and separate,‖ and so the problem of judging across cultures arises as insoluble. We must instead consider ―interculture‖ rooted in existence we all share as inter-existence, and ―moral values‖ or ―virtues‖ are rooted in existence we humans all share, and so we must begin considering the matter at this basic level. We will strike out our own way from scratch, at the intercultural existential level. We insist that the very word ―culture‖ is already ―interculture,‖ and ―relativism‖ is ―interenrichment.‖ We would convince the reader so with storytelling, as follows. First, ―to be specifically‖ creates existence specific, and specificity is in history expressing ―culture.‖ Against Ricoeur flattening this historic creative be-ing, we say story-of-cultures is a ―circle‖ edgeless and center-less, ever expanding. This is ―relativism‖ of storytelling. Relativistic interculture is then told in a story of ―China written in English,‖ to envision the coming-together of storytelling in China and in the West. Moral debates across cultures shall then turn intercultural give-and-take.
CONCRETE CREATIVITY AS REAL-IZING, STORYTELLING AS COSMOS-“SYSTEMATIC” We begin at the beginning of things, and see how things‘ coming-about is already infused with culture. Let us first consider philosophy in the West.2 Two thinkers in the West claim our attention. They are Martin Heidegger and Gabriel Marcel. We will (A) consider Heidegger, then Marcel from whom we take cues on how existence creates, to (B) connect with culture.
1 See, e.g., Samuel Fleischacker, The Ethics of Culture, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994. Amitai Etzioni, The Monochrome Society, Princeton University Press, 2001, esp. ―Cross-Cultural Moral Judgments,‖ pp. 232245. 2 We consider Western philosophy where ―system‖ tends to be logical. Chinese philosophy is ―story-philosophy‖ and deserves a separate consideration.
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A. Heidegger and Marcel Martin Heidegger is allegedly notorious in abstruse obscurantism on the fundamental ontology that he claims to have discerned and revealed; he awesomely claims that it is the revolution of Western philosophy. A close and delightful reading of his Being and Time (1927)—as lucidly translated by Joan Stambaugh—however, reveals otherwise. I found the clue in her unassuming explanation of factors that makes Heidegger‘s volume difficult to translate. His bountiful neologisms came from everyday German (Befindlichkeit from ―wie befinden Sie sich? How are you doing?‖); he mixes common vocabulary with uncommon meanings (Dasein), and uses traditional philosophical words in untraditional senses (Wahrheit, Sein).3 Being sensitive to his manner of mixing the common with the uncommon, her translation is refreshing, intelligible, and even delightful. We must ask what all this shows. Heidegger shows (a) his familiarity with the traditional thrust of Western philosophizing, yet (b) he constantly gazes at our daily living expressed in our daily language to realize how our ordinary living reveals what it mysteriously means to ―be.‖ (c) These ordinary/mysterious meanings of Being differ so conspicuously from queries and answers in Western philosophy that he had to pronounce the latter mistaken. (d) Thus, he tries to correct it by the raw primordial insights revealed in daily living. (e) The result is that his entire philosophical task has a hard shell that contains a soft core. The shell is asking questions with jargon and system of traditional Western philosophy; the core is exposition of what is at hand in life, again in the traditional manner. All this renders Heidegger awesomely unapproachable—clad in a formidable system and a formidable battery of jargon. Is all this necessary? Doesn‘t our difficulty understanding him show how unsuitable the Western methodology is to his insights? Thus the hard shell of his thinking (that he himself thought was wrong) vitiates the soft core of his concrete insights. The vitiation goes this way. He now thinks about those insights from outside, always circling around them with misplaced jargon.4 His philosophy pursues answers, in the systematic mode of ―Western philosophy‖ he thought was wrong, to the question, ―What is Being?‖ a typical one in ―Western philosophy‖ he thought was wrong. How disastrously ironic it is to judge Western philosophy wrong5 and stay there to pursue the novel insights missed by Western philosophy, and that with the jargon and methodology of ―philosophy‖ he thought was wrong!6 ―Why is all this approach wrong?‖ Well, isn‘t it odd to complain that something is wrong and still stay in it? It is to complain an apple not sweet as melon, and insist on having an apple-that-is-melon-sweet, a contorted garble. Rather, it is to call apple no-sweet-melon, melon sweet-apple, and then complain that apple is no melon. Of course, things get contorted and complex; in their ―precision‖ of his contortion, Heidegger prides himself. What proud exercise in complex futility he generates and conducts! 3 Joan Stambaugh, tr., Martin Heidegger: Being and Time, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996, ―Translator‘s Preface,‖ p. xiii. 4 This feature is most apparent in his aesthetic reflections on arts conveniently anthologized in Poetry, Language, Thought, tr. Albert Hofstadter, NY: Harper and Row, 1971. See also ―The Origin of the Work of Art‖ in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, HarperSanFrancisco, 1977, pp. 143-187. 5 Being and Time, op. cit., I.1. 6 Ibid., I.2.
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The point is clear. If Plato says ―A‖ as only Plato can, then Plato is the one saying-A, and is no other. We cannot complain that Plato-saying-A is wrong, should have said B, and keep saying so in ―Plato‖-way, for Plato-saying-B is no longer the Plato as he is, Plato-saying-A. No wonder Heidegger turns turgid and unapproachable, in contorted garbles of ―philosophical exactitude.‖ He should have first reformed his philosophizing manner and given it a new name, not ―fundamental ontology‖ haunted by the ghosts of ―Western philosophy.‖ Now let us go to Gabriel Marcel. He has no such awkward irony and so he is naturally and subtly complex. On one hand, Marcel is as firmly rooted as Heidegger in Western philosophical tradition7 and is as sensitive to life‘s ongoing as Heidegger. On the other hand, while Heidegger unreflectively sticks to the systematic West in ―fundamental ontology,‖ Marcel champions a ―concrete philosophy‖ of ―critical Socratism‖ that keeps a judicious distance from ―system‖ to end up being systematic unawares.8 Thus, Marcel can puff out offhand astonishing insights, vitally concrete and penetratingly universal. Let us take an example. Marcel in his usual casual pungency noted that ―creativity‖ and ―being‖9 imply each other; to create makes be, and to be creates. He said,10 I am in complete agreement with Mr. Gallagher when he stresses the importance of the following phrase: as soon as there is creation, in whatever degree, we are in the realm of being (p. 84). But the converse is equally true: that is to say, there is doubtless no sense in using the word ―being‖ except where creation, in some form or other, is in view.
Where there is creation there is being, and being is where creation is in view. This twofold statement hits us out of the blue, quite extraordinary. At first, we do not know what to make of it; ―being‖ is such a vague scary word. But slowly as we munch on it, its truth dawns to impress itself on us. Every act, in a most general sense, trivial or momentous, strikes us as being itself in so far as we notice it as such; it is a new creation against the backdrop of all we know. Let us go slow here. Imitation is-not; only initiation is, where authenticity resides. Authenticity is new 11 creation. Each moment is the dawning of an ―inward morning‖ that creates new being. This provocative truth, creation is being, amounts to saying that creation real-izes. That is, creativity changes drab ―nothing‖ into something real, of substance, and so of significance. 7 Marcel studied Josiah Royce a solid Western systematicist, Royce‟s Metaphysics, trs. Virginia and Gordon Ringer, Chicago: Regnery, 1956. 8 To be fair, we must confess that Marcel and M. Merleau-Ponty are poetically perceptive yet hard to feel their poetic cadence, especially in their early volumes. Heidegger‘s poetry is easier to sense. Or perhaps all three have their poetry, and we must be more perceptive to savor their poetic thrusts, each in his distinct pulsation. For all that, Heidegger‘s poeticism jargonizes turgidly; Marcel and Merleau-Ponty poetizes not poetically but philosophically, in a typically Western manner. 9 ―Being‖ is Heidegger‘s and Marcel‘s favorite word. Marcel strikes out in a fresh surprising direction on this word, while Heidegger seems to clothe himself with contorted obscurantism on it. 10 Gabriel Marcel‘s Foreword to Kenneth T. Gallagher‘s The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel, NY: Fordham University Press, 1962, p. xiii. The whole page and the next explain further as Marcel refers to Gallagher‘s pp. 84-85. Gallagher‘s last chapter criticizes Marcel, yet Marcel‘s Foreword has nothing but thinking further with him. This ―thinking further with‖ is Marcel‘s hallmark, completely displayed in his disarming replies to each critical essay in The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel, eds. Paul Arthur Schilpp and Lewis Edwin Hahn, La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1984. There, Marcel spots the themes he took to be the essayists‘, for which and whom he thanks, then develops them further in his own way, constantly stressing how much he owes them for his insights. It is a true conversation, a ―critical Socratism.‖ It is a sight to behold. 11 This extraordinary phrase is the title of Henry G. Bugbee, Jr.‘s The Inward Morning, NY: Collier Books, 1961, prefaced by Marcel. Bugbee can be called Marcel‘s alter ego.
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Then, against this Western background, Taoists‘ Hun Tun and non-being and Buddhist Emptiness appear with an Oriental stroke of genius, as creativity that makes things of real significance even out of drab, unspecific, and unspecifiable ―nothing.‖ It is a surprising move toward a distinctive creativity; here is a creation of ―nothing‖ that is now something really matters, by remaining precisely an empty nothing. Now, have we noticed here a subtle cultural shift? In the beginning is an act of be-ing that is a creation—that differs in different cultures. In the West, Marcel noted a be-ing that comes out of nothing as a being-creation. In Asia, Taoism and Buddhism noted a nothing that comes out of nothing as a being-creation. ―Being‖ as creation takes on differing hues as it appears out of nothing, in different cultures. All this brings up an important thought on what ―system‖ can mean, again differing as cultures differ. To create is to real-ize, to become concretely real, which is to appear as 13 concresced, coherently, and coherent concrescence is an existential system. In short, to create is to be systematic. At the same time, however, to be creative is to be messy; no time to tidy things up when things constantly erupt to surprise us. Marcel did not say so, but life being novel everyday and novelty being synonymous with being creative, life-coherence cannot by nature be ―systematic‖ in usual logical sense. To be is to create. As being, existence is an emergence of a system-as-concresced; as emergence in creation of being, however, existence is messy, not logically systematic. Being as creation is thus an unsystematic system, logos alogoi. 14 Thus in his sparkling insights, Marcel naturally steadfastly refuses to systematize, and his systematic refusal of creating a system makes a stumbling block to the Western sentiment. Marcel was relegated to oblivion soon after his death; even his great disciple, Paul Ricoeur, came to say very little about him, much less follow his style and steps of thinking. This fact brings us to an important issue of what ―being systematic‖ can mean. I used to distinguish ―systematic‖ in the West from ―coherent‖ in China, and ―being systematic‖ in China from ―having a system‖ in the West. It is time to explain what this distinction means. Let us come back to Marcel. He even refused to be systematic, and Gallagher accused 15 him of being temperamentally incapable of systematization, a sort of being philosophically handicapped, if not unphilosophical. This amounts to criticizing Frederick Delius as incapable of making music because his music is not ―systematic‖ as those of Haydn and Beethoven are, and Picasso as no painter because he violates every traditional painterly canon. Both Delius and Picasso are great artists, however, as long as many generations of listeners and viewers can appreciate both, however much both challenge our ―decent‖ artistic sentiment. Similarly, Marcel is a ―systematic‖ thinker against our canon of system, as long as we who differ from him can understand him and are enlightened about what being systematic
12 See Wu, ―‗Emperor Hundun 渾沌‘: A cultural Hermeneutic,‖ Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, September 2007, pp. 263-279. 13 ―Concrete‖ is literally to be ―concresced,‖ grown-together. 14 Gallagher takes Marcel as a ―relentlessly unsystematic thinker‖ and tries to do justice to his ―elusive‖ thinking (op. cit., p. ix), but did not probe into the depths, nature, and significance of this unsystematic elusiveness, much less devote a chapter to understanding it. Gallagher tends to take it more as obstacle to thinking than as an indispensable opening to a new crucial dimension of/to thinking, as Marcel obviously did. It is not a coincidence that the present volume spontaneously grows coherent and systematic by resolutely refusing a ―systematic‖ format. 15 Ibid., pp. 147-149.
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means in real life of beings thanks to him, though he offends conventional canons of ―system.‖ All this amounts to saying this. ―System‖ signifies universal understandability of sane reasonable coherence in existence. The closer such a lived coherence con-forms to the contours of life élan, the truer to life, the more real, and more genuine the system is to conduce to universal life-enlightenment. Lived coherence is thus the true system. So we can see that Marcel coherent and alive is the most conscientious arch-systematic thinker in the West precisely because he opposes the traditional Western sense of ―system‖ that tends to hermetically seal from lived sinuousness. Storytelling and story-thinking perform such a lived sinuous system, and it is not an accident that Marcel is a musician and a dramatist who constantly refers us to life-drama, telling its stories, whenever things get rough 16 in philosophical reflection. Mind you, such a life-reflection as above on Marcel in the West is impossible in the West. It forebodes cross-cultural interculture; it has to originate in Lao Tzu (73) who has the Heavenly Net sparsely meshed, to flex with life-vicissitudes to leak nothing. The word ―network‖ in fashion today, as a noun and a verb, echoes ancient Lao Tzu‘s cosmic Net. No wonder, almost every traditional Chinese treatise on any theme in life, from fiction, calligraphy, and painting to cooking, medicine, martial arts, and sociopolitical ethics, begins with cosmology to interconnect themes, to network into cosmogony, the story of everything coming to be. That is ―system‖ truly so called. Gabriel Marcel remains, as Martin Buber, a Western thinker echoing Chinese style— concrete, perceptive, spontaneous, peripatetic and unpretentious—and unpredictably systematic. The fact that Marcel is a playwright, pianist, and music and drama critic made him the ―concrete philosopher‖ that he was. Marcel parallels Chinese literati versed in poetry, painting, calligraphy, seal engraving, and in politics, as they were deeply engaged in thinking on life to engage the world. Still, Marcel is alien to ―nothing‖ on which China thrives.
B. Interculture, Life Now, storytelling is such a flexuous ―system‖; if all this above has not told the story of how philosophically and inter-culturally significant ―storytelling‖ is, we do not know what it did. To recapitulate, ex-plicate, and expand on all above, we have six points toward all our life in interculture. One, to be creative is to be (Marcel), to be is to emerge to be-there, to cause the situation to differ from before. To appear existing-as-differing from before is such be-coming process, a process of coming-to-be. This process of appearing to come to differ comes to differ from before and before the beholders. To ―pre-sent‖ is to ―be-before‖ both in time (out of the past) and in space (in front of the beholder). Appearance-before to come-to-be ―presents‖ itself as existence. This appearing process tells a story of be-coming, to grow as Einstein‘s special relativity grew into general relativity, Lewis Carroll‘s wacky Alice‟s Adventures in Wonderland grew into the no less 16 The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel (eds., P. A. Schilpp and L. E. Hahn, La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1984) is a magnificent example of this tendency of his, to always draw on concrete living itself in philosophical reflection, as sharply contrasted with his commentators who are often so abstract, so turgid.
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wacky Through the Looking-Glass, and this process of appearance and growth before its beholders spreads the story to tell and show how things before and things now stand-together, as sy-stem. Thus, we have just proceeded from creativity, through be-ing, be-coming process of coming to be different from before, and appearing (standing-out) as such before its beholders, to storytelling that manifests how things stand-together, which is ―system‖ through time. And this proceeding from-to is itself a storytelling, a lived system in the making, called ―history.‖ Two, ―system‖ has four ingredients. An idea-system appears (a) perceived by usual readers, common audience, to (b) stand together to (c) make sense. (d) To be perceived is perceived by people other than the creative system-teller, thereby to spread from the original system-teller to hearers in other places, other times, and other cultures; such spread is itself a system. A system communicates to spread into a bigger wider-resonating system. Ideas and people come to stand together into a new lived ―system‖ universalizing cosmically. The system of words/ideas is a system of existents, an existential system. Three, how the ideas should properly come to stand-together into a system is dictated by how they would enable perceptive understanding by people in a specific culture, not by preset rules such as logical canons that are after all a fruit of cultural experience of understanding. But how do ideas stand together to induce people‘s understanding? What sort of stand-together of ideas—culture—is it that makes for cultural understanding? It is our natural/cultural mode of daily living that cohere things in sense, to enrich the common mode of living we all in a community share. After all, to write in a specific language is for sharing, for standing together in understanding with readers of the same culture or similar cultures. Logical system across all cultural/historical barriers is a poor way to share, for logical system bypasses an indispensable medium of understanding, specific culture(s), transmitted by intercultural translation; translation is a medium that gathers cultures to become intercultural system. Four, thus the most compelling and effective system is not a logical one but a natural storytelling, sensitively, perceptively laid out, where ideas naturally, culturally gather in spontaneity that is anti-rule, for the ―rule‖ is what elucidates how things stand together. Marcel follows his instinct of dramatic musical rhythm of life. He resonates with Chinese storytellers of reflective life. In their respective cultural ways, Marcel and Chinese people stand together to co-resonate and inter-enrich. Here is a lived system of cosmic interculture. How do they do it? Five, by so perceptively following and explicitly representing the spontaneous hanging together of things as we stand ideas together, our living itself comes to integrate selfreflective way. This is the way of stories telling and spreading. Story forms our system by storytelling to appeal to hearers. This story-system cannot help but expand into all listeners to join them together through time and space to form a net, a process of networking things into a story-system, and to network the story to its readers, thereby to create a ―brave new world‖ of myriad all hitherto unsuspected. This world is an expanding dynamics of system-as-verb. Wilfred Sellars described philosophy as the study of how things in the most general sense hang together in the most general sense. Doesn‘t this description of philosophy describe a story-system? Sellars may not have realized how cosmic a significance his ―the most general sense‖ has. He has just told us a mini-story of how philosophers think, perceive, and describe the system-order of all things, that is, how they stand together to form a ―cosmos‖ in its original sense of comprehensive beautiful order of all things.
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Such description of order tells stories, and philosophers are systematic storytellers of the world. Besides, Sellars may not have realized that ―the most general sense‖ differs as each culture differs from the other, that the Greek-―general‖ is not German-―general,‖ Chinese one, or Spanish one, and that such differences of the ―general‖ tend to gather into the general of all generals that keeps expanding as cultures expand in history. Six, such an expansion of the meaning of ―system‖ is not just an expansion of the scope from the author‘s system-building to embracing the reader into their common system. It is a revolution of the very way of systematic thinking, from thinking-as-logical to thinking-asliving, and from living-in-a-culture to living-adjusting to many living-ways of many cultures, spontaneously, coherently. After all, the familiar steps of logical argument cannot lead us into territories of unfamiliar novelty, and novelty is nature naturing unceasing. Thus, to roam in actuality and do justice to its throbbing bubbling novelty, we must tread the unfamiliarity of logical surprises in the lifeworld faintly smiling, profound while casual in levels of profound senses. It is a revolution from system as logical to system as lived, life-system that distinguishes itself one from another, distinctive as each culture is, to system as life-together that keeps expanding renovating. It is a revolution from thinking as system to community-as-system, that is, system-as-thinking-from-nowhere to system-as-communication to build a community of many cultural meanings and, in the end, the very cosmos as a beautiful system culturally co-implicative and ubiquitous. How does such a living expanding system of things come about? Another favorite teacher of mine, Robert Frost, is here, smiling. He says words would ―fetch‖ from everyday speech of the street to come alive ―unmade,‖ for it is ―made in the united states of nature‖ and, we would add, culture-shaped. First he agrees with poet William B. Yeats that ―all our words to be effective must be in the manner of everyday speech‖; but he is ―sick of people who use only these ready-made words and phrases.‖ He says, ―I like better a boy who invents them for himself—who takes a word or phrase from where it lies and moves it to another place. . . . (D)o you ever get up a new one (new 17 word or phrase)?‖ This moving is to metaphor without using the tired word ―metaphor.‖ We 18 must ―fetch‖ the common words to give them ―a poetic twist,‖ such as ―Are you satisfied?‖ to replace the tired ―How are you?‖ To fetch perceives; to twist tells stories. Actually, metaphor is a thinking verb that spreads thinking this way. Meeting an A, impresses, calls forth, fetches, the thought of B like A but not A. Calling forth B ferries A over to the new similar B to rhyme with A, as a boy points to a giraffe and calls, ―Doggie!‖ to induce laughs of everyone around. The boy is a poet who expands ―dog‖ to include giraffe to include everyone around, ferrying everyone over to an exciting novel territory. Such a delightful story! ―Ferry-over to the new‖ fetches a creation; inter-resembling A and B rhyme-sings poetry resounding. Resounding poetry all over thinks to spread. The spread tells stories, and A and B
17 My On Metaphoring: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 2001, is entirely on ―metaphor‖ without, I hope, tired trite metaphors that kill metaphors. 18 I wish he said, ―Are you glad?‖
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cohere to cohere Cs and Ds and more. Storytelling coheres to story-think in China, not logic-thinking in the West. Metaphor, poetry, and storytelling cohere. Likewise, we must have, not seeing eyes but ―the imagining ear,‖ to fetch the living ―sounds of speech‖ into writing; here is no fancy dead decency of the so-called written language. Frost fetches us to his own five lines: ―I‘m going out to fetch the little calf (light, informative)/ That‘s standing by the mother. It‘s so young, (free)/ It totters when she licks it with her tongue. (persuasive, inviting)/ I shan‘t be long.—You come too. (afterthought, 20 inviting)‖ to spread. The resulted poem stuns us, fresh in all its common words, as that calf, as pasture fresh from winter, Nature in the daily Vermont farm that day. It is ―the unmade word,‖ uncreated nature-fresh, culture-fresh, in all its spontaneous reasonableness of living. It takes a poet of Frost to fetch it into our awareness. China‘s poets are all kinsfolk of Frost‘s. Reason is now life-fresh, life-reason (Ortega), reason alive as the throbbing bloodstream of Nature itself—birthing, birthing, without ceasing—in all its en-cultured naturalness. Here reason is life as a system, all-standing with all, in all, each a calf so young standing beside his mother culture who loves her lick-able calf the new creation. Reason alive in each calf gathers provincialisms to produce inner harmony of the self and among the selves, relishing lively provincial smells and tastes of each earthy expression in that living in that community, in that way that day, the loving cow. Our words enable licking-tasting each another‘s cultural smells and sounds, colors and flavors to relish one another‘s cultures. We shall then naturally self-forget and mutually relish our differences, letting one another live out the full life of each person and each culture, as each of us tastes, relishes, and relates to all the others, however tottering-ly. Now, ―relishing‖ and ―tasting‖ spontaneously appeared above. Life is made of tastingrelishing and hitting the pillow sleeping. Combining tasting with sleeping may come as a surprise. I see two connections between the two. One is that tasting takes in foods to fulfill oneself, as sleep takes in oneself to fulfill oneself. Two is that we love to taste as we love to sleep, for we love our selves. Both tasting and sleeping express our loving attachment to living. Thus tasting at our gut-level is one of two basic activities that sustain life, as follows.
SLEEPING, TASTING, LOGIC, AND STORYTELLING Life lived, systematic unawares, is explained above. We must now see how actually systematic life is, aware or no, by watching two basic life activities, sleeping and tasting. Even at the physiological level, life without sleeping and food-tasting dies away. This basic fact of life is applicable throughout all personal levels of life reflective and spiritual. To sleep is to come home to oneself; to eat is to go out to take into oneself from outside. We must have room to return home to ourselves, as we interact with outside to inter-digest things to grow. Such is how healthy life grows into itself, to grow together by eating and 19 Its structure (―the logic of storytelling,‖ as it were) is traced in my On Chinese Body Thinking, Leiden: Brill, 1997, pp. 22-79. 20 I freely summarized Robert ―The Imagining Ear‖ (pp. 687-689) and ―The Unmade Word, or Fetching and FarFetching‖ (694-697) in Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays, NY: Literary Classics of the United States, 1995.
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letting eaten, sleeping and letting sleep, and a community is born where we grow together into our respective selves. We first consider ―sleep,‖ then ―eating and tasting.‖
A. Sleep Sleep is a common daily affair. We take it for granted so much that no philosophy, 21 psychology, or even religion has ever, much less seriously, considered it. This fact may testify that sleep is not to be considered objectively but to be undergone to discern, though we keep undergoing it without discernment. To show what it is, how indispensable it is, and how essential it is for being human, we must meditate on it in a Taoist manner, for only there can we entertain some hope for enlightenment on sleep. We usually think sleep a waste of time. In surprise, we discover that sleep fortifies and fulfills the self, and well slept life, or sleep-infused life, is true humanity. Here are two sorts of such meditations, A. Mediations on Sleep as Spontaneity in five subsections, and B. meditations on Sleep as Self-Fullness in four subsections, to sum up in C. Concluding reflections to come home to storytelling.
A. Meditations on Sleep as Spontaneity Life cannot go on without sleep, yet in sleep everything is so wiped out that life goes blank and non-conscious. What is such strange sleep? Nothing is more daily and trite, and nothing more mysterious; yet, strangely, no philosopher thinks about it22 except Aristotle, who proudly probed it with his preformed categories, and missed it.23 As usual, when in philosophy we get stuck we go outside its super-conscious analysis, and Chuang Tzu is often there, welcoming us with smile. He seldom disappoints us, for he just tells stories to softly enlighten us. On sleep, his story-thinking is quite full of insights, as usual. Here is his story, in poetic lines so rough and pungent.24 (Uncouth) Mr. Chew-Chipped asked (cultured) Mr. Clothed on Tao. Clothed said, ―You right your form, one your vision— Heavenly Harmony will arrive. Fold your knowledge, one your bearing— Spirits will come homing-in. Virtue will be your beauty, Tao will be your lodge— You gaze like a calf newly born and not seek causes.‖
21 Psychology considers sleep in its defective mode, sleeplessness, as a symptom of psychic stress, never probed ―sleep‖ as it is as the essential ingredient of healthy growing living itself. 22 I know of no article on sleep in dictionary or encyclopedia of philosophy. 23 Aristotle enquires on whether sleep belongs to body or soul or both or half of each, etc., whether sleep is a contrary to waking, whether it is actuality or potentiality, and so on. (―On Sleep‖ in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes, Princeton University Press, 1995, pp. 721728) Aristotle tries so hard to trap the sleep-wind of life in boxes he designed, to measure the size of the flow of sleep-life with the tape measure he constructed. He cuts a tragicomic figure. We must go out of his cognitive snare and describe sleep as it is. 24 Chuang Tzu 22/21-24. This is my translation that tries not to smooth away rough poetic lines as many English translations did.
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Kuang-ming Wu Words before ended, Chew-Chipped fell fast asleep. Clothed, much pleased, departed singing, ―Form like a withered skeleton, mind like dead ashes, . . . Dim, dim, dark, dark, Mindless and cannot consult with, What man is he!‖
Whatever else this poetic story may have, it clearly does one thing—it praises sleep as the highest of our life ideal, that is, to come home to the self. Sleep is authentic self-ing, for no one can be unreal or deceptive in sleep. Thus ―sleep treatment‖ emerges as the oldest mental healing in ancient Egypt, and ―sleep therapy‖ in psychology. Sadly, psychology today is intent only on exploiting sleep‘s healing efficacy, not dipping into its what and its why. Let us repeat. Sleep enlightens us on why we sleep at all, what it means to become authentically oneself, and how to come spontaneously back home to oneself. Nothing is more 25 common in life, and nothing more important, than sleep as wholeness unawares, yet seldom is ―sleep‖ (not dreams) recognized as ontologically nourishing. We have five subsections here to discern what all these can mean.
1. What Dream is Attending to dream, related to sleep, can help clarify sleep. We dream both while asleep 26 (nightmare) and while awake (daydream), so dream is not sleep, nor is it awakening. What 27 then is a dream? It is a mistake to claim, as Freud and Jung did, that dream occurs in the unconscious, individual (Freud) or collective (Jung), for while dreaming, we are not 28 unconscious or comatose. This obvious fact enables psychologists and philosophers to write on dreams but not on 29 sleep, for we are non-conscious while sound asleep and so philosophers or psychologists, those supremely conscious thinkers, can consciously say nothing about non-conscious sleep. 30 What Freud or Jung may have meant is that dream is our non-self-conscious activity. A self-conscious activity splits oneself into observing self and agent self, the former reflecting 31 on the latter. Self-consciousness initiates the self as another, and self-deceit-conceit and 32 other-deceit emerge. 25 We can thus see how sleep deprivation is one cruel torture that deprives the self of the self, amounting to murder. 26 See Kuang-ming Wu and Ruth C. Chao, ―Cultural Variations in Nightmare: A Content Analysis,‖ International of Journal of Psychological Research, forthcoming. We tried to cover, albeit imperfectly, these aspects of ―nightmares.‖ 27 E.g., Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), Carl G. Jung, Dreams, compiled and translated by R. F. C. Hull, Princeton University Press, 1974. 28 Greek Hupnos (sleep) is Nux‘s (night) child and Thanatos‘ (death) twin brother—related yet different. Being unaware in sleep is not being unconscious in death. 29 I am yet to find literature devoted to sleep. 30 Or we can say, ―non-egological,‖ which is less inclusive and more pedantic than ―non-self-conscious‖ or ―nonself-aware,‖ or simply ―non-aware.‖ Mind you, non-self-conscious (in sleep) is not un-self-conscious or unconscious (in coma or death). 31 Paul Ricoeur (as Sartre) is also mistaken in taking the split self as something original in human nature (Oneself as Another, University of Chicago Press, 1990). He should have said instead that human nature is originally one but fragile; it tends so easily to split into two, to become one self as another. 32 Being so much within the self, this ―other-ing‖ tendency misled Jean-Paul Sartre into taking such ―deceit‖ as ingrained in consciousness qua ontological ―nothing‖ (Being and Nothingness [1943], NY: Philosophical Library); it is a mistaken ontological phenomenology. Socrates cuts a naïve tragic hero urging us to self-
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In contrast, non-self-consciousness closes the self‘s ―eye‖ away from otherness to return home to the primal self, the childlike wholeness without split, without unreality. My son Peter said, ―You know, Dad, I have three names, me, myself, and I. Bye, Dad!‖ and off he ran to play. He could play with gusto because he was non-deceitfully one, so he could afford to play with and within his own ―three names.‖ Peter‘s is the true self as it originally is; it is threefold authenticity without deceit. In contrast, in a dream we are not self-conscious yet aware, so ―the dream shows the inner truth and reality of the patient (the person) as it really is: not as I conjecture it to be, and not as the ‗patient‘ would like it to be, but as it is.‖ (Jung33)
2. How to Put “Sleep” into Waking Life ―But how do I put my sleep-unity into waking activities? Do you want me to sleepwalk?‖ Well, returning to sleep-unity is a conscious turning to sleep-oneness. It is not simply to collapse into sleep, as sleepwalk is a sleep-collapsed act. Self-examination treasured by all Western thinkers must itself be examined, to attain non-awareness purposely turned to, as we purposely hit the pillow, close our eyes, and calm our awareness, before we fall asleep unawares. Falling asleep crucially differs from collapsing into it. Here is that mysterious self-folding-back-together, repeated daily, uniting self-act aware and fall-into-sleep unawares despite oneself, much like falling in love. In sleep every night, we fall in love with our own self. This unity of conscious effort and non-conscious falling asleep signifies the spontaneous reunion of the split self into the primal one-self; this ―spontaneous reunion‖ is what is mysterious. What does spontaneity have to do with reunion of split self back into the primal one-self? Every word is a mystery. 3. Sleep is Spontaneous Sleep is spontaneity incarnate, and spontaneity is notoriously elusive. Conversing with an objective analyst about dream and/or sleep enables us to understand what spontaneity is not. 34 He may say, ―In a dream, one can watch oneself flying or walking, so one is not un-selfconscious as while sleeping. Besides, Heidegger‘s formula of self-identity is belonging35 together-with-oneself-in-thought. How could this identity not be conscious? Again, this time formally, self-identity is not self-disappearance, actual or conscious.‖ This is a familiar critical objectivism that misses sleep-spontaneity. Dreaming about watching oneself flying or walking is just that, dreaming that one is watching, not actually watching. Dreaming that one is watching does not actually watch. Heidegger, as Kant, engages in logical explication to bypass spontaneous understanding. His formula of selfidentity is fine on paper; sleep/dream as spontaneously undergone is beyond such formal structural description. ―But the sense of I-ness is quite operative in sleep.‖ This true enough statement, however, is made either outside sleeper or after sleep. Both are external perspectives in space or in time. Such an outsider‘s observation is irrelevant to understanding of the personal undergoing of sleep. ―But what you are objecting to is objective logical explication that is not Kant‘s or examine irrespective of its success or failure or of examining its possibility or whether it is an essential trait of humanity or not. 33 C. G. Jung, Dreams, op. cit., pp. 87-109. 34 Such objective analyst is usually a he; ladies are more perceptive than that. 35 Cf. Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, NY: Philosophical Library, 1957.
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Heidegger‘s transcendental explanation, which clearly presents what can be explained.‖ This objection sounds tidily logical, where two words, ―can‖ and ―explained‖ give us a pause. ―Can‖ here is a logical ―can‖; ―explanation‖ is logically ordered. In fact, to say is to explain that is to logicize and externalize. Explanation is packed logically, analyzing, reckoning, and arranging in order, as the very meaning of ―logic‖ (legein, logos) originally 36 meant. Only an external observer or retrospective reminiscence later can perform such analyzing/arranging. The actual spontaneity of sleep is ineffably internal and concretely selfless to the self. It was said that the unipede envies the millipede, who envies the snake, who envies the wind, who envies the eye, who in turn envies the minded heart 心, that is, awareness, says 37 Chuang Tzu. But this minded heart, non-self-conscious awareness, that moves legs and mind disappears once made self-aware. Its structure is notoriously elusive. Millipede was happily walking until asked by leg-less Snake how he could coordinate his 38 million legs. Millipede stopped to ponder on how, and turned unable to walk again. Polanyi said that we must attend from ourselves to play the piano, must disappear to our consciousness to play, which is a self-expression. Self-disappearance to the self enables selfexpression. Such self-disappearing spontaneity is reenacted every night in our sleep and dreaming. This fascinating tacit dimension of life is its very vitality. It requires sensitivity to wonder at the nuances of its expression, for its expression encroaches on its content. At issue here is not Kant‘s/Heidegger‘s correctness (or incorrectness) but their mode of expression. Saying ―I love you‖ can solidify or destroy love, depending on whether it is said as a description, in admiration, disdain, or sarcasm. How ―I love you‖ is said expresses many varied meanings. Kant/Heidegger‘s formality misses these living modes of spontaneity in the saying. As casual saying aloud of ―love‖ can destroy love, so a formal saying-out of morality can demolish morality. This is because to say is to objectify and formalize, while love and morality is lived spontaneity unsayable, that is, unanalyzable into components, unpackageable into formulas. In the human world, what is said must be conveyed hidden in how it is said, for the human subject must be hid to appear, disappear to become authentic, as clothing expresses the unique self that vanishes in physiological sameness when stripped naked. Cosmetics companies manufacture not produced stuff but fashions, as various as possible, for consumers to choose what fit them. The consumers buy these fashions to partake of ―top of the fashions‖ to show off their identities to themselves and then others. Thus their naked physique is not them, not their identities, but bare material on which to mold their true selves, as trees are bare raw material with which to build a home to suit homeowners‘ taste. Nakedness must hide in clothes to show the self. Hiding shows. Thus clothing stores are crucial to human self-expression; ladies are sensitive to this human truth.
36 Logos articulates a gathering. Calvin O. Schrag, The Resources of Rationality, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992, pp. 77, 93. Wu, On the “Logic” of Togetherness (1998, Leiden: Brill), pp. 162 (note 41), 334 and note 181, and Wu, On Metaphoring (2001, Leiden: Brill), pp. 10 (note 23), 54-58. 37 Chuang Tzu 17/53-60 is a wonderful story of stages of spontaneity that culminate in consciousness that is nonself-aware. See Wandering on the Way, tr. Victor H. Mair, NY: Bantam Books, 1994, pp. 159-160. 38 Michael Polanyi, The Study of Man, University of Chicago, 1959, among others, explains the tacit dimension. Polyani devoted his entire life to explicating this dimension alone.
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Objectivism bulldozes all such subtle truth, to force actuality to disappear, missing and destroying the tacit experiential reality. Sleep hides self-awareness; objectivism ruins sleep.
4. How to Sleep-Spontaneity Now, to see how concretely our daytime activities can and should be empowered by such spontaneity of sleep-unity, think of Socrates‘ assiduous practice and promotion of selfexamination, which is the height of acts of split-self. Pushed straightly far enough, these acts would have immobilized him in an infinite regress of self-reflections, were it not for the fact 39 that Socrates constantly relied on that inner mysterious Daimon he never examined. His Daimon stopped him from going in a certain direction that he later found to be inappropriate, and so he simply followed its injunction without examining It, which is after all a part of himself beyond him. It is here that Socrates ceased to self-examine, in order to examine himself well. His self-examination requires a stoppage of examination at an ultimate daimonic level he does not examine, for he cannot examine examining. Let us put it another way, and we are surprised at how this other way opens us out into the world. ―We must be open-minded,‖ we say. ―Open‖ cuts into me; I must open me to whatever comes, never judge it as if I were know-it-all that closes me off. Socrates opposes self-closure with self-examining to open out to learn, listening. Socrates thus combines selfexamination with listening to his inner Voice of Daimon to thereby dialogue with others differing from him. Self-examination unclogs me to open, to listen, and to perceive anything that comes. So my total self is open, ever ready, alert and sensitive to whatever will come. Nothing is here yet, and this not-yet makes a powerful dynamo toward—what? No one knows. This is the dawning of creation of what is yet to come to be. Such is ―perfection‖ inexpressible, as the musician yet to pluck her zither, and its ―music‖ cannot be faulted, and ―no fault‖ is perfect. Is a kid not yet grown up ―perfect‖ in this sense? This is the dynamo of perfection called kid who is of course imperfect, and so, to children of all ages belongs the Kingdom of Perfection of which they are the greatest. Kids are here 40 beginning, to begin to yet to begin to yet to begin to begin. All this describes my acts that begin my abiding posture pervading all my thinking; it is the way I think and the way I live. Let us tarry here in the child. Jesus said, ―It is to such as these (children) that the kingdom of God belongs.‖ Perfection belongs to kids‘ imperfection, not kids belong to perfection; the saying so stunned all three gospels into recording it, identically, and John (3:3-8) records how Jesus stunned the scholar Nicodemus with the necessity of being born again in the natural wind and water. We put it 41 another way, and our surprise remains. Kids the ―true heart‖ at our root is immaturity! How could it be? This existential inconsistency, disjoined joint at our root, is space-logical crack. ―Kids‖ are unintelligible to us in space-logic as above, so we take them into time-logic. Adult maturity-now hits the ceiling, no more room there; the child is the horizon-in-time 39 On the fascinating story of Greek ―daimon,‖ See F. E. Peters, Greek Philosophical Terms: A Historical Lexicon, New York University Press, 1967, pp. 33-34, Gerhard Kittel, ed., Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (1962), Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1978, II:1-20, and E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1951, p. 317 (index on ―daemons‖). 40 Matthew 19:14=Mark10:14=Luke 18:16, Chuang Tzu 2/43, 2/49, and Matthew 18:4 are combined here. 41 Kids‘ immaturity and growth are missed by ―童心說‖ in 李贄文集, 北京社會科學出版社, 2000, I:91-93.
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wide-open, unlimited. The horizon ciphers ―growth‖ beyond logic. No growth, no kid, and no growth, no perfection (who would want perfection without growth?), so no kid, no perfection. Perfection belongs to kids growing! Time-logic cannot be mocked and the West is slowly learning it. ―Cosmos follows the eternal laws to have countless dimensions beyond the four we know‖ is space logic where time is part of space as ―warped,‖ and even warping is a spatial notion. ―Cosmos evolves according to laws, itself evolving‖ is time-logic where space is a stage of time, when what and how it is now, soon to change. Actually, Western theoretical physics is slowly switching from the definite spaceperspective to the logic of evolutionary time-change as above described. Such a shift in logicmode cannot be handled by logic that is set and operates within a set perspective. The logicshift can only be described by stories. This new time-story of cosmos has three features: One, up until now life-realm is patterned after stone-realm. After the switch to time-mode of understanding, the stone-world is patterned after life-evolution. Two, ―evolution‖ used to go from simple to complex, but cosmos may go from simple to complex and then from complex to simple, as Yin and Yang internecine inter-nascent. Three, thus time-order is 42 unpredictable and inevitable, not random. Existence pulses in its heartbeat as music, to sing history rhyming in time. So, Western physics is approaching ―perfection‖ as cosmic. Perfection is growth in perfection, under the divine (divine is perfect) grace upon43 grace. Grace is motherly perfection. So, perfection is the dynamics of kid‘s growth in perfection, in parental perfection upon parental perfection; it is an asymptotic dynamics of perfection embraced by Perfection Parental, in the Nisus of the Spirit of Perfection. 44 And mind you. Mom grows with her dear child, as divine Love is perfected in us. God is thus our Perfect Parent in the Perfect Kid, as the Perfection-Kingdom belongs to the kid‘s dynamics to Perfection in Parental Grace, as the Perfect Kingdom belongs to the kid‘s wonder at Perfection, the kid‘s growth-dynamics so tenderly watched over and identified with by the divine motherly Love, growing with her kid. Mom is born with her kid, to form a life-
42 I join two stories in Discover, April 2010. Adam Frank‘s ―Who Wrote the Book of Physics‖ (pp. 32-37) tells of the ―rebels‖ switching from our usual pursuit of eternal truths behind everything to envisaging cosmos evolving from simple to complex. Stephen Ornes‘ ―Microscopy in the Fourth Dimension‖ (p. 15) tells of our electron microscope watching atoms and electrons pulsing as heartbeat. Both stories pattern nature after the rhythm of the living. 43 See three meanings of ―anti, upon‖ in ―grace upon grace‖ (in place of, upon, after) in Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John (i-xii), Anchor Bible, 1966, pp. 15-16. 3831John 4:12 has this amazing verb, ―teteleiömenë (having been perfected),‖ repeated in 1 John 2:5, ―teteleiötai (has been perfected)‖; fortunately, human Jesus perfected divine love for us on the cross, saying (John 19:30, cf. 17:4), ―tetelestai (it has been perfected).‖ (Raymond E. Brown plays with ―love for God‖ and ―love from God‖ in 1John 4:12, The Epistles of John, the Anchor Bible, 1982, p. 521, so as to avoid the ―embarrassment‖ of divine love being perfected by imperfect human love.) Richmond Lattimore honestly translates 1 John 4:12 as ―if we love each other, God abides in us and his love is made perfect in us‖ (Acts and Letters of the Apostles, NY: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1982, p. 269). New Revised Standard Version, New American Standard Bible, and William Barclay have ―his love is perfected in us.‖ So do King James and New International Versions. Eugene Peterson also has ―his love becomes complete in us—perfect love!‖ (The Message) J. B. Phillips ingeniously puts it as ―his love grows in us towards perfection‖ to have the cake and eat it, smoothing away the paradox as he keeps it (The New Testament in Modern English, NY: Macmillan, 1958, p. 521). Yet, no one seems to notice the cosmos-shattering paradox in this extraordinary announcement, not once but twice (1 John 2:5 and 4:12), i.e., perfect love of God is perfected in our imperfect love! Love alone pulls off this stunt.
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palindrome as Mom-kid is kid-Mom. Love alone pulls off such a stunt to and fro, to grow and fulfill life. ―But kids are so wobbly, so imperfect,‖ you say. Yes, wobbly imperfection manifests precisely the lively stage busy growing. That ―imperfection‖ tells of the erupting power of self-perfecting dynamism, perfection vernal moving on perfection irrepressible. Kid is stark future-now tenderly sprouting into its own self, and such a drama developing is no defect. Dawn is no low noon; kid is no low adult. Kid spontaneous is adult subliminal, and dawn sublime. Kid is Perfection at dawn all its own so fresh, so fabulous. Love is perfect, and Perfection belongs to growth; Perfection thus belongs to this child, whose misshaped immaturity describes wobbly growth so irresistible. We call growth ―the child.‖ Now no adult would dare to belittle little children, for the ―true heart‖ of humanity is growth. We have thus just cracked the secret of kid-mystery at the crack of dawn; it is six in the twilight dawn, the child of our ―today.‖ ―Now, what else is new?‖ Nothing is new; the child is still sleeping. But O, what a discovery we have made! Kid growing is imperfection—nothing new—to which divine Perfection belongs! Motherly God is always-Kid always growing into the fabulous God beyond our ―God.‖ The God who saves us is born a baby wrapped in swaddling cloth, 45 sleeping in an animal-feed box. Whoever would have dreamed of such? Going thus beyond all our expectation, this nisus of going-beyond, to grow ever beyond, is the real God beyond our ―God.‖ 46 Soon, ―(Child) Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men,‖ for everyone likes him, even God likes him. Such is the child growing beyond child; he is God growing beyond God, our true flesh-and-blood God-as-Kid Parenting, God parenting in growing, God parenting our growth as he himself growing in parenting, parenting in growing. 47 Isn‘t this life-dynamism what we in our ignorance byname as ―phusis,‖ as things birthing unceasing, Mother Nature ever naturing, birthing and rebirthing? Would anyone dare ask what else is new now? Let us translate and unpack this amazing power-point further. To live is to live on, and living on is this growing posture of ever opening to all, ever ready to deal with whatever will come. Thus I am powerful because I am powerless, empty, accepting all to inter-change. Here is the nothing-power of letting it all to happen, whatever ―it‖ is, pain or joy, ever unexpected. Thus, poetry of life begins to sing with all, and science of myriad all begins to dance. This radical self-opening makes an empty ―net‖ ever expanding to include all that comes, to approach Nature as this coarse-meshed Net, leaking nothing. This spirit of resolute acceptance makes history so comprehending constantly that it makes no mistake, to judge myriad all. ―Open,‖ not judging, is the judge of all, the kid ever growing; it is nature naturing toward a complex unity, the unity that is so stark, simple.
45 Sean Caulfield (In Praise of Chaos, NY: Paulist Press, 1981, pp. 7-11) noisily notes our freedom as the child growing, but shrinks from taking God as child. Many world myths have gods as kids, but quite vaguely, in splashing playful story-bits, not like that baby in Bethlehem that caused tons of troubles, described by Raymond E. Brown, The Birth of the Messiah, NY: Doubleday, 1993. 46 Luke 2:52. 47 See ―phúsis‖ in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. Gerhard Friedrich, Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1974, IX: 251-277, and ―physis‖ in F. E. Peters, Greek Philosophical Terms: A Historical Lexicon, New York University Press, 1967, pp. 158-160. Martin Heidegger thrives on this concept, ―phusis.‖
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Nature is ―nature‖ the Milieu where myriad all, such as we, live, behave, and have our being. Nature is also the other—nature the Thou or the It—to be influenced by human efforts, to influence humans in turn; nature is ―naturing‖ via us. As the milieu for us and as the other to us, nature naturing is vitally inter-involved with us its part as it is also part of us (―nature‖), 48 and the other where we thrive (―naturing‖). I am open, all ears and all eyes, to whatever is as it is, and as such, I effectively contribute to nature, as nature feeds me. This is how opening out to nature feeds me; listening to birds chirping far, to dry leaves crunching underfoot, and gazing at trees silent, rugged, and longest-lived, all out here, is my soothing joy of health. Nature is now in me as my walk listens to my body responding to my footsteps, to heal me all over. Medical science listens to my body-language, body-music; medical art is musical walk. All poets open themselves to doves cooing, kids shouting, for doves and kids show themselves a poetry of life that embraces poets; poets live in nature as nature creates poets to create nature as kids, opening to nature. Opening one‘s self is the Open Sesame to the lifeworld of nature. All this is never a ―closing in,‖ death in depression; ―closing in‖ is not at all autism listening to oneself in vivid self-awareness—and we hope autistic persons will, empowered by their self-oneness, soon open powerfully out to things around. The fact thus remains that our self-awareness is supported and enabled by that rockbottom layer of bare self-ness unquestioned, aware unawares. We have moments of fascination when we are transfixed, of rage when we hit the ceiling despite ourselves, of involvement in an engagement in which we forget ourselves, of artistic enjoyment when we are enraptured, transported, and of archery when we become that arrow about to fly cosmically. This childlike oneness of the self is always ready to appear at the drop of a conscious hat, to guide us to achieving (with) the cosmos. Chuang Tzu is never tired of telling us how irresistibly powerful those moments are, simply because when we are one with ourselves, we are one with the world, unawares; the whole world is here embodied in us into one as we become and remain an integral part of the 49 50 world. ―I am born with the Heaven and Earth, and myriad all and I are one.‖ 51 The whole point of Zen Buddhism is here also, to train us to attain this state of supreme primal self-unity in(to) world-unity. It is literally to ―attain life‖ itself, as Chuang Tzu puts 52 it. This is the sleep-unity realized in the wakeful self that is ―greatly awakened,‖ awakened 53 to sleep, to unify the self with the myriad all, to ―one one-self‖ with the cosmos.
5. Awakening to Sleep Now, what does ―awakening to sleep‖ mean? This phrase is cited in contrast to Buddha who wanted us to wake up from sleep. Chuang Tzu urges us to be awakened to the fact that no one is sure of whether one is awakened or asleep, as his story of butterfly-dream testifies 48 This complex point of unity totters out in Frederick J. E. Woodbridge, An Essay on Nature (1940), NY: Columbia University Press, 1961. 49 Chuang Tzu‘s Chapters 19 and 23 (especially its conclusion) are just some examples, but actually the entire corpus of his writings are about this state; to attain it is to ―nourish life,‖ as Chapter 3 is so titled. 50 Chuang Tzu 2/52-53. 51 E.g., 高僧傳, Two volumes (2005), 碧巖集, Two Volumes (2005), 六祖壇經 (2008), all published by 臺北市三民書局. And the list goes on. 52 This is the title of Chuang Tzu‘s Chapter 19, 達生. 53 This is what Chuang Tzu proposed to clinch the profound Chapter Two.
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to. It is also to realize, to awaken to, the fact that he can be butterfly dreaming to be man now or can be man having dreamed to be butterfly, and either makes sense yet neither can be true with the other. In short, it is to awaken from dogmatic awakening, cocksure of being awakened when one could be asleep, dreaming either as butterfly or as man, but not as both at once. Such is the Great Awakening to sleep and to dreaming. It is to turn our commonsense ridicule upside down; we usually laugh at unthinking people ―drunk live to dream die 醉生夢死.‖ This is also to oppose Buddhist otherworldly ideal of waking up to the world beyond. Awakening is becoming aware. To be awakened from awakening is to become aware of being aware, to end up awakening to becoming aware of sleep-oneness, to be awakened to sleep, to become one-in-sleep, sleep-one. This is to re-turn to sleep, and falling asleep is just one route to sleep-return that extends the sleep-unity at night into daytime activities, sleepinfused, aware unawares. Here sleep begins everything and empowers every act. It will be powerful indeed, as invincible as the power of Nature itself, immune from disasters of Nature as Nature is immune, unabashedly claimed Chuang Tzu. This is because the sleep-fulfilled self is self-full in nature-full, as opposed to self-exhaustion in jittery trials here and there. Stevens said, ―It is not only that the imagination adheres to reality, but also, that reality adheres to the imagination and that the interdependence is essential,‖ called ―nobility.‖ This is the fit; Chuang Tzu would add that this existential nobility is so comfortable that we forget ourselves in it. The whole Chuang Tzu concerns this theme. Non-self-consciousness is selfforgetful spontaneity in self-fit, shoes fitting forget the feet, belt fitting forgets the waist, and 55 so forgetting right and wrong shows mind-heart fit in the world, to fit in forgetting the fit. The ultimate of all this is a good sound sleep, a non-conscious homecoming to oneself that we practice at least once everyday, to replenish ourselves into authenticity. This self-ness enables us to conduct ourselves during waking hours in full childlike spontaneity, to become as joyous as child so alive and true. Kids live fantasies spewing out of volcanic life-vitality in ―Alice‘s Wonderland,‖ where sleep-spontaneity infuses all waking hours. Great indeed is the one who loses none of one‘s baby-heart (Mencius 4B12) throughout life. But then, if one-self is the basic primal ―essence‖ to the self, it needs otherness to feed it. Eating nourishes sleep as the other nurtures the self. No wonder a psychologist usually asks, ―Do you sleep well? Do you eat well?‖ Good sleep and eating well are the twin hopeful signs of becoming whole, un-split, all of a piece. Let us then consider ―eating,‖ whose apex ―tasting‖ is another fundament of solid healthy self.
B. Tasting We now gaze at tasting. Although nothing is more important in life than being oneself, and so activities in the day are for the sake of sleep at night when one comes back home to oneself, one cannot be oneself asleep without first eating, tasting, and enjoying food to fill up 54 See my The Butterfly as Companion: Meditations on the First Three Chapters in the Chang Tzu, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990, p. 493 (index on ―butterfly‖). 55 Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination, quoted in Modern Poetics, ed. James Scully, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1965, p. 144. Chuang Tzu 19/62-63, abridged.
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oneself; one cannot sleep when hungry. We must also realize. Remaining concrete, ―taste,‖ 56 ―tasting,‖ ―tasty,‖ ―tasteful,‖ and ―tastefully‖ are so basic that they tacitly spread out universally in culture, in life and death, in sociopolitical management, and in logical thinking. We see how tasting includes all our five senses, relishing wording and relishing tasteful 57 life-―walking.‖ We ―eat‖ our beloved spouses and our children, as we say, ―O, I love you so much I can eat you up!‖ No wonder Greek myths cite instances of gods eating their own 58 children, and Plato takes ―knowing‖ as ―sexing,‖ a version of eating. Our taste buds taste life as we eat and digest the world, and the world becomes ours as we 59 grow into it. The world is now the sensible meaning to constitute ourselves. We eat things‘ meanings and relish their beauty, and we turn tasteful, to be person of good decent taste. We live on the world‘s irresistible taste, smacking our lips on faith, hope, and love. We savor our self-fulfillment as we sing the world, relishing it. Dining the world, we chant, clap hands and dance in world-fulfillment, with world-gusto. Sadly, Western philosophers have seldom considered ―taste,‖ it being the lowest in the scale of our senses. This move generates three serious disasters. One, this move needlessly concocts artificial conundrums out of mind-body dichotomy. Two, this move breeds sexism; 60 the female is the visceral bottom and the male the visual is on top of the social scale. Three, seriously, this move ignores the basic fact that all living things cannot survive, much less grow, without tasting things outside to taste them in and digest them into their life. The fact remains then that there has been no serious philosophy of tasting and eating in the 61 West, and there would be no philosophy without thinking about such basics of life. The final important point above bears elaboration. The basest is often the basic, and so it is the most universal. The universal Tao is the lowest for Chuang Tzu, who puts it this 62 marvelous story-way (22/43-47) : Master Easturb asked Chuang Tzu, ―What‘s called ‗Tao,‘ where is it exactly?‖ Chuang Tzu said, ―Nowhere it is not.‖ ―You‘d better answer as expected.‖ ―It‘s in crickets, ants.‖ 56 The same holds for synonyms of taste such as ―sense,‖ ―sensation,‖ ―delicious.‖ ―Sexuality‖ belongs here also, as Plato in Symposium understands knowing sexually, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty sees sense and sex as modes of our bodily being (Phenomenology of Perception, tr. Colin Smith, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962, pp. 3-12, 154-173, 203-242, 369-409, etc.). Neither Plato nor Merleau-Ponty considers bodily ―taste‖ as body thinking, however. 57 Cf. Chuang Tzu 17/79 on learning to tastefully walk in elegance. 58 So much in Greek mythology centers on tasting—feasts with the gods, hospitality signaled by eating together, and eating one‘s own children in a few myths. 59 Conversely, we enter the world and change it, as we influence the situation and change it science-cognitively and socio-politically, so much so that we cannot objectively observe ―things as they are.‖ Thus the we-world interaction mandates that we be forever open in our mind and our action to be corrected by the world as we correct it. 60 It took a female aesthetic philosopher Carolyn Korsmeyer in Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999) to bewail this trend in Western philosophy. Sadly, however, she missed the obvious fact of our inability to survive without eating. She just wordily beat around the bush, the social and aesthetic significance of tasting food. She never thought of why tasting food carries social importance and breeds beauty, and what this fact means. 61 We are reminded of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought, NY: Basic Books, 1999. That they have to ―challenge‖ the West describes thinking in the West as disembodied. Their own exposition feels curiously disembodied, however. This volume itself belies its thesis. Does this fact mean, however, that even disembodied analysis has to be embodied? What place does such thought put this book, however? 62 As usual, this is my translation, consulting renderings by 黃錦銓, Graham, Mair, Watson, Giles, and Legge.
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―What, so low?‖ ―It‘s in weed, tare.‖ ―What, still lower?‖ ―It‘s in tiles, shards.‖ ―What, worse yet!‖ ―It‘s in shit, piss.‖ Master Easturb responded no more. ―Your queries, sir, just don‘t get at the substance. Director Huo asks the head of market to step on pigs, and he says pressing down lower reveals the pig‘s situation more. Don‘t you insist on exact locale; you can‘t escape from things. Ultimate Tao is like this; Great Words are thus as well.‖
Remember, pigs are cherished as our delicious food; so is Tao. Likewise, the ―lower‖ we go down the ―hierarchy of five senses,‖ the more we see how our sense turns intimate and pervasive, concrete and universal. This is so in four aspects. First, taste is bodily and is more specific and intimate than all other senses, and intimacy suffuses the whole bodily life. Besides, being most specific and intimate, taste includes all senses, as visual survey penetrates things when vision tastes what is surveyed, as hearing deliciously tastes things‘ music, as smelling inhales smells tasting them, and as tactility touches a thing to feel to taste it. Thus, moreover, taste alone intimately enters us to pervade and nourish us as no other senses do. Finally, as taste is most bodily specific and intimate, as ―it tastes good,‖ so taste is 63 ―least bodily‖ and most pervasive, as with ―he has a good taste‖ or ―it is tastefully done.‖ Taste is all over, concrete and universal. Tasting is also cultural. Both animals and humans eat, but only we humans relish dinner. Animals and humans taste food with gusto, but animals taste food and forget it. Our taste cultivates us ―human‖ beyond animality and distinct in each culture. First, taste makes us human distinct from animals. Taste is the human grammar of comportment, the canon of sense that feeds us into humanly alive. Our thinking then must follow the logic of taste, the logic of our basic sense. Here usual logical system is not worshipped or abolished, but is naturally accepted, let be, as a nudge, a wink, and a reminder/maker of life-coherence, a spice of life-system in every culture. Relishing taste is the logic of all logicizing, the reason of all life-reasoning, the principle of 64 every living and everyday logic of living. Logic ultimately is the logic of sense. Thus, actually, taste is the highest and lowest sense so unique, the intimately bodily sense that is 65 logical, universal. Thus taste makes us distinctly cultural-human. Being the intimately bodily, taste in the end is the anchor and flavor of a culture. Cultural sensibility is based on taste; the best direct way to be acquainted with a culture is to literally taste it in its dinner, tasting its specific tang of convivial sensibility. Taste is redolent with distinct flavors, fragrance, aura, and sounds of dinners of a specific culture, beckoning us in. Life is a tasteful logic, the logic of tasting mutuality, for existence to stand-out of the other by tasting the other. This is more and other than self-alienation of Hegel, Marx, and Sartre. In China, tasting makes the self as another and in another, as Chuang Tzu (6/50-52. 55) tells the marvelous story of dying joyously expecting to be tasted into a rooster, a pellet, and more. 63 We say ―a tasty three minute song,‖ ―this delicious phrase.‖ See examples in Oxford English Dictionary (1991) on ―delicious‖ (IV: 417) and ―tasty‖ (XVII: 662). Professor Higgins said, ―She is deliciously vulgar,‖ in a movie, My Fair Lady. 64 Gilles Deleuze (The Logic of Sense, trs. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale, NY: Columbia University Press, 1990) may not have sensed the ―logic of sense‖ in this tasteful sense. 65 I ―argued‖ extensively for this point in On Chinese Body Thinking: A Cultural Hermeneutic (Leiden: Brill, 1997), although at the time I did not realize the intimacy of taste with sense and the intimacy of bodily sense with beyond-mere-bodily sense.
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This is how China takes tasting to be; tasting relates intimately to living and dying, both delicious, delightfully inter-transforming and inter-transmigrating by tasting-digesting. Our story of tasting in China does not end here. We are what we eat as we eat to grow into what we are respectively, distinctly, culturally. China rightly takes ―what we are‖ socially to be nourished by what we eat. The ruler-chef skillfully prepares an exquisite banquet by tastefully mixing and harmonizing communal affairs, personal and interpersonal, for all people to taste and live on, relish and thrive on, young and old, poor and princely. The human 66 world, social and personal, is to be scrupulously cooked, and expertly relished together. Its recipe the Tao of Food is, ―Governing the big state is as frying small fish.‖ (Lao Tzu 60) We call this the culinary art of ―socio-politics.‖ In the end, China sees the whole Nature as managing itself by cooking itself. ―Liao-li 料理‖ in China means ―management,‖ and as the phrase travels to Japan, it, now pronounced ―ryōri,‖ adds a new sense of ―cooking.‖ Management and cooking mutually imply in the world of interculture. This is the ―Economy of Nature‖ in the Triune Heaven, Earth, and Humanity through life-and-death cycles via inter-tasting of various species, as in Chuang Tzu‘s above quotation. All this tells a tasty story culturally, thoughtfully, intertwining into a unity of culture and culinary arts. Nature is an inter-tasting society, killing in enlivening, in birds singing, brooks whispering, and leaves rustling. Listening to them heals; all parties taste giving as taking and taking as giving, in Yin-Yang interaction that inevitably spreads to co-resonance with birds, brooks, and leaves. No wonder cultures, myths, and religions abound with ―tasting‖ that enriches. The Lord Christ institutes the Supper to offer himself in bread and wine to his disciples, who taste him to enrich them, to satisfy (feeds) the Lord in return; just taste John 4:32 in its whole storycontext. This is the center of the Christian rites of the shared agape-meal, the breaking of the bread, the way that Jesus presented himself as an essential part of human existence by associating himself with the bread and wine. Foods taste good, thanks to the hostess of good taste, who in turn tastes the well-fed guests‘ praises to feed her into joyous satisfaction. Human foods are thus both physical and socio-cultural, and both unite to make human community, to ennoble physical nature a mutual eating society. Tasting food (tastes good) is thus intimately linked to taste as cultural cipher (good taste),67 and pervades throughout the whole world of Nature. In conclusion, both sleeping and tasting thus show how bodily concrete we are as human in the lifeworld. The Chinese character ―hsin 心‖ is often rendered ―heartmind‖; it can 66 Cf. Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living, NY: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1937, p. 452 (index on ―food‖). Richard Craze and Roni Jay, The Tao of Food (NY: Sterling Publishing, 1999) briefly touches on this point toward the end. Cf. K. C. Chang, ed., Food in Chinese Culture: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977. 67 The French anthropologists, like Levi-Strauss, have picked up on some of that angle in their discussion of those who eat raw food vs. those who cook.
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actually render ―bodymind‖ to tread ―shen 身,‖ the bodily life-span, the life-existence that, as Chuang Tzu shows, extensively tastes-connects to thrive in the whole Nature, ceaselessly naturing in, with, and around us. All this gathers life in storytelling, and gathering is ―logic.‖ So we now consider the logic of storytelling. We will be surprised that storytelling is the primal logic of life‘s epistemology. That is, how we tell stories is how we know myriad all, and how we know is how we taste with our whole body, soul, and life. This is the logic of story-thinking, a gathering-in of things via storytelling. Thus the logic of storytelling pursues the ―taste‖ of life.
C. The “Logic” of Storytelling Taste weaves a tasty life-system, what we casually call ―storytelling‖; to live is to tell its story as children constantly do by their living, in all their self-expressing to grow. Have we bumped into a kid, so imperial and defiant in a chocolate mess, to dare us to touch her? It is a sight to behold, not to touch. She is the marvelous glorious story of herself! Children of all ages thus taste the lived telling of life as story and relish hearing such stories. Philosophers must simply follow the child who is the parent (Wordsworth), the guide (Nietzsche), and the greatest (Mencius) of us all adults. Now we must pursue this line of sleeping, tasting, logic, and storytelling, and we are surprised, fascinated. Storytelling (a) has a logical sort and (b) a non-logical sort, and (c) it opens out deliciously. We must explain in three points. 68 (a) Storytelling can be logical as with mathematical and scientific essays in the West to inform us about the world. Albert Einstein‘s relativity theories write in mathematical formulas that are a science of the universe. In any case, a mathematical and scientific essay is supposedly logically tight, coherently whole. For all that, interestingly, Kurt Gödel proved with tight coherent math that they are each incomplete, for no mathematical theorem can prove itself; it is provable only by another system outside. Math parallels life that eats, tastes, and takes in things outside. We are tempted to ask Gödel, ―Is your theory of incompleteness itself incomplete, in 69 need of Einstein to prove and support you?‖ By the same token, logical storytelling in the West is coherent and open to other storytelling of other cultures. Each culture must taste the others to survive and thrive. Logic then must be logicized/supported by non-logic. (b) Storytelling can be non-logical, as with myths of Gilgamesh, fables of Aesop, and tall 70 tales of Alice in Wonderland; they are delicious haphazard associations of ideas and themes. We note that as long as they are ―associations of themes/ideas‖ we can understand, they are coherent; and yet as long as these associations are ―haphazard,‖ they are open to interpretations, modifications, and additions. Such combination makes the living story-system 68 Mathematics essays are stories told in a specific cultural language of mathematics, as stories in China are told in Chinese language, those in Germany in German, those in England in English, and so on. 69 Paul Arthur Schilpp, ed., Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, Open Court Publishing Company, 1949, 1970, has an essay by Kurt Gödel (pp. 555-562) and Einstein‘s replies (pp. 687-688). They were good friends. 70 Non-logical stories are ―logically parsed‖ as Gilles Deleuze did on Alice (The Logic of Sense, Columbia University, 1990), C. G. Jung on mythology (Four Archetypes: Mother/Rebirth/Spirit/Trickster, Princeton University, 1973), and many on chaos (N. Katherine Hayles, ed., Chaos and Order, University of Chicago, 1991). None, however, thought on logic-non-logic interdependence.
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that renders it tasty/tasteful. Non-logical storytelling is coherent and deliciously open, ever ready to taste something else. Mind you, further, that we ourselves exist this way, for we live on to make history to judge it. Our life is also coherent and open-ended, as history judges itself (coherent) while rhyming itself forward (open). It is an ongoing fact-music. History has Vietnam war, then Iraq war, My Lai massacre, then Iraq prisoners-abuse, Nixon, then Bush, Kissenger, then Rice, and the rhyming list goes on in time. Fact is stranger than fiction; our history is strangely coherent and open as any myth or fable. Doesn‘t this twofold feature of open coherence rhyme with being as creation by tasting things outside, to make our life a concrete existence-system, as creatively messy as Marcel‘s ―being as creation, creation as being‖? (c) Storytelling logical and non-logical is thus coherent and deliciously open to describe ―Heavenly Net‖ (Lao Tzu). Storytelling as a flexible net is a dynamic circle relishing life, to use another metaphor; storytelling is complete in itself as any circle, and yet opens out, lustily invites and tastes others to relish life to grow together. Storytelling inherently, integrally, and tastefully expands; it is a paradoxical irresistible ―open circle‖ pan-centered, no-edged. Tasting is delicious; ―not delicious‖ is not tasty. A circle pan-centered and edgeless (Nicholas of Cusa) expands; expansion has no-edge. ―Delicious‖ shows how tasting benefits, as ―expansion‖ includes more and more. Benefiting expansion can be told of in stories of criticism. Here are two such stories. Neville‘s three criticisms of Wu enrich Wu-in-response. Wu‘s criticism of Ricoeur clarifies Wu‘s story-thinking. In the following we tell Neville‘s story, then Ricoeur‘s story.
THE SPIRIT OF SYSTEMS AND THE SYSTEMATIC SPIRIT To illustrate the expanding circle of storytelling, let us take Robert Neville‘s critique of Kuang-ming Wu‘s writings. Dr. Neville accuses Wu as an anti-system systematic thinker, a 71 contradiction, and objects to Wu‘s ―concrete philosophy‖ as contradictory and totalistic. He has three critiques. I systematize anti-systematically (Forewords to Body Thinking, 1997 and Togetherness, 1998); I am idiosyncratic in what I pick (Foreword to Metaphoring, 2001); and stressing ―concreteness‖ to totalize toward totalitarianism (Foreword to Togetherness). I respond thus. One, the concept of ―system‖ has non-concrete, inclusive, and organized categories to classify all concrete details. Widening systematically into generality that is comprehensive and detailed dilutes myriad all to senselessness; now everything is related to everything else 72 indifferently. Two, everyone is idiosyncratic as ―idios,‖ oneself, so we all must gather respectively our own ways to inter-enrich. Making an indifferently comprehensive system blinds us to the idios and leads us to false empty universality. Three, ―concreteness‖ is just what there is as it is. Many elements are concresced, and one concresced pattern now is ready to change into another new pattern in the next moment. Concreteness is time-flexuous, concresced anew in each situation. We naturally tell stories on 71 ―Philosophy‖ thinks about the concrete, and so cannot be ―concrete‖; ―concrete philosophy‖ self-contradicts. 72 Cf. my thoughts on ―system‖ in China-West Interculture: Toward the Philosophy of World Integration, ed. Jay Goulding, NY: Global Scholarly Publications, 2008, pp. 298-302.
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how naturally comfortable ―being oneself‖ is, whole and glowing healthy. This ―glow‖ is subdued73 whole unawares. All this is beyond objective system. Concrete details are noted to spontaneously ―connect,‖ no ―system‖ separate from actuality, no ―comprehensive totalism.‖ Three connections are here. (1) Connections by two-way metaphor; I familiarize myself with the new by seeing it as similar to the old, and then renovate the old with the unfamiliar new now made familiar, as explained in my On Metaphoring. (2) Connections by contagion; a thing is seen to be similar to another by that first thing ―bleeding out‖74 to the second, by comparison, contrast or reminding, sometimes haphazardly. (3) Connections by family resemblance; a thing is seen to be a ―family member‖ of another as an activity is seen as ―game‖ with another, as Wittgenstein proposed.75 These three connections are experiential, no comprehensive system but concrete goingthrough, presentable in storytelling in a systematic spirit, not in systems. Examples can help. An example of (1), connection by two-way metaphor, is to learn from the past to design the present,76 and then renovate the past with the new present patterned after the past. An example of (2), connection by contagion, is Paul‘s ―In everything give thanks,‖77 by comparison when things go well in situations A and B, and by contrast of happy A against tragic B. An example of (3), connection by family resemblance, is a quip, ―Trust no past.‖78 The ancients said so to people then, they say so to us now, and both situations resemble as family members.79 Now, all these situational examples are understandable only as told in stories of how we come to regard an experience A as related to new B. Even these three connections themselves are somehow mutually connected. Here our circle of understanding expands from A to B then from B to A, experientially in a storytelling way. All this is neither totalistic, anti-systematic, nor a system. Instead, all this follows things as connected, expanding, storytelling way.
CONTRA RICOEUR To ignore the dynamic expanding circle of storytelling kills storytelling. This is graphically shown by Paul Ricoeur‘s alleged description of narrative. His Time and Narrative makes me angry for this reason. Its problem setting, and so its problem, begins at taking ―narrative‖ as made of ―emplotment‖ (muthos) for ―imitation/representation‖ (mimesis) of
73 葆光, 莊子 2/62. 74 Chinese/Japanese ―感染 felt and bled out,‖ meaning ―contagion,‖ captures its intimacy with ―bleed-out.‖ 75 On Metaphoring, op. cit., pp. 18-19. 76 Confucius‘ ―Warm up the old to know the new‖ (2/11) did not say, ―then warm up the new to know the old.‖ 77 1 Thessalonians 5:18. Cf. Ephesians 5:20, 2 Thessalonians 2:13. ―God the Creator of all is love in each particular event‖ has a similar problem of ―all‖ being applied to ―particulars,‖ and can be resolved by giving thanks in happiness and giving thanks in tragedies, each specifically, yet each identically to the other, i.e., in gratitude. 78 See, e.g., Chuang Tzu 13/68-74, 14/35-37. 79 ―But doesn‘t this saying itself part of the past? We cannot follow this saying or oppose it without falling into a contradiction, then.‖ To cavil thus at this saying, as self-referentially contradictory, makes sense only when we take the past-and-the-now as one comprehensive system. In any case, Paul‘s ―hymn to love‖ in 1 Corinthians 13 also cites a love-effect in each situation that differs each time it happens, and so the description seems scattered yet is coherent.
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human ―discordance‖ (Augustine), thereby solves its tragic actuality.80 This is not spontaneous storytelling. The problem here is that he contrives. His ―narrative‖ is not a story but fiction that requires ―emplotment,‖81 an elaborate plotting. Plotting leaves experience and ―time,‖ and then all sorts of ―aporias‖82 arise that his three volumes of ―Time and Narrative‖ are contrived to solve or resolve systematically, only to end in ―Time is a mystery‖; the problems stay unresolved. The whole problem begins when Ricoeur re-defines ―muthos,‖ myth, primal human storytelling, as straight ―emplotment‖ that is—we must protest—only distantly related to myths,83 if at all. After all, a simple ―plot‖ may or may not have been ―emplotted,‖ that is, contrived in advance. A plot may well just naturally emerge in our descriptive process; a plot comes to us spontaneously while we tell stories about our experience. To know a narrative by analyzing its plot is to understand a human person by analyzing his bones, by first killing him to pull out his bones. I don‘t want ―narrative‖; I want simple story, however short. I don‘t want ―plotting‖; I want the story-coherence of simple experience-description that does not ―imitate/represent‖ but mirrors/echoes actuality, or at least makes a coherent sense of experience. Chuang Tzu the great short-story teller did so; every Chinese thinker does so. They tell short stories in their meditations and reflections of life, to weave out stories of what we glibly/casually call ―Chinese philosophy,‖ to make sense of our life-world. The issue cuts deep. Chinese classical thinkers compress stories even further into curt aphoristic sayings, and even one pregnant word, being an ideo-audiogram, tells a story intimated by that word. Later ―commentators‖ write treatises to unpack the nuanced stories, as ―expositions‖ of classical sayings, longer than the originals many times over.84 What happened? It cannot be that those ancient sages were so inept as to need later scholars to expound on their theses. What I observed is this. History may teach us, but we must learn how it teaches us; raw random data teach us nothing. It is we who learn raw random sayings to be wise aphorisms and probe to explicate them, to result in commentaries and treatises. ―But such ‗randomness‘ itself must have something worth learning,‖ you say. All right, the ―something worth learning‖ is its evocative enabling. Classical sages are ―enablers‖ of later scholars to expound on what these latecomers think the revered classical thinkers thought, and end up developing on their own. Classical writers are ―classical‖ due to evocative enabling power. ―How do these enablers do so?‖ They do in two ways. One, those aphoristic sayings are concentrates of things-unsaid to call forth saying-expounding. Two, those aphoristic sayings are inter-coherent but seem scattered; Chinese thinking shows Dr. Seuss‘ ―Here and there, funny things are everywhere.‖ Later scholars are drawn into ―systematizing‖ those precious 80 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (1983), University of Chicago Press, 1984, I: 31-34, cf. Preface. 81 Not even Oxford English Dictionary has ―emplotment.‖ Such a convoluted contrivance! 82 Why doesn‘t he simply say ―problems‖? This is another contrivance. 83 Myths (muthos) have an ―underlying sense‖ (hyponoia) hidden in their simple childlike stories that cannot be lightly dismissed in logical argumentation (logos) of Plato (Phaedo, Republic, Phaedrus, Timaeus) and Aristotle (Metaphysics 1091b, cf. 982b, 1074b, 1000a). See F. E. Peters, Greek Philosophical Terms: A Historical Lexicon, New York University Press, 1967, pp. 120-121, and J. A. Stewart and G. R. Levy, The Myths of Plato, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1960. 84 Just see contemporary ―translations‖ of Confucius, Lao Tzu, and Sun Tzu. They are all stuffed with ―introductions‖ much longer, often many times over, than the actual translations of the original texts.
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―funny sayings everywhere,‖ resulting in one scholar‘s specific system, another one‘s another different system, etc. ―Chinese philosophy‖ thrives on such ―thinking game‖ for millennia. The West is similar; sayings abound everywhere. From Thales‘ ―All is water‖ and all Pre-Socratics‘ poetry through Euclid‘s The Elements, Spinoza‘s Ethics, Pascal‘s Pensées, to Nietzsche‘s writings and Wittgenstein‘s Tractatus, thinkers keep pro-ducing pungent sayings for later thinkers to expound and systematize. Even Hegel‘s, Kant‘s, and Whitehead‘s ―systems‖ are expounded by Neo-Hegelians, Neo-Kantians, and Whiteheadians. China just explicitly admits and glorifies itself in this situation, while the West does not. Western philosophers spontaneously perform thought experiments by entertaining concrete examples and counter-examples. Plato has ―myth of the Cave,‖ Hobbes and Rousseau have ―state of nature,‖ Rawls has a ―veil of ignorance‖ (in A Theory of Justice, 1971), D. E. Harding has ―on having no head‖ (1961, 1987), and Thomas Nagel has ―being a bat‖ (in The Mind‟s I, 1981). Sadly, these philosophers never stop to reflect on what they are doing, on how significant it is for life to think by such storytelling. This entire seeming quibble over the classics, past and present, is not just a matter of whimsical preference, personal or cultural, but necessitated by life; it is alive and relevant to life actuality. We just think of ―history‖ that cannot be plotted but can only be lived, dotted, and described. There is no ―science of history‖ in the mode of natural science, as there cannot be ―natural science of human living,‖ for our daily living can only be recorded, collected, and described in aphorisms and journals—and then commented on by posterity. This is perhaps because natural science is constructed to deal only with repeatable parts and aspects of nature that does not repeat itself. Natural science is so plotted as to depart from ―actual time,‖ our lived world. Our lived world is all-too-historical; our life is history in the making, history itself, and ―history does not repeat but rhymes.‖85 If we cannot have a natural science of history, we cannot have natural science of our life, our experiences and our daily world, whether cosmic, physical, or psychological. Thus there is no exact (natural) science of sociology, economics, trade, or weather. Our diary and journal that dot events record them, often aphoristically, have no (natural) science to them, either, for every day differs from every other day and their differences cannot be calculated, tabulated, repeated, and generalized, and predicted precisely. They can only be concentrated into curt aphorisms, to scatter around all over, on each event each day, at a time. Narrative or fiction is, then, a ―fake‖ so contrived86 that in writing it we are distanced/torn from ourselves. Ironically, such an unnatural fiction-making87 is also a part of our life. Scholars would describe how we make fiction to live our lives, and then our description turns out no fiction but description of fiction-making, itself one of our real lifeactivities, a part of our ―history‖ that includes fiction-making as one of our life-activities that, in turn, compose our life-world. Let us tell one of its basic stories, on life and no-life. Machines do not die; only things alive grow and die. Machines just wear out and disintegrate. Disintegration is not death. The boy lying dead beside his warn-out bike that fell apart is brought home to us by a story; logic would have seen them identical. Can and cannot 85 Foreign Affairs, November/December 2003, p. 2. 86 That is, as long as fiction requires artificial ―emplotment‖ (Ricoeur). ―Is there really no fiction-making that has no emplotment?‖ Well, in fact, ―fiction‖ connotes imaginative invention (Oxford English Dictionary, V: 872) as in ―fictitious‖ and ―The average man is a fiction,‖ contrasted with ―fact.‖ Taken this way, fiction is not ―story‖ that includes fiction. 87 I take ―fiction-making‖ to include ―fiction-writing.‖
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are living words; do and do not are machine-words. Babies cannot think, talk, work, laugh, or play—yet. Machines do not taste, or sex, talk, or think, at all. When a ball is bounced by kids, kids laugh, but the ball does not even ―bounce,‖ which is a life-word. Kids wait; machines do not. Taste, sex, talk, think are life-words. Signs are part of talk that is life-word. Only we humans alive ask, ―Can machines think?‖ Machines do not ask; asking is lifeword. The above is told of as stories; only stories describe all this. Logic cannot understand it, for logic just computes. Logic is machine-word; story is life-word. In fact, even ―compute‖ is life-word, for machines just click on. All this is told as stories. Story-thinking tells stories that life and no-life inter-traffic to inter-exist, as the violinists play their violins, becoming part one to another to make life-music. Our lifeworld is itself such storytelling; it is story-shaped.88 No wonder ancient Aeschylus took ―logos‖ to mean something to be perceived at once by the ear as sound and talk, and by the phren, those who have ears to hear, as principles and reasons pervading the cosmos.89 Likewise, the Chinese take Tao to be both talk and cosmic principle,90 as Lao Tzu began his Tao Te Ching with ―Tao can tao (talk-as-Tao91), not Always Tao.‖ In self-negation, Lao Tzu shrewdly repeated Tao so many times, to stress how thoroughly Tao pervades Heaven and Earth, in its negative visibility and positive ineffability. Tao is the word, the story, of cosmic principle, spreading as a dynamic Circle of the universe that expands everywhere, without an edge, with its center everywhere. We are now ready to consider ―circle.‖ And this circle would reveal to us how cultures and storytelling are interrelated to reveal our living as human.
CIRCLES, CULTURES, STORIES There is a circle whose center is everywhere and its edge nowhere, said Nicholas of Cusa, 92 proverbially, or Augustine (as Emerson said). Both men used such a circle to describe 93 God but it is no less awesomely revealing of actuality, closely relevant to ―what there is‖ if not identical to it. In any case, such is how this interesting notion, this strange circle, appeared in history. We must consider what it is, and then what it means. To begin, what is this strange circle? A circle shows a definite relation between a point at the center and all other points at its edge, connoting a coherence of a center with all 88 Cf. Rodney Frey, ed., Stories That Make the World: Oral Literature of the Indian Peoples of the Inland Northwest as Told by Lawrence Aripa, Tom Yellowtail, and Other Elders, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995. 89 David Sansone, Aeschylean Metaphors for Intellectual Activity, Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag GmbH, 1975, p. 80. 90 ―Logos‖ in John 1:1 means both ―principle‖ (to appeal to the Greeks) and ―word‖ (to appeal to the Jews). Chinese translators cleverly rendered ―logos‖ as ―Tao‖ to combine ―principle (li 理)‖ with ―word (yen 言).‖ See 聖經: 啟導本, 香港: 海天書樓, 1989, pp. 1482, 1880-1885. 91 At least this is what almost every later commentator takes it to mean, although I am not sure it is correct, for ―tao‖ as ―say, talk‖ appeared in the fourth century BCE while Tao Te Chine appeared in the sixth. Still, the interpretation is not off the mark, and apt here. 92 The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, NY: Modern Library, 2000, p. 252. I once saw a book about how China also independently noted such a circle to exist, but I now lost the reference. 93 See Coda: Various Ponds Alive, below. I have also considered this circle as descriptive of God in my manuscript, Nonsense: Cultural Meditations on the Beyond, yet to be published. I consider here this circle as our historical actuality of storytelling and cultures.
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equidistant points at the edge. The circle with an everywhere-center and nowhere-edge must then not stay but moves, for ―everywhere‖ is ―here and elsewhere,‖ ―nowhere‖ is ―ever expanding elsewhere from ‗here‘,‖ and ―elsewhere‖ moves somewhere ―else‖ not ―here‖anywhere. This circle is then a moving coherence, a circle of many circles, blending one into the other in waves, out and out. Now, what does this intriguing dynamic circle mean? It can describe (1) daily ongoing, 94 (2) my life, (3) cultures, (4) interculture, and (5) storytelling. One, the circle of everywhere-center and nowhere-edge can describe daily ongoing that goes around in open coherence. The sun rises in the east every morning (constant), while the wind blows as it chooses (moving, indeterminate), as Whitehead said, and each day is this coherent unity (circle) of constancy (everywhere-center) and indeterminacy ever going ahead (nowhere-edge). Everyday is thus same-different, round and round, out and out. Two, this dynamic circle may describe the pond of my life dotted with countless raindrops of inspiration, each rippling out a circle that constantly expands into nowhere, that is, constantly vanishing to blend into another ripple-circle made by another inspirationraindrop, and then another, incessantly, indefinitely. The pond of human awareness makes a circle dotted with many expanding circles, a circle in time, coherently one in centers everywhere, to expand edge-nowhere. Three, all this has profound cultural implications. In the West, Einstein dissolved Newton‘s absolute space and time into relative ―spacetime‖; for Derrida an absolute circle of the universe was now ―deconstructed‖ into many subject-circles each related to the others, ―deferred‖ into the others constantly appearing and disappearing likewise. Plato and Hobbes gathered up loose crowds into the politics of a center, a philosopherking or a Leviathan, and Foucault ―deconstructed‖ it into political rhythms of push-and-pull in waves of raw power. Our universe is now a ―shoe-string‖ circle of moving ―wavicle‖circles, each pulsing and undulating into the others, as the circle of a system cannot prove itself (Gödel), that is, a circle exists as such only thanks to the other to which it opens and ripples out. Our circle of universe and its understanding is now waves and rhythms of many interblends of circles constantly expanding into nowhere. The West expressed all this in the 95 mathematics of tight logical analysis and no-nonsense experimental deduction/induction ; strict circle-coherence pervades the moving open-ended circles/circumferences. Many moving inter-blending circles inter-pervade to manifest a pond that is peculiarly Western. Thus, we all think/live in a moving circle of open-ended coherence, such as in the West‘s mathematical/experimental weaving of science/technology. Only China explicitly manifests it as such, both in thinking and in expression; China is another pond of many moving circles that is distinct from the West. We now consider China-circle and its cultural implications.
94 See Wu‘s ―World Interculturalism: China Written in English,‖ Taiwan Journal of East Asian Studies, June 2005, pp. 1-42. 95 Chad Hansen is today‘s I. A. Richards, innocently taking Western ―analytical logic‖ to be universally applicable, confidently pushing his analytical interpretation all through Chinese history of thought (A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought, Oxford, 1992). That story-thinking can accommodate analytical logic indicates how great story-thinking is, for analytical logic to house story-thinking results in tearing logic apart (as Alice in Wonderland did to Lewis Carroll‘s math) and tarnishing analytical logic itself (as Deleuze did to Alice in Wonderland by logicizing her, Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, NY: Columbia University Press, 1990).
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François Jullien wrote on the Chinese notion of ―shih, 勢‖ he translates as ―the propensity 96 of things.‖ He was perceptive enough to see this notion as a center from which scatterspread out all sorts of notions all over China, a key to understanding the thought-world of China. Jullien may not have realized, however, that the same universal reverberation of implications and connotations exist in all Chinese pivotal notions. Each of the words, ―Heaven 天,‖ ―Tao 道,‖ ―nature 性,‖ ―ritual-propriety 禮,‖ ―princely man 君子,‖ ―humanity 仁,‖ ―loyalty-conscientiousness 忠,‖ ―fidelity 信,‖ ―filiality 孝,‖ ―principle as the grain of things 理,‖ ―breath-élan 氣,‖ ―feeling-situation 情,‖ ―the Yin-Yang 陰陽,‖ ―the divine 神,‖ and so on, covers no less than the entirety of the world of China. When Confucius wanted his disciple Tseng Tzu to thread his Tao into One, Tseng Tzu could have rightly cited any common notion that came to his mind. Our fascinating question here is, ―Why is all such the case?‖ The ―cause‖ quite possibly lies in the nature of actuality itself. Almost any notion that is interesting, that is, eye-catching, can be a center from which all sorts of implications flow. It belongs to Chinese genius to perceive this irradiation of ideas and capture it in a distinctive mode of thinking and expression that is describable as historical and literary 文史—all concrete storytelling. This is the sentiment of the circle with everywhere-center and nowhere-circumference. In addition, the reverse is also true. Any moment, any place can be a new circle which irradiates all sorts of new notional radii of implications, and in fact, any individual in any situation can begin an epoch-making revolution. As a common Chinese saying goes, ―The 97 situation shapes the hero as the hero shapes the situation.‖ The moral of our life is clear: Do not be trapped. We must always break out new and pursue the implications of new insight that comes at every moment, and expand it into a new 98 circle, and then go to another circle. This is how the new story of the New World is created; the brave new world begins at the new story-circle. Verification/confirmation consists in how far the new circle can expand its implications. If it expands just a few yards, then it is weak if not false, e.g., violence; if unlimited in its horizon, ―nowhere‖ to be seen, then it is powerfully valid, e.g., compassion. Such is the circle-canon of Chinese circles, Chinese culture. China calls the range of expansion ―history.‖ Let us come back to our ―pond,‖ our culture that is our peculiar circle of inter-blending circles. How do we detect the peculiarity of each pond as distinct from others? A handy sign is translatability. ―Grace‖ and ―honor‖ in English are almost untranslatable into Chinese; some say ―freedom‖ and ―democracy‖ are as well. The reverse is also true. There exist no words as exact replicas of ―culture,‖ ―analysis,‖ ―philosophy,‖ or other Western terms. Chinese language must struggle to devise compound words, ―文化,‖ ―分析,‖ ―哲學,‖ either nonexistent before the Ch‘ing period when China first contacted the West, or 96 François Jullien, The Propensity of Things: Towards a History of Efficacy in China, NY: Zone Books, 1999. 97 Jullien‘s book sadly missed this shaping reciprocity between the 勢-situation and the individual (not just individuals helplessly riding on it), as Saussy also missed who reviewed the book brilliantly (in The Journal of Asian Studies, November 1996, pp. 984-987). Besides, Saussy (as did perhaps Jullien) missed culture as an open circle, as stressed here, and Saussy‘s problem (rather flamboyantly put) of the familiar lack of common categories in cultural comparison is resolved to my satisfaction in On Metaphoring, foreshadowed in previous Body Thinking and Togetherness; but I admit Saussy wrote in 1996 while my books were out in 1997, 1998, and 2001. 98 Emerson‘s ―Circles‖ (op. cit.) is alive primarily because of this emphasis on breaking out into novelty.
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apply compound words to those Western technical terms with meanings different from their 99 original ones—to approximate their new technical imports. The Western penchant for objective abstract analysis turns psychology into medical physiology and tangible sociology. Scientists resort to brain scanning to ―measure‖ pain and ―determine‖ how a shy anxious man differs from an impulsive extrovert, and takes counseling as psychology. We thus understand how the West sees China as ―fuzzy and unclear‖ and China the West as ―cold and barren‖; how tiresome a platitude-mouther Confucius is in the West as how brutal and unreasonable Socrates is in China, and the list of such cultural incompatibilities goes on. Words are truly alive only in the culture-pond in which they mean in their own way. The West imposes the ―problems‖ of freedom vs. fate, and God‘s love vs. human suffering, onto 100 for ―love‖ and ―freedom‖ in the Bible differ from the Bible that has no such dilemmas, those in the West, whose ―theology,‖ logical-systematic if not analytical-scholastic, is foreign 101 to the Bible. Barclay said, ―(W)ords have associations. They have associations with people, with history, with ideas, with other words, and these associations give words a certain flavor which cannot be rendered in translation, but which affect their meaning and significance in the most important way.‖ This is why he had to write a book to give that linguistic ―flavor‖ to some Bible words. Likewise, Lewis also had to write a book to elucidate the very ―life‖ of certain 102 common English words. 103 As some Western words are difficult to render into Chinese, so ―風骨 (wind bones?)‖ and ―情節 (feeling nodes/joints?)‖ are untranslatable into English; some say almost any Chinese notion is as well, for example, ―ssu, 思‖ is not quite thinking, nor is ―k‘au, 考‖ quite equivalent to ideation or deliberation. This is why Confucius‘ compact Analects and Lao Tzu‘s no less turgid Tao Te Ching have not been successfully rendered into English, despite almost an unlimited number of their translations have long been flooding the market. No wonder we often hear such comments as ―China has no philosophy‖ (Arthur Wright) though it has deep reflections on matters at hand and in Heaven and Earth, and ―China has no ethics‖ (Henry Rosemont, Jr.) though it has Five interpersonal Relations (五倫). Their untranslatability comes from the fact that each culture has its own ―music‖ of sense and reason that cannot be rendered into different tunes, rhythms, and resonance of other 99 ―文化‖ originally meant teaching-transforming common people with exquisite virtues (以文德化民); ―分析‖ simply meant to divide; ―哲學‖ came from Nishi, Amané (西周)‘s ―希哲學‖ adapted from 周茂叔‘s (周敦頤) ―希求賢哲.‖ 100 People in the Bible did suffer from those dilemmas, but did not treat their suffering as intellectual problems. 101 Robert A. Oden, Jr.‘s The Bible Without Theology: The Theological Tradition and Alternatives to It, NY: Harper and Row, 1987, tries to develop a non-theological hermeneutic to the Bible. Although he still adopts the usual analytical methods of anthropology to understand the Bible, no one seems to have paid attention to his thesis. 102 William Barclay, New Testament Words, Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1974, p. 12. C. S. Lewis, Studies in Words (1967), and also An Experiment in Criticism (1969), both from Cambridge University Press. Cf. Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning (1973, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press), History in English Words (1926, London: Faber and Faber, 2009, Barnes and Noble, 2009), Speaker‟s Meaning (1967, London: Rudolf Steiner Press), etc. 103 Is ―wind‖ here like ―airs and graces‖ or ―give oneself airs‖? Did natural air come to have such human complexity because ―ch‘i 氣‖ as the root dynamics of life circulates throughout Nature and human nature?
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cultures. Hence, culture shocks and misunderstanding, as well as cultural inter-learning of creative delight occur. The Tower of Babel has its headaches and attractions, and its headaches are its attractions. Four, if each pond of circles of no circles has its peculiar life-style and flavor, these ponds are themselves circles of everywhere-centers and nowhere-edges; the culture-ponds are themselves circles of expanding circles inter-blending into other culture-ponds, and an exciting world of multicultural inter-translations comes about. This ―world‖ is itself a circle of circles of everywhere-centers and nowhere-edges, themselves in coherent flux, inter-confusing without confusion, a chaotic cosmos. Here is an ample room for creative misunderstanding, continual cultural miscegenation, creative inter-borrowing into constantly emerging new worlds, one after another. I used to 104 typify and explain the mode of such interculture as ―metaphoring‖ ; I will claim here that this metaphoring activity is actually storytelling, as ancient as the history of humanity itself. Five, these cultural ponds of circles, expanding, interblending, are expressed in storytelling in the languages of mathematics (West) and delightful notions/myths (China). They inter-yarn into a meaningful coherence, a story, that constantly expands by opening itself into unexpected other stories, blending in with them. Story is itself an act of storytelling 105 that moves and weaves itself out (open) and, all this while, still remains itself (coherence). How do such storytelling form circles of everywhere-center and nowhere-edge? Its answer is itself an interesting story. Barfield said, ―(T)here is one case where the past . . . live(s) on in the present . . . where 106 we . . . re-enact (as Collingwood said) . . . wherever we speak or write . . .‖ This is history widely understood. Let us extrapolate from Barfield in our own way. This meaningreenactment in history-time and community-space makes dynamic circles of anywherecenters, nowhere-edges. As we use (in speaking/writing) a word in roughly similar ways as its inherited meanings, they come to accumulate those meanings into a cluster of meanings in a dictionary; this is part of a cultural pond, made of communal usage of words. When we express ourselves by 107 contracting the lexical meaning (e.g., ―furniture‖) or expanding it (e.g., ―focus‖), we make a circle-center, anywhere, and it has to spread in communication to its audience, and the spread expands the circle‘s edge indefinitely, constantly, that is, ―nowhere.‖ ―How did the past meanings of the word get initiated, however?‖ We don‘t know; all we see is that we are in the midst of this continuous process of dynamic complex reenactment, from time immemorial to future immemorial. This is another example of circles of anywherenowhere, alive in history everywhere. Contraction and expansion are just two ways in which word-reenactment occurs, to form a moving meaning-circle of its center everywhere and its edge nowhere. All this word-usage tells stories of our expression of meaning and its communication, themselves a storytelling, and Barfield tells stories of all this storytelling. When we want to communicate English meaning-expressions among communities of other cultures, we engage 104 In my On Metaphoring: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 2001. 105 I briefly considered this peculiarity of ―story‖ in my The Butterfly as Companion, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990, pp. 67-68. 106 Owen Barfield, Speaker‟s Meaning, London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1967, p. 23. 107 Ibid., pp. 31-32, 41-42. We do not need to go into details of how ―furniture‖ and ―focus‖ got transformed, expanded, or contracted, as Barfield sees them. It will detract from our main thread of reflection here.
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in hermeneutic understanding, translations, from one culture-pond to another, and circles of anywhere-center and nowhere-edge keep inter-blend to expand worldwide. Now, our description above unwittingly displayed three sorts of circles of storytelling, inter-involved. We have told the story of how this circle of everywhere-center and nowherecircumference occurred in the history of our thinking, then the story of what it is, then that of what it means; each of three sorts of stories (how, what, its meaning) leads to and blends into the other. ―Are these stories, then, three aspects of one story, or three separate but related stories?‖ It is an open question. Answering it makes another sort of story. ―Here and there, funny things are everywhere,‖ said Dr. Seuss, and set out to write stories about them for children of all ages who are eternally curious. Life is indeed funny and enjoyable. Life is larger than logic and beyond what we usually think and sense, and anything bigger than what we can understand can evoke laughter. Dr. Seuss is not alone. Ancient Kung-sun Lung 公 孫 龍 shows us how logic can be used, twisted, to tell stories on how we view things beyond our casual perceptions and common sense. Escher, Einstein, and Lewis Carroll did so likewise; so did all literary writers, Erasmus, Voltaire, Twain, and world mythologies. Things sparkle with fresh brilliance because of such going-beyond our thing-perception. Homer‘s Odyssey is one of the world‘s oldest stories of this mind-expansion. Kung-sun Lung is another, and Chuang Tzu yet another. Sadly, usual commentaries on Kung-sun 108 Lung and Chuang Tzu try so hard to convolutedly fit them into the Procrustean bed of our usual perception of things. A. C. Graham‘s studies of Moh Ching 墨 經 turn them into dull scholastic contortions. Actually, all Name Scholars‘ 名家 writings are delightfully refreshing. They are 109 expanding our common sense into things‘ vast visions, their ―tall stories.‖ Myriad things are in fact ever out there beyond us. They are then ―outrageous‖ to our common sense, which must turn outrageous-to-itself to fit into actuality. There are more fun things than our philosophies dream of. Now this is not as far-fetched as we usually think, as our common sense takes. Take an outrageous but instructive example: We in our thought experiments on letting ―Humpty Dumpty‖ sit on a wall and see how it fares—it ―falls, breaks.‖ Kids repeat the story, adults repeat the experiment, and we all find that ―no king‘s horses, no king‘s men, can put it back again‖; it is confirmed, that an egg that sits on a wall would break. ―But Humpty Dumpty is a unique entity, not an ordinary egg, incapable of repeatedly experimenting on,‖ say we adults. Well, in which case, we adults say this is outside ―fact,‖ in the realm of ―myth,‖ of nursery rhyme; but kids don‘t care and keep repeating the ―story‖ until it becomes ―history‖ for them, for whichever ―kid‖ doesn‘t remember Humpty Dumpty sitting on a wall and falling down? History rhymes as poetry and music to move us rhyming historical reality into their flesh. Scientists perform dull same experiments to confirm; kids bounce nursery rhymes for fun dancing. Kids love funny ―Humpty Dumpty‖ sitting on the wall as adults on the ―fact‖ of an 108 E.g., Max Perleberg, The Works of Lung-Sun Lung-Tzu, Hong Kong, 1952 (private printing). 109 Chuang Tzu‘s ―ch‘i hsieh 齊諧‖ (that begins Chapter One) can mean ―all jokes,‖ that is, ―tall stories.‖ See my The Butterfly as Companion on this point. We are forced to say, ―You must be kidding!‖ in disbelief always; jokes often reveal truths.
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egg breaking, no fun. If adults laugh at kids‘ ―Humpty Dumpty‖ as infantile and unreal, kids can laugh at adults‘ ―fact‖ as adult-silly, for ―fact‖ is no fun, and nothing is more 111 and what is real, as history, is rhyming fun! Kids‘ ―fact‖ is important than having fun, 112 adults‘ ―Humpty Dumpty.‖ 113 In other words, we are all kids enjoying the whole ―event‖; kids call it a ―story‖ to repeat by chanting, dancing its rhyme for fun, while adults call it a ―science‖ to confirm by experimenting and theorizing on it as fact. And then all such storytelling, rhymed and confirmed, becomes our ―history‖; if it is far back in history, we call it a ―myth‖ as with Gilgamesh or Odyssey. ―Well, all this outrage, these shenanigans, may have originated in our actual experiment and experience,‖ we adults insist with a long face. It doesn‘t matter, for kids enjoy the story, whether Humpty-Dumpty falls and breaks or no, and kids‘ enjoyment repeats the story—and 114 their rhyming repetition ―confirms‖ the story for them as fun for sure. In short, there surely exist far more things in our world than our philosophies dream of. Here in this statement, the phrase ―more . . . than‖ makes for an outrageous feature of the world that remains ours. If our reason, logos, means to put matters together to understand them, then our reason is our story in four modes: story, science, history, and myth. These four remain in actuality and as actuality, and the greatest of these is story. The story has to be outrageously rich and varied as described above in science, history, and myth; if it is not outrageous, it is no ―story.‖ We must now push further this strange storytelling that is a circle of everywhere-center and nowhere-edge. As Emerson correctly intuited, this circle is dynamic self-transcendence, going beyond itself and its milieu, breaking in pieces all egg-conventions and limitations of the experienced and the known/knowable. The circle breaks through past experience; it is trans-experiential, changing, changing, never ceasing, always envisaging a new horizon, and such a process of breaking forth into the new is storytelling that expresses life itself. Let us look into what this self-transcending élan is. The élan in life is expressed—in 115 storytelling—in an aesthetic creation of the active Subject. This pushing beyond the push itself pushes beyond this world to the trans-world, and we enter ―religion.‖ Religion is that beyond-world, beyond-self, in which we live and which enables our life to self-create beyond itself, and so we humans do not create religion, nor do we see or know it; we can only accept it whose part we are, for we grow out of status quo thanks to ―it.‖ Going beyond this-worldly self-transcendence (aesthetics), this transcendence of selftranscendence, this going from this-shore to that-shore, is religious transcendence. To obtain succor in our absolute trustful acceptance of the Absolute is Christianity; to reach Nirvana after ceasing all world-delusions is Buddhism. To obtain the Way to become sagely is 110 ―You kids do no experiment; we repeat it to confirm facts.‖ ―Your ‗experiment works‘ in your heart/mind as our nursery rhyme works for us. Your ‗experiment‘ is your favorite nursery rhyme. We kids repeat ours, too. Besides, your nursery rhyme is no fun; ours is, for we dance on ours, and you don‘t on yours!‖ 111 Kids‘ ―fun‖ the adult Aristotle called ―happiness,‖ which is less happy than ―fun.‖ 112 That is, kids‘ Humpty Dumpty is factual as adults‘ egg, and adults‘ fact should be fun as kids‘ Humpty Dumpty. 113 Are we not kids? We should be. ―Great Ones are those who lose none of their ‗baby-heart.‘‖ (Mencius 4B12) 114 Every time kids repeat a story they change it a little, as our oral tradition does. We call such repetition with variation ―rhyming‖ as in poetry, music, and myths. 115 Why ―aesthetics‖? It is because art is the freest realm of human creation so sensuous, so sensible.
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Confucianism; it is the highest form of morality. To divinely conform to the Way is Taoism; it is the highest of naturalism where life itself is fulfilled in Nature that overflows life. Now, we have unwittingly told stories about life‘s storytelling, even the story beyond life‘s storytelling, this circle of everywhere-center and nowhere-edge, pushing, pushing, forever pushing out of itself. This pushing beyond itself is ―history,‖ our life-story, our storytelling, our living. ―How does storytelling relate to history?‖ Both in Chinese and in English, ―story‖ both relates to ―history‖ and overflows it. As we 117 are made of stories, stories overflow history that we are. This phenomenon shows how we overflow ourselves; we are more than what and how we actually are. So, we have two points here, one, what story is, two, what we are, as told and shown by story and storytelling. Thanks to story and storytelling, we are bigger than we are. What do both these points mean? One, ―story‖ narrates what happened; story is related to history, etymologically and logically (故事, 史譚, 事蹟, 來歷). Such a story of history would not tell unless it is interesting (軼聞, 逸事, 傳記, 逸話). Soon (logical and chronological ―soon‖) ―interest‖ takes over and story overflows history and turns into a tale taller than historical facts, that ―facts‖ that may not have happened and may never happen, a ―fable‖ (傳奇, 傳説, 小説). Two, the telling is of the story of things, persons telling and told to, told to us, to us before (典故, 來歷) and to us after. Telling forms us, history shapes us; in the telling we stand-out, exist as ―we,‖ as story. Without storytelling, there would be no telling (情報, 情節, 結構). By the same token, without telling, there would be no story. Besides, without story and storytelling, there would be no ―we.‖ We overflow actuality to exist in story and 118 storytelling, factual and fictive.
RELATIVISM AND STORYTELLING Before we go further into the panorama of storytelling, we may note that, as we read a story, at least sometimes we feel why it went this way and not that, or it ought to have happened this way instead of that. This feeling is our thrust to normative critique that spontaneously arises as we read a story about what actually transpired. What fascinates us here is that our normative thrust takes us in a direction of what is ―logically expected that differs from how the story goes.‖ Our logical sense wants to have it this way, not that, while the story-sense follows wherever things go, ―this way is OK, and that 119 way is OK, too.‖ This both-and thrust can ―walk both‖ ways mutually incompatible, and we open the notorious Pandora‘s Box of ―relativism.‖ 116 Being ―divine‖ means being an awesomely divine performer of music of life. 117 Story overflows history because story can soar beyond fact to which history is confined. Stories soar imaginatively beyond fact, even counterfactually. 118 All this story of stories is woven with a glance at ―story,‖ ―history,‖ ―storytelling,‖ and ―exist‖ in the Oxford English Dictionary. Chinese words and phrases inserted here and there show how much the Chinese sentiment agrees with the West on ―story‖ and ―storytelling.‖ We all agree as human on all this. 119 ―Walk both‖ is a natural (we walk with both legs, don‘t we?) but paradoxically insightful phrase of Chuang Tzu‘s (2/40), who explains his points, and delights and convinces us of his points, by continual storytelling such as ―morning, three, evening, four‖ in this context.
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Relativism is a way of ―paradox,‖ suspending us among many directions mutually logically-exclusive. Paradoxically, however, we find pleasure, fascination, and satisfaction in 120 confronting such a paradox-situation. This is perhaps because in this paradoxical both-and we find ourselves saying, ―But of course!‖ We finally come to see actuality eye to eye, and that spells an unspeakable satisfaction. Paradox, relativism, and storytelling intertwine to gratify and delight us. Relativism cuts much deeper than a hand-off ―anything goes‖ attitude or ―leave me alone as I leave you alone‖ solipsism. These are two of many withdrawal-pitfalls of democracy so much in vogue today. Relativism is actually a dynamo that pushes us out into a panorama of diverse worlds storytelling displays. Relativism shows diverse views on the same theme, such as Descartes, Confucius, and Chuang Tzu taking the ―self‖ in different ways, or else show diverse takes on the same view, 121 such as American spirit of pragmatism vis-à-vis Chinese pragmatic spirit. We are fascinated and frustrated; what can we do? In fact, what should we do? Can‘t storytelling help? Three stories come to mind. One is Chuang Tzu‘s well-known but puzzling ―morning, three; evening, four.‖ A Monkey Uncle announces to the monkeys that from now on he is going to give them three nuts in the morning and four in the evening. Monkeys are furious. ―All right, then,‖ said he, ―how about four in the morning and three in the evening?‖ They applaud. Relativism is here, indeed. Another story says that two disciples dispute over two views mutually opposed. Their Master goes to one and says, ―You are right,‖ then goes to another and says, ―You are right.‖ A third disciple complains, saying, ―But Master, the two are opposed one to the other. How could both be right?‖ Briefly paused, the Master then says, ―And you are right, too.‖ Isn‘t he 122 the Master of relativism? Finally, we see Tommy say to Mom, ―I hate Charlie. I want to kill him!‖ Mom says, ―All right, you can kill him tomorrow. Now, come to your dinner, OK?‖ Tommy says, ―OK, Mom.‖ Tommy then forgets all about what he said to Mom. Another marvelous story of relativism is displayed here. We spontaneously nod to all these stories. ―There is something here that manages relativism just right,‖ say we, but what is it? All three show an amicable accommodation to whatever that comes. ―Whatever comes‖ is relativism; ―amicable accommodation‖ is its solution. The beauty here is that the solution takes place so smoothly, so naturally, as if nothing were done. That‘s storytelling ―solving‖ and resolving the potential bloodshed of contention among incompatibles. It is thus, in any case, that storytelling opens us into relativism of the diverse worlds, and manages them with natural apt poise without fanfare. Here is a win-win situation where everyone is satisfied, thanks to tact and sensitivity of Monkey Uncle, the Master, and Mom. It is a breathtaking concord, with sensitivity intellectual, empathetic. It is hospitality. 120 I freely rifle Roy Sorensen‘s A Brief History of the Paradox: Philosophy and the Labyrinths of the Mind, Oxford University Press, 2003. Although interesting, Sorensen is too much confined to historical exposition to freely explore the fascinating depths of paradox, what it amounts to, where its roots are, why we are delighted and satisfied precisely in our inability to resolve the paradox, how it relates to relativism, and so on. 121 See my On the “Logic” of Togetherness: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 1998, pp. 303-342. The volume told stories of these two cases, and told a story of these two stories. 122 See my On Metaphoring: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 2001, pp. 339-345. The whole volume concerns storytelling as metaphoring; it tells a story of life.
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The story of Odysseus silently shows us the crucial virtue of hospitality. Hospitality is not something nice to do but a matter of life and death, giving life to those who are hospitable, killing those who are not. The strength of USA is founded on the spirit of hospitality to those immigrants who are poor, miserable, and hopeless. The Statue of Liberty is a gift from other nation (France) to celebrate the American Spirit of Hospitality after which everyone yearns. No wonder, American democracy is the whirlpool of relativism, an accommodative experiment in world togetherness.
RELATIVISM AS STORYTELLING ―How are relativism and storytelling related, however?‖ We must first consider, that is, tell a story of, what ―relativism‖ is and how crucial it is in life. I have treated this theme elsewhere,123 but as befits relativism, we must start all over from scratch.124 Relativism forever begins afresh; it is an eruptive thrust of life in cognitive garb. But this is to anticipate. To begin, we must realize that ―relativism‖ has two meanings, as a noun, an assertion of a thesis, and as a verb, a description of life-process. This realization generates seven points on life as relativism alive. (1) Often relativism is taken as another assertion, one of usual judgments, categorical and terminal, and so relativism is what absolutely asserts a denial of all absolutes. It is then easy to attack relativism as self-contradictory; doesn‘t it assert its own denial? Or we can attack it as intellectually irresponsible; doesn‘t it take any view as equally good as any other, all depending on one‘s perspective, cultural, ethical, or otherwise? Philosophers since Socrates (contra sophists) such as Kant (contra Hume) are supposed to fight/demolish relativism in the same manner as we fight religious heresies. Closely related to these accusations are many questions, ―Is there an absolute truth at all?‖ ―Are all views equally valid?‖ ―Is there a universal form of reasoning?‖ and ―Can we judge between two views?‖125 These questions emerge because we think we can know whole truths and what we know to be true are whole truths. Mathematician Whitehead warns us, ―There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.‖126 These questions are insoluble conundrums requiring acrobatic ingenuity, once we take
123 Kuang-ming Wu, Existential Relativism, Ph.D. Thesis, Yale University Philosophy Department, 1965, and On Metaphoring, op. cit., pp. 339-344 and 669 (index on ―relativism‖). See later ―§ Rorty, China, and World Relativism.‖ 124 By ―as befits relativism,‖ I mean relativism is a description (not assertion) of our reasoning as life-process, forever on the way, on the go. This is to anticipate, however. 125 These are some of the typical questions hurled at relativism in Martin Hollis and Steven Lukes, eds., Rationality and Relativism, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1986. Rom Harré and Michael Krausz, Varieties of Relativism, Oxford: Blackwell, 1996, also takes relativism as an assertive view. 126 Isn‘t this an insight of relativism? The saying appears in Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead, ed. Lucien Price, Boston: David Goding, 1954, p. 14. As master mathematical logician, Whitehead must be aware of contradiction in his saying. Is his saying the whole truth? What if his saying is only a half truth? Either Yes or No answered to either question would lead him into difficulty. But he did not mean his saying as a definite thesis. It is this ―not‖ that is relativism.
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relativism as one among usual asserted views.127 Strangely, however, we say relativism is dead wrong, and yet historically it keeps popping up everywhere in life and in thinking.128 (2) Such an impossibly formidable maze that drives us into a dead-end, and yet refusing to leave us, signals that relativism is crucial in life and that it is wrong to take relativism as a noun, a static definitive view on a par with absolutism. Relativism must instead be a descriptive verb, a challenge to the absolutist approach to life-issues, and being a challenge to an assertive approach, relativism cannot itself be as set, assertive, definitive, and cut and dried as absolutism. Relativism must instead sinuously describe an actual situation, not judge, declare, and categorically assert a view. As description, relativism realistically testifies, points, and proposes. Relativism is a verb, being constantly, critically, alert to every issue and every view, ever sifting, ever searching, forever on the go. Is this why Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu constantly tell stories of common living, alerting us to its unsuspected implications, egging us on to reflect on them, yet proposing no definitive views? Is this how the Taoists came to be accused of committing ―an error of relativistic lifewithdrawal—vague, indecisive, and irresponsible‖? Relativism is a description of a living process, that is, a story as alive as actuality, unceasingly telling stories of life, one after another, so that we can live through various views and attitudes to inter-learn one from the other and inter-cultivate. Interestingly, ―better‖ and ―best‖ are usually taken as part of mathematically exclusive ordinals, such that if A is better than B, B cannot be as good as A, and if A is the best, nothing else can be as good as A. But we can understand parents proudly proclaiming their children to be ―the best in the world,‖ proud spouses pointing to their beloved as ―the best dearest in the world,‖ and proud children claiming their mothers as ―the most beautiful in the world.‖ ―The biggest sale of the season got even bigger!‖ says Marshall Fields. How can the ―biggest‖ be ―even bigger,‖ mathematically? But ―bigger‖ emotionally boosts the ―biggest.‖ Are we ―more blessed than billions of others‖ with foods in the refrigerator, safety to worship our God, some cash reserves in the bank? Yes, but so are other billions who are also blessed because ―Blessed are you who weep‖ (Jesus). Who is more blessed? Thus, we can and do often freely use ―better‖ and ―best‖ to describe our happy situation, as long as we allow others to do likewise, congratulate them, and rejoice with them. In the human world, ―better‖ and ―best‖ are non-exclusive description of blessedness. Non-exclusion is the warmth of relativism that goes around in the world among humans. (3) ―But relativism cannot blindly describe; it must describe what life is and how we must behave.‖ Yes, it does both. Ruthlessly realistic, relativism points us to life as it is, and to an appropriate life-posture, ever empathic and critical to things and views. Relativism says that 127 A self-proclaimed relativist Joseph Margolis faces these challenges head-on, rambunctiously stirring up turgid pages in Pragmatism without Foundations: Reconciling Realism and Relativism (NY: Continuum, 2007), Truth About Relativism (Blackwell, 1991), etc. We agree that relativism is as alive as he is spirited, and yet wonder if it is as unapproachably complex as he makes it out to be. 128 No independent comprehensive article, ―Relativism,‖ exists in Paul Edwards, ed., The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Eight Volumes (Macmillan, 1967). Nor is there such article in Philip P. Wiener, ed., Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas, Five Volumes (Charles Scribner‘s Sons, 1973). Still, both sets have a long list of its scattered appearances in their Indexes; there, relativism appears as relation, situationism, skepticism, subjectivism, and even anarchism. Ubiquitous yet non-existent, relativism remains a mystery if it is taken as a set asserted view against another set asserted view, absolutism.
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we are and thus are to be ever ―on the way‖ trailing the Tao of Nature ever naturing. No view is perfect yet none is totally wrong, and every view must be carefully, patiently, gone through, vigilantly discerned, never pompously pronouncing the final judgment. Relativism is an apt and a normative posture of life. (4) ―But views must have goal; relativism cannot go aimless.‖ Yes, but its goal is not set eternally. Aristotle said that ―happiness‖ is our common goal that differs as all lives differ, and differs as life grows. My Johnny once excitedly vowed he was to be a garbage collector! Later, he vowed he was growing up as a milkman! He is now happy violinist, music historian, and medical technologist. One just changes interest as one grows. Ends are endless (Dewey) as life. Goals of life go on varying endlessly; so does the goal of relativism not predictable, not arbitrary. ―But we need a method, not arbitrarily wander around. What is the method of relativism?‖ Well, relativism‘s method is to carefully discern, going through views from inside the view, existentially.129 This is the truth in its ―laughing stock claim‖ that ―all views are equally true; we are all-tolerant.‖ All views are not actually equally valid, but relativist‘s method of sifting them applies equally to all views, yet its method cannot be canonized definitively; it has to sinuously follow each specific view that emerges. Socrates complained that Euthyphro‘s ―definition‖ of piety as ―what all gods love‖ is a contradiction, ―what all gods love and hate‖ among gods in conflict. Euthyphro could have responded that, of course, it is so by nature. Socrates‘ complaint holds only if we pursue a definition of ―love‖ identically universal, which is absurd. And so the definition could be amended as ―piety is what each god loves,‖ offering to each god what is due to it and no other. No single ―generic gift‖ pleases everyone; the same gift can of course be loved by one and rejected by another. Gifting is person-specific and cannot be uniform or arbitrary. All this is not a ―definition‖ of piety but its description. (5) Now, here is a bombshell on method, on argument. Relativism does not argue but simply describes what actually is the case, and description itself thereby argues—as Socrates did, powerfully, when he described how he came to be indicted as youth-corrupter and atheist. He described how, on the contrary, he improved their souls (no parent indicts him), as he followed the Delphic Oracle totally disregarding his own living, and his own life 130—and his description of this life-behavior demolished the indictment of impiety.131 Kierkegaard and Voltaire, Hugo and Tolstoy, among many others, followed suit and kept telling stories, and Western thinkers have been doing ―thought experiments,‖ arguing with ―examples‖ and ―counterexamples,‖ and all Chinese thinkers have been ―arguing‖ by tirelessly telling stories from history, actual or imagined. Story-argument is most powerful and persuasive because it ruthlessly follows life itself. Someone still demurs, however. ―Facts are not opinions because facts are not values; examples are not points, so relativism confuses description of facts with logical demonstration.‖ This accusation commit false dichotomies at the high judgment seat of ―abstract thinking‖ (Marcel). Thinking should be concrete; far from a contradiction, ―concrete thinking‖ is the way human life goes. Life forms history, an ongoing ―story argument,‖ to which Chinese thinkers constantly appeal. Here is an example from ―strictly conscientious‖ analyticity. 129 Cf. Kuang-ming Wu, ―Existential Relativism‖ (Ph.D. thesis, philosophy, Yale University, 1965). 130 The Apology, 20-24, et passim. 131 This is the best of journalism, whose factual description is an argument. Description as argument here parallels description as prescription in (3) above.
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G. E. Moore‘s ―naturalistic fallacy‖ says that we can still ask, ―Why are they ‗good‘?‖ to naturalistic properties cited to compose things ―good.‖132 Well, why is it a ―fallacy‖? Don‘t those factual properties show how they actually compose ―good,‖ and showing so demonstrates ―good‖ as good? Isn‘t this what Socrates did when he demonstrated—proved and showed—how unjustifiable the indictment was by simply describing how in fact he came to be indicted? ―But thinking makes a system. How could storytelling weave a system?‖ FischerBarnicol wants Marcel to pay more attention to ―system‖ that connects ideas. Marcel says he has been doing so in his dramatic works ―under the heading of ‗yes-but‘,‖ and this is being systematic without the ―intellectual imperialism‖ of having a system.133 Marcel has been telling stories and acting them out in ―dramas.‖ So did Sartre, whose ―systematic‖ work of ―phenomenological ontology‖ is packed with stories after stories of the intertwining of ―being and nothingness.‖ Such phenomenological description argues systematically. Marcel confesses, ―I . . . stimulate theologians or . . . offer them food for thought (, not) to think as a theologian myself‖134; he claims he does not do theology, but lets others do it. His systematic thinking has induced theological thinking, for his story-style delivery of thinking is thinking, and dramatic storytelling is itself a systematic argument. In short, relativism describes, describing demonstrates, that is, argues in systematizing things. (6) Now, in thus describing how relativism describes to demonstrate, haven‘t we described storytelling that describes? Isn‘t storytelling as sinuously alive as relativism, as alert, empathetic, and judicious to life, in a word as realistic and formative, as relativism? Doesn‘t relativism point to the story-way of story-formation, first appearing in an oral tradition, then coming to be written down, and then revised, rewritten, as history goes? Isn‘t history itself such a relativism-growth of storytelling? Isn‘t this the way we all walk, live, move, and have our be-ing to create life? To be is to create, live, and have our be-ing that is storytelling—in relativism-way that is the Tao of life. ―The Tao is walked and it is formed,‖ Chuang Tzu said (2/33). Likewise, our life is lived, reflected on, and it is formed.135 (7) Now, the ―self-defeating‖ feature of relativism so much exploited and ridiculed by opponents of relativism takes on a strangely new significance. Whitehead said,136 The true method of discovery is like the flight of an aeroplane. It starts from the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation.
He may not have realized that this airplane of thinking can take off and fly on, because our thinking ―defeats itself,‖ as it were, in what he calls ―inconsistency‖ right after this 132 G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica, 1903. Cf. P. H. Nowell-Smith, Ethics (1954), Harmondsworth Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1963, p. 323, index on ―Moore, G. E.‖ 133 Paul Arthur Schilpp and Lewis Edwin Hahn, eds., The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel, La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1984, pp. 421-455. 134 Ibid., p. 455. 135 This way of putting things—relativism, storytelling, history—goes a long way to simplifying Marcel‘s involved explanation of being systematic—to think in a connected fashion—against ―having‖ a system, in response to Fischer-Barnicol‘s emphasis on ―system.‖ Marcel‘s insistence on life-dramatic ―yes-but‖ to avoid intellectual imperialism of labeling a system as ―mine‖ is relativism at its best (ibid., p. 455). 136 Alfred N. Whitehead, Process and Reality: Corrected Edition, NY: The Free Press, 1978, p. 5. See my reflection on it in On Metaphoring, op. cit., p. 254.
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quotation. Wittgenstein celebrates it as he concludes the Tractatus with oracular pungency, saying,137 6.54: My sentences are illuminating in the following way: to understand me you must recognize my sentences—once you have climbed out through them, on them, over them—as senseless. (You must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after you have climbed up on it.) You must climb out through my sentences; then you will see the world correctly.
Philosophical thinking is ―senseless‖; we ―climb up on the ladder‖ of thinking only to ―throw it away.‖ We must first climb ―out through‖ his sentences to ―see the world correctly.‖ Still, Wittgenstein wrote all this down, and we understand it, before we can climb out through it. We still have to live with all this senselessness. We must first climb up on the ladder before we kick it. Climbing up on the ladder follows its rungs, its rule; likewise, kicking it also follows some rules to avoid getting hurt. In the end, aren‘t ladder-kicking rules a part of ladder-climbing rules, as Max Black insists138? This self-defeating activity is elucidated by his another saying, ―Don‘t worry about what you have already written. Just keep on beginning to think afresh as if nothing at all had happened yet.‖139 So the ladder is our past thought that is no longer sensible now. Our thinking is a relentless process from past to present. Relativism forever begins at the beginning, learning from the past and then beginning afresh on one‘s own. Learning is an imitation that kicks the original; imitation is no mechanical copying.140 Here, neat packaging is out of question. One must pick as many big or small insights as one can, insights relevant or even significantly irrelevant. This messy advance results in the scattered nature of seminal revolutionary writing. Thus the dotted feature141 of the journalmaking of Pascal, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Marcel, Buber, and Paul Weiss,142 among many others in the history of thinking, is so significant.143 ―Are these thinkers ‗relativists‘?‖ Well, all thinkers are alive to the extent that they are ―relativistic.‖ This is less to say that all thinkers are relativists than that they are true thinkers so long as they sensitively heed the warning of relativism and follow its ruthless life-
137 Wittgenstein‟s Tractatus, translated by Daniel Kolak, Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1998, p. 49. I quoted from this most recent translation I know of. An earliest translation I know of is C. K. Ogden‘s (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd, 1922) that has a slightly different rendering. 138 Significantly, Max Black (―Is the ‗Tractatus‘ self-defeating?‖ in A Companion to Witgenstein‟s “Tractatus,” Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1964, pp. 378-386) rehearses our process of understanding mathematical ―infinity, ∞‖ and metaphysical concepts by extending ordinary notions, to defend Wittgenstein against the criticism that Wittgenstein falls into total senselessness. Kicking is extending of the ―circle.‖ 139 Wittgenstein Notebooks 1914-1916, eds., G. H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe, tr. G. E. M. Anscombe, Oxford, 1961, p. 30 (6), quoted by Black in A Companion, op. cit., p. 2. 140 For Aristotle (Poetics, 48b4-14), learning occurs via pleasant imitation, but he never took it as exact copying. Cf. my ―Learning as a Master from a Master: ‗Chuang Tzu‘ in University General Education,‖ Journal of Humanities East/West, December 1998, (Vol. 18). See my On Metaphoring, op. cit., pp. 615-640 141 On ―dotted pragmatics‖ see my On Metaphoring, ibid., pp. 387-395. Our book-essay here follows this route. 142 Cf. Paul Weiss, Philosophy in Process (11 volumes), Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 19551989. Thinkers in the West are cited because all Chinese thinkers are journalistic. 143 This is why these writers are hard to summarize and their systematic ―progress‖ hard to chart. This phenomenon is typified by Lao Tzu and a bewilderingly superb book on healing based on Lao Tzu, Greg Johanson and Ron Kurtz, Grace Unfolding: Psychotherapy in the Spirit of the Tao-te Ching, NY: Bell Tower, 1991.
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following. They should never yield to the temptation to universalize/generalize too quickly to seal themselves off in a glorious consistency of a system, as relativism warns them. Here familiarity blunts no fascination any more than beloved folksongs do. The pleasure of writing and reading intimate journals that continue to make impacts on one‘s life-quest. Journal bits are subtly connected as musical composition in life whose leitmotifs spontaneously reappear with rhyming modulations. The whole show is impressively free, forceful, original, and organic, to illuminate life-perplexities; it is a ladder to climb up on, to kick, i.e., evoke our own elaboration of those life-perplexities jotted down, if not to resolve them. History is our communal journals of life. History-ladder is thus to be climbed to kick away, only to come back for us to climb again and kick again. Chuang Tzu kept insisting that the past is useless because it is irrelevant to the present; to try to follow the past is to follow footprints, not the moving shoes, to revere the scum of old, not its life, to push a boat on land, not a cart.144 And then, all Chuang Tzu‘s insistence on the uselessness of the past itself turned into the past for us to kick away. History does not repeat itself; it rhymes.145 Our kicking is the way toward re-freshening our present. The present lies in this kicking; thought experiment keeps going and we will later throw away most of it. Nietzsche told us to kill God; our true God is in fact the God we have killed, willingly or no. For Kierkegaard, our true teacher is the dead one; we add, she is the teacher of the past who passes on in the hand of our present. This is the only way our life advances; this is the modus operandi of relativism, a dynamic attitude imploding/exploding forward, dynamite that pulverizes the surrounding as it presses ahead, building senseless ladders to explode them, and those pieces are bits of dynamite themselves to continue exploding. No wonder innovative writings are never a system, such as Socrates‘ early dialogues, Pascal‘s Pensées, Buber‘s I and Thou, Marcel‘s circular concentric mode of exposition, and the list goes on. They all share the protesting forwarding spirit of relativism. These writings are bits imploding each into the other to explode forward all over, being systematic, but without system. In fact, any living ―system‖ (as Kant‘s, Heidegger‘s, Tillich‘s) is a concatenation of insights, grown-together.146 Wittgenstein‘s aphoristic bits match Lao Tzu‘s, less linear continual expositions than evocative invitations to explode to co-exploration. The Tao Te Ching builds its own ladders and does its own kicking; it is an excellent exercise in significant futility. Both Lao Tzu and Wittgenstein self-destroy. ―Why bother to build a ladder and kick it?‖ This exercise gives life. This self-inconsistency makes Tao Te Ching and Tractatus forever alive, forever fresh and controversial, demanding to be re-interpreted by every new generation.147 The story of relativism tells us all its serpentine way life as lived. Relativism is the way history tells our story to shape us. We must live and live well to understand relativism, and relativism must be studied to live life well in the ―logic of history‖—story argument—that is our life.
144 Arthur Waley has conveniently collected these stories (Chuang Tzu 13/68-74, 14/35, 74-78, etc.) in Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China (1939), CA: Stanford University Press, 1982, pp. 14-19. 145 The saying is quoted in Foreign Affairs, November/December 2003, p. 2, to justify its ―Flashback‖ to Allen W. Dulles‘ report on the occupation of Germany. 146 Even Aristotle is a member of this dynamic group. See my comments on him in Butterfly, op. cit., pp. 372, 494. The present volume aspires to grow, concresced, likewise. 147 Due to religion‘s inherent contradictions, usually called ―paradoxes,‖ all religious scriptures such as the Bible demand continual reinterpretation and retranslation.
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In relativism, our story and our history cease to be irrational and our life ceases to be choked to death by logic, a definitive straightjacket. No wonder, relativism spreads all over to silently support philosophizing and philosophical writings—as it is attacked as a distinct, definitive topic in encyclopedias, in dictionaries. Relativism inevitably leads us to culture, the deposit of the history of a community, and further on to inter-involvement of cultures to spread as dynamic circles. Nothing is more important than to go concretely here to demonstrate this point. We thus tell a story of a case, writing China in English. We have been in this volume doing so unawares. Now it is time to really gaze at it, to realize the importance of open-ended inter-involvement of cultures. It is our life-task that makes our true life possible.
CHINA WRITTEN IN ENGLISH—THREEFOLD IMPACT TOWARD INTERCULTURE Three points must be made here, one, what thinking is; two, how both China and the West fail to realize it; three, what twofold task ahead we have. All such consideration leads us to writing China in English as the first step toward thinking world-interculture way. One: Thinking is ―how to think what.‖ Saying so says about what thinking is, which is how we think. Thus in thinking, method is content, critical Kant penetrating ontological Plato, the flow-chart draw-er gazing at the stars, to go to Mars. Plato without Kant is blind, and Kant without Plato is empty, ―Kant today‖ would say. To hear all this is enabled by me, a Chinese thinker learning from Plato and Kant in the West. Two: This ―mixed-up‖ Chinese, me, realize. The method-content unity is displayed in China for millennia, not in the West, yet China does not know it. The West intimates all this, and does not know it, either. The West instinctively (unawares) sits on an analytical hilltop, 148 looking far to the land of method-in-content, not knowing what the land is. Its ignorance 149 parallels how no one knows what the self is, until tiny Peter leads the way, saying, ―I have three names, Dad, me, myself, and I. Bye!‖ and goes out to play—in that Land, leaving us the job of scouting the Land. Three: Our task is to elucidate the land of the method-content unity, in two ways. First, we must explore what the thinking-mode ―China‖ has, its how in its what, its what in its how, as concrete-thinking, body-thinking, story-thinking, etc., although China has never been aware of all this. China just keeps thinking, not thinking about its thinking-mode. China is a Peter so young so all of a piece. And then, we must direct our exploration, enabled by the West‘s logical sensitivity, to world ―interculture,‖ beginning at dialoguing with another Western thinking-mode that is 148 The West looking far to the land not reached is indicated by its four sensitive thinkers, Buber‘s I-Thou and learning from China, Whitehead‘s ―The precision is a fake,‖ Wittgenstein‘s climbing his proposition-ladder and kicking it, and Derrida deconstructing logocentrism. None has reached a final satisfaction of reaching their intuited faraway land. Derrida needs no citation. Wittgenstein‘s climbing-kicking, accused of ―mysticism,‖ concludes his Tractatus (1922) in §6.54 and §7. Whitehead‘s quip concludes his final published essay, ―Immortality,‖ in The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1951. On Buber, see his I and Thou (1958) and ―The Teaching of the Tao‖ and ―China and Us‖ in his Pointing the Way (1957). 149 Psychology in the West has retreated from studying the psyche long time ago. China has no ―psychology‖ as an ―-ology,‖ an objective study.
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clear-distinct, lucid-analytical, and thus tends to miss the forest for the trees. ―Writing China in English‖ is one concrete step toward such China-West interculture, toward world interculture, as Peter constantly addresses me his Dad. So, Western analytical sensitivity looks at China in wonder and disbelief at its apt subtlety of life-presentation. Meanwhile, China‘s life-sensitivity gazes at Western clarity in wonder, admiring how careful it proceeds in life. Finally, both wonders would gather to inter150 learn and inter-enrich. Here is no comparison of details in one Western frame. Here is instead frame-comparing in how China sees the West Western way, and how the West sees China Chinese way, comparing the two ways. Now, do we have a grand story of interculturethinking? Let us be concrete. 151 Here are two concrete intertwined questions. What would happen when Chinese culture is considered and communicated in English? How significant is the story of China written and thought about in English? This is not just English translation of Chinese stories, but English translation of the entire Chinese culture, English understanding and rendering of Chinese way of thinking and living. This phenomenon is becoming quite common in the world today, and we must consider its intercultural impact. Thus we will consider Chinese culture considered and communicated in English, or 152 simply ―China written in English.‖ We give our conclusion first: China is written in 153 We write about China in English, not in Chinese, to reveal and English to interculture. 154 shape both China as concrete/allusive and the West as clear/analytical. It is ―argued‖ here that we write about China in English (A) to self-shape, (B) other-share, and (C) inter-shape to interculture. (D) Such threefold impact cures cultural conflicts to make for world concord.
A. Writing to Self-Shape To write is to write down, to de-scribe to objectify. Writing (i) externalizes oneself to (ii) bounce the theme against oneself, and (iii) project—throw-out beyond—such internal 150 Here are two sad examples, quite erudite: Lee H. Yearley, Mencius and Aquinas: Theories of Virtue and Conceptions of Courage, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990, and John B. Henderson, Scripture, Canon, and Commentary: A Comparison of Confucian and Western Exegesis, Princeton University Press, 1991. 151 Jörn Rüsen in ―How to Overcome Ethnocentrism: Approaches to a Culture of Recognition by History in the 21st Century‖ (Taiwan Journal of East Asian Studies, June 2004, pp. 59-74) says that history is a narrative that forms cultural identity. Agreed, history is an identity-narrative, to which we gave a rationale. Then he said such narrative [1] ossifies as a, b, c, and [2] proposes a‘, b‘, c‘ to fix/develop into [3] a ―universal history‖ of ―(the unity of) humankind.‖ Three comments are here. Point [1] is a common sense writ-shaped; who does not know that history can coagulate into ethnocentric pride? On point [2], we can go on endlessly to cite d, e, f, etc., and propose d‘, e‘, f‘, etc. to fix them. Point [3] shows the Western mind; its ―universal history‖ will jostle for supremacy with Chinese one, Japanese one, African one, etc., and ethnocentric conflicts reappear on a meta-level ―universal history.‖ We take off in a new threefold direction. One, we show how writing in China can avoid ossification Socrates worried about and continually shapes cultural identity. Two, we positively describe the modus vivendi of concrete interculturalism, ―China written in English.‖ Three, we propose not a ―universal history‖ but cultural inter-learning, inter-shaping, and inter-enriching, i.e., ―world interculturalism.‖ 152 I discarded ―sinography‖ because of its technical ring, quite un-Chinese and even un-English. 153 Merriam-Webster‟s Collegiate Dictionary, 1993, 2008, p. 651, has ―interculture,‖ one word. To my knowledge, no other dictionary (not even Oxford English Dictionary) has it. 154 ―Argue‖ is put in quotation marks, for Chinese writers seldom argue deductively; this book-essay must ―argue‖ in ways palatable to both Chinese and Western readers. We here performatively ―argue‖ for inter-humanity.
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bouncing onto paper beyond/before oneself. Writing is then a going-beyond tripled, going 155 beyond itself to self-externalize to self-communicate. Writing thus saves us from self-dissipation in the fluid here now, by representing us, distancing us to confront us, for us to re-experience ourselves to understand—stand under— ourselves to undergo ourselves, and realize ourselves anew. Such reenacted realization— showing/revealing to ourselves to real-ize ourselves—of our situation is essentially a Socratic self-reflection to shape us human. Plato de-scribed Socrates to shape him as one who urged us 156 to self-reflect to self-shape. Writing shows the writer, thereby reveals to shape the writer as human. Let us see how. ―What do I do to own myself?‖ To write down this question answers it; my writing it down, while no one cares, no publisher approaches, is my magnificent self-owning on which I live. If to be self-conscious is to be uneasily beside myself, then to be (conscious of) homecoming to myself is to self-forget to heal self-consciousness, to be comfortably myself. Writing is one such self-homecoming, as I forget myself when I write. To write is to self-forget to come home to myself. Writing on my situation (a) accepts myself to (b) unwind my jittery self. Thus writing shapes me into myself natural, unawares. Psychologists urge us to keep a daily journal to self-heal, to heal even the psychologist herself. Freud wrote much in his neurotic days. He wrote not despite depression but because of it to shape himself out of it. ―Why/how does writing unwind, shape, and heal the writer?‖ Writing is thinking; it is oneself seeing the self-shaping-the-self, a Socratic self-reflection to self-shape157 to self-create. George Herbert Palmer wrote that158 expression and thought are integrally bound together. We do not first possess completed thoughts and then express them. The very formation of the outward product extends, sharpens, enriches the mind which produces, so that he who gives forth little, after a time is likely enough to discover that he has little to give forth.
Expressing and showing thought in writing reveals its thought as it shapes it, to think further. Moreover, writing shapes the integrity of be-ing oneself in society, in a language that is ―the shrine of a people‘s soul,‖159 to create and reveal personal identity in society.160 155 Ssu-ma Ch‘ien 司馬遷 dramatically performed this self-real-ization as he devoted himself to writing/chiseling forth the monumental Records of History 史記, which solidly immortalized him throughout Chinese history! 156 Similarly, ―singing‖ (or chanting-wailing) heals. Singing and climbing the Mount of Olive (Matthew 26:30=Mark 14:26), singing at Taoist friend‘s death (Chuang Tzu 6/62-88), and singing at Chuang Tzu‘s wife‘s death (18/15-19), are confessions, far from casual. All confession, singing, chanting, and writing express and describe oneself (in spontaneous self-reflection) to heal and shape the self. 157 Socrates in Theaetetus (206d) and Phaedrus (26a-b) says so. 高行健 connects writing not unreasonably to selfsex, masturbation, in 沒有主義, 臺北聯經出版事業公司, 2001, p. 29. Does this connection explain Socrates enjoying homosexuality? It is curious, however, why Socrates prefers oral conversation to conversation on paper, writing. Plato via Socrates told of a dialogue between god Theuth and an Egyptian king. Theuth offered his invention of the letters, praising them as the medicine of memory and wisdom. The king said that, neglecting our remembrance, the letters only aid recollecting knowledge we already have, and deceive us transmitted into believing that we have knowledge we lack. The letters say not a word, cannot reply, decide whom to transmit, or defend themselves (Phaedrus, 274-275). In short, writing does not respond. I don‘t see why not. Writing shapes ideas, even creates them as they appear on paper. Written message is conveyed as Plato‘s does to quietly provoke responses and reinterpretations, to transform the written words. Staying as they are, they thus ―change‖ in meaning; they ―respond.‖ Plato wrote the anti-writing sentiment to provoke responses. 158 George Herbert Palmer, ‖Self-Cultivation in English,‖ in On Writing Well: Selected Readings from Two Centuries, ed. William D. Templeman, NY: Odyssey Press, 1965, p. 3. 159 Edwin W. Smith, The Shrine of a People‟s Soul, London, 1929.
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Writing shapes me into myself independent of loss, use, worth, fame, effect, and whatever is other than myself. Such writing that reveals my personal integrity is my absolute sine qua non and ultimate right to be a person, to be alive as myself. Expressing myself in writing, talking, nodding to myself in my words on paper—seemingly de trop, they all vitally create myself to self-comfort. I am self-sufficed, self-pleased, for good over ill. This is not selfishness as the dictator‘s ―I am the state!‖ that depends on his people‘s compliance to fulfill. In contrast, a Polish writer‘s assertion, ―I am Poland,‖ quietly says that he just rejoices in the pride of his culture where he roams unencumbered. His declaration is also mine. Showing reveals to shape; I am deep in my culture as I write in its language. Writing reveals to me that I am myself, independent, alone and self-full in a little corner of my culture, away from limelight and pressure.161 I am alone myself and social when I write. In my writing I rejoice in such pride of being myself, social, and socially unbound, free of selfishness that has to look askance up to others. The Pulitzer Prize-winner Eudora Welty, after her 90 odd years of writing, was described as follows.162 Welty never married, and lived almost her entire life in the family home in Jackson. She wrote and rewrote . . . What others called a sheltered life she called crucial to her art. ―Southerners tend to live in one place where they can see whole lives unfold around them. It gives them a natural sense of the narrative, of the dramatic content of life, a form for the story comes readily to hand.‖ Only in solitude, away from social clangs, can I observe deep and wide about life in all its details without distraction, without distortion.
As I write alone, I show to myself, ―not go outdoors, know (all) under heaven,‖ as Lao Tzu wrote.163 Writing shows me off to the world to satisfy me, possess me, and empower me, smiling to replenish me. If someone is interested in reading it, even after my death, I would have lived in my happy self-expression beyond my life and death. Writing is my mirror to know myself, to let my invisible me appear. I go outside to become my other, my lone writing 164 is inherently social. ―Why do I write?‖ I ask me, and answer, ―I do, for I want to be me.‖ I just want to write, as I just want to be me, as a kid just wants to dig a hole. I am mywriting as the kid is his-digging. I live on writing-all-this-down to birth me before me as the kid digs to birth himself. Not digging, he turns grouchy, ―Nothing to do!‖ i.e., he cannot give birth to himself. A motherly instinct in me urges me to write, as the kid urges himself to dig. Excitingly, I see me ―born‖ before me in writing, my ―digging,‖ for writing digs me out, rounds me up, to make me whole. Writing puts me at ease, rids me of futility; I feel no vanity of possible fame or futility of being rejected by the public or publisher. Confucius said (1/1), ―People ignoring-me and not 160 Section B considers this theme. 161 All this I irreverently rifled from 高行健‘s rambling volume, 沒有主義, 台北聯經, 2001. The ―Polish writer‖ mentioned here appears in p. 10 as ―波蘭流亡作家康布羅維奇.‖ I arbitrarily arranged what I rummaged and added some of my own for my pleasure, though a bit redundantly because I was pleased, self-disappearing in the joy shared. 162 This is quoted from Newsweek, August 6, 2001, p. 60, soon after she died happily ever after. See also The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty, Orlando: Harcourt, 1994. 163 ―不出戶, 知天下,‖ Tao Te Ching, ch. 47. All English translations are mine unless otherwise noted. I tried for more fidelity than felicity to bring out the vigorous parsimony of the original Chinese so poetic. 164 Why can I not ask why I want to be me? To ask so I must pretend to be other than me, and painful psychosis of being beside myself erupts; my pain stops me from asking why I want to be me.
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irritated, isn‘t it so princely of a person?‖ Writing pushes me ahead frivolously writing on. I 165 am a Sisyphus nonchalantly rolling my own rock my pen to keep me fit, renewing myself. 166 God ―is the poet of the world,‖ for God shapes as poets do to enable poets to do as God the Poet of all poets does—to write Nature. I do not create out of nothing, so I am no Christian God, but I am what I am as god, for writing creates me beyond what I am. In 167 writing, I am what I will be. On wings of writing as Thoreau168 I soar beyond ―I‖ as my 169 170 ―God beyond God.‖ Desiring living words, Socrates desists writings that ossify, yet word-ossification decisively shapes; I keep writing to keep decisively shaping me, as Plato‘s writing keeps spreading Socrates‘ anti-writing.
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My writing objectifies me, shapes me into another ; writing pushes me out as my other, to self-shape to other-share. I become social as I write alone. How do I do so? ―Writing‖ is in a language I learn, and language and learning are both social and cultural. My writing creates an I-other mutuality, as writing in self-self mutuality, a primal sociality, spreads to others in printed sociality for others to read. We who can see and hear, now understand how, through writing, a blind Homer and a deaf Beethoven created their own sights and sounds, their glorious worlds more enchanting beyond our ordinary world beyond their entering. To write is to creatively share our various worlds. Eight points below explicate this important truth. One, generations of readers and audience vouch that Homer and Beethoven‘s worlds are more enchanting than our common world. Experiencing their excellence through written history, we came to know their names, ―Homer,‖ ―Beethoven.‖ It all began at their writing down. Next, someone says, ―You and I with perfect vision see an identical scene, and you can be moved while I am not. So, beauty lies not in senses but in sensitivity, worthy of being written out,‖ for writing shapes the impact that blindness or deafness may have enhanced, irrelevant to an external stimuli. Three, self-pride in writing is not self-glorying. Kant may have simply wanted to share what he had found. Writing shows my simple joy of sharing, ―Hey, look what I‘ve found!‖ Four, in writing, sharing the joy of truth-discovery spontaneously appears, not out of selfenhancement. The writer naturally merges in joy-sharing, vanishes in writing to share 165 In China, brushes are heavier than hoes that cultivate the land, for obviously the brushes cultivate writers who are more strenuous to shape and nourish than land. 166 Alfred North Whitehead said, God ―is the poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness.‖ (Process and Reality, Corrected Edition, NY: Free Press, 1978, p. 346) 167 This is a shotgun marriage of two readings of God‘s name in Exodus 3:14, ―I-am-what-I-am‖ and ―I-will-bewhat-I-will-be,‖ to enable Paul to say, ―By God‘s grace I am what I am,‖ which means three things. [a] It is the Other Beyond, God, who enabled Paul to be ―I am what I am.‖ [b] Paul said so in I Corinthians 15:10 on the ―resurrection‖ of the past, the status quo, beyond itself. [c] Paul wrote it down as the Exodus-writer(s) did. 168 Poet Robert Bly sees in Thoreau The Winged Life: The Poetic Voice of Henry David Thoreau, San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1986. 169 ―God beyond God‖ is Paul Tillich‘s provocative phrase concluding Courage to Be (1951), with no explanation. 170 Phaedrus 274-275. 171 This way of taking ―writing‖ turns Paul Ricoeur‘s scholastic Oneself as Another (The University of Chicago Press, 1992) into a social dynamic.
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enjoyment together; ―O, for the word-forgotten one to word with!‖ wrote Chuang Tzu the self-forgotten one.172 Word-forgetting forgets oneself to word authentically, to authenticate both selves inter-wording. Five, in my meditation spreading, I vanish in my written ideas to roam beyond to reach others, often beyond my death. Ideas enter me to expand through me, and I am nowhere, selffulfilled beyond me. This sharing-without-―me‖ who share happened in Kao Hsing-chien‘s 高行健 solitary nonchalance in an obscure corner of his society, delightfully echoing Chuang Tzu‘s and mine. We three would look at one another, find nothing to oppose the heart of our 173 minds, and part our ways. We are with one another without being with one another. Friendship flows with insipid water. Six, oddly, Kao‘s obscure corner in Paris is now a storm center; he is the first writer in China to win the 2000 Nobel Prize in Literature. Being oneself as Chinese, merges in sharing 174 oneself with non-Chinese cultures. Seven, Jesus the Son of God says, ―Ye are gods‖ to those to whom God‘s words come to become gods, and God‘s words are words from beyond within me that enter me. As I meditate on them and write them out, I rank as a god in literature where I disappear; I am what I am to be beyond me, disappeared as a god beyond 175 god. Emerson writes, The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher world. St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere, and its circumference nowhere. . . . Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen in mid-noon . . .
―Without end‖ ciphers the beyond as ―every end a beginning‖ does me writing. The circle‘s center everywhere is ―I,‖ as its circumference nowhere is I beyond me. I am the Beyond in me; I am beyond me with others, in writing. No wonder I am happy with flying birds above that hoard nothing, in songs of inter-thriving life that pulses this world. ―Those who hear not the music think the dancer mad‖; I am madly writing/dancing my own music to vanish into a community beyond me. I am happy beyond joy and sorrow! ―Ultimate joy, no joy,‖ chimes Chuang Tzu in (18/11). I am glad I have just found someone who found ―religion‖ alive beyond ossified belief.176 ―Beyond‖ is a radical verb, going beyond even itself. The river of vitality carves its own course, to become this river and no other, only to break out of its own banks. Every day is ever a baby growing beyond itself, beyond its expression beyond words, always new, always unpredictable. The kingdom of God belongs to babies of all ages, at every moment. Every day is exploding with new ideas. In the beginning is Word beyond words, God beyond gods. Such commonplace! And such Beyond-common so awesome!
172 This sigh concludes his Chapter Twenty-Six significantly titled ―Outside Things 外物,‖ where ―outside‖ may be a verb, to go outside, things going outside us, etc. 173 Chuang Tzu 6/45-47, 61. 174 John 10:34-35. 175 The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, NY: Modern Library, 2000, p. 252. 176 James P. Carse, The Religious Case Against Belief, NY: Penguin, 2008.
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Let us put it the other way around. Jesus for other people does ―bad things‖ as pointed out and accused by the scholarly Scribes and holy Pharisees. It is thus that Jesus went down to hell for bad people, and for people in pain. Jesus is our Robin Hood rifling the trunks of social decency. He suffers with us every day. The Beyond is every day, day to day new, day to day is such a good day. Every day is such a healing beyond what it is! Eight, the ―beyond me‖ here ciphers interculture. Writing China in English reveals such peculiarities of China as story-thinking and the Yin-Yang of negating affirmations that the section below considers. These features would not have been noticed, and China would have kept writing routinely, were it not for ―English writing on China spontaneous writing.‖ Meanwhile, the English thinking is thus revealed, affirmed, and shaped as how analytically lucid it is in its very revealing of the Chinese world.177 The twofold interculture is achieved in China written in English.
C. Writing China in English—to Inter-Shape We now concretely execute how the West reveals/shapes China to reveal/shape the West, as follows. Writing shows a language that shows a culture. The English language with its specified parts of speech clarifies to objectify, analyze, and survey. The Chinese language 178 179 lacks marked parts of speech to ―indirect‖ to implicate, intimate, and wink. The West analytically notes that Chinese writing objectifies to indirect, and such noting 180 redounds to revealing the West‘s analytical sensitivity. Plato/Aristotle proposed a logical 181 pair, collection (sunagoge) and division (diairesis), to join into an assertion. Chinese collection in storytelling does well to join Western division in analysis to complete humanity. As a result, the West writes a common theme in sentiment distinct from Chinese writing on that theme, e.g., romantic love. In 1916, six girls of rural Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, placed their letter, signed with six names and addresses, in a bottle in the Susquehanna River, saying, We are all good looking and industrious young women, but the boys of our town are too slow. We want husbands. They must be good to look at and strictly temperate and above all they must not be slow. . . . Now if you mean business please write, finder of this bottle, and we will be glad to tell of our abilities and exchange photographs.
177 My On Chinese Body Thinking: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Brill, 1997, executed this China-West mutuality of inter-explication, in dialogue with Merleau-Ponty on body-thinking. 178 It is not that no Western writer used indirection but that that writer would be atypical in the West. Kierkegaard touted and practiced indirection and was taken an ―odd ball‖ in the West, while Chinese writers simply spontaneously do so. See my On Metaphoring: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 2001, p. 666 (Index on ―indirection‖). My Nonsense: Cultural Meditations on the Beyond (forthcoming) explicates and executes indirection, only via which can the Beyond be intimated. 179 Complete clinical nakedness is a bore, while fascinating nudity is revealed through clothes-covering, indirectly. 180 The whole essay‘s ―argument‖ gives a ―framing‖ to this ―section on Chinese anecdotes‖; see Section D. 181 On ―sunagoge‖ see Plato‘s Theaetetus, 150a2; Phaedrus 266b4 (opposed to ―diairesis‖); Republic 526d3, Aristotle‘s Physics 217b 15; Nicomachean Ethics 181b 7; Politics 1316b 40. On ―sunthesis,‖ see Plato‘s Phaedo 96a, Republic 611b, Aristotle‘s Nicomachean Ethics 1174a 23. On ―diairesis,‖ see Plato‘s Laws 768c8, Protagorus 358a6, Republic 534a6, Aristotle‘s Metaphysics 1016b4, Politics 1294a34.
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Happy conjugal endings ensued. In ancient China, the following ―animated pastiche of a lovely rustic seducement‖ was 183 recorded in the timeless Classic of Poetry, 詩 經. In the wilds, a dead doe./ White reeds to wrap it./ A girl, spring-touched:/ A fine man to solicit her./ In the woods, bushes./ In the wilds, a dead deer./ White reeds in bundles./ A girl like jade./ Slowly. Take it easy./ Don‘t feel my sash!/ Don‘t make the dog bark!
So the ―eternal battles of the sexes‖ are fought stealthily in China and assertively in America even in the Victorian 1910s, though both slyly and delightfully, as different languages wonderfully cut these different styles of different cultures. Now, let us generalize. Going through translation into English of the Chinese originals reveals as it shapes the cultural differences of two language-worlds. Rendering Chinese sentences into English refreshingly defines (this is good) and unexpectedly delimits (this is bad) Chinese sensibility. Comparing Chinese originals with their English translations edifies both Chinese and English readers. ―How?‖ Tilted toward Chinese language-freedom, unwittingly benefiting from ―restrictive‖ 184 ―tyrannical framing‖ of English language, the bicultural poet Wai-lim Yip sighed, I must consider myself fortunate to live (in) a time when both poets and philosophers in the West have already begun to question the framing of language, echoing . . . the ancient Taoist critique of the restrictive and distorting reconsiderations of language and power, both aesthetically and politically. When Heidegger warns us that any dialogue using Indo-European languages to discuss the spirit of East-Asian poetry will risk destroying the possibility of accurately saying what the dialogue is about, he is sensing the danger of language as . . . 185
When William Carlos Williams writes trapping experience within a privileged subjectivity. ―unless there is / a new mind there cannot be a new / line,‖ he also means ―unless there is / a new line there cannot be a new / mind.‖
Here in a single involved breath, Yip unwittingly confessed to having recognized in Chinese spontaneity a free breathing room for expressivity, revealed by the liberating interinfluences of two languages and modes of thinking. Yip may not have realized that Western clarity pinches Chinese sensibility to reveal the peculiar trends both of the West and of China, and that the uncomfortable ―distortion‖ redounds to enriching both the West and China beyond their original physiognomies. This is how the meeting of cultures shows and shapes one another. Does this mutuality of inter-
182 Letters to the Editor: Two Hundred Years in the Life of an American Town, edited by Gerard Stropnicky, Tom Byrn, James Goode, and Jerry Matheny, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1998, p. 181. 183 Both the description and the translation are Wai-lim Yip‘s (葉威廉) in Chinese Poetry: An Anthology of Major Modes and Genres, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997, pp. 36-37. The poem is titled ―野有死鹿 [actually 鹿 with 囷 under it].‖ I changed his ―seduce‖ to ―solicit‖ (誘). Sadly, Bernhard Karlgren‘s obsession on textual critical matters (Glosses on the Book of Odes, Stockholm, Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, 1942-1964) bypasses what the Book of Odes chants means, even though he translated it (The Book of Odes, 1950). We must begin there, not stop there. Cf. Arthur Waley‘s The Book of Songs, NY: Grove Press, 1996, that often departs from Karlgren considerably. 184 Ibid., p. xiv. 185 Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, tr. Peter D. Hertz, NY: Harper and Row, 1971, pp. 4-5.
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revealing and inter-creation of both cultures remind us of Yin-Yang gender mutuality, intimated in the above ―battles of the sexes‖? With this new sensitivity inter-culturally gained, we notice that, for example, the English mind hesitates at a simple Chinese phrase ―松風, pine wind.‖ Is it wind blowing through the pines, pine branches swaying in the wind, pine-scented wind, pines in the wind, wind in the 186 pines, or all of these, or none, or something else? The Chinese sentiment would respond, ―I didn‘t know all that; but do we have to choose 187 from all these different meanings?‖ This response jolts the West to savor the pre-reflective pre-expressive ―pine-wind milieu,‖ as China confessed to being jolted to realizing various connotations in a simple Chinese phrase, freely roaming in and out of fuzzy borders of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. Grammatical ambiguity signals syntactic freedom; almost every Chinese phrase has a 188 poetic overtone, and Chinese poetry is particularly luxuriant. Yip writes, The words in a Chinese poem . . . have a loose relationship with readers, who remain in a sort of middle ground between engaging with them ((in) predicative connections (for) relationships . . . among the words) and disengaging from them (refraining from doing so, (for) . . . noninterference). Therefore, the asyntactical and paratactical structures in Chinese poetry promote a . . . prepredicative condition wherein words, like objects (often in a . . . montage) . . . , are free from predetermined relationships and single meanings . . . to readers in an open space. Within this space, and with the poet stepping aside, . . . they can move freely and approach the words from (various) vantage points (for) different perceptions of the same moment. They have a cinematic visuality . . . at the threshold of many possible meanings.
Being simple tends to be alive, and being alive is usually deep, in varied implications. So being simple, deep, and alive gather to go together. Never could complexity pull off such a stunt. Chow and Yu, among many others, amassed many examples to the effect that Chinese 189 grammar-ambiguity enables. We cite just two sorts of quite common Chinese expressions, story-notions and negating to affirm, which English sensibility reveals. 190 To begin, let us see two common phrasal story-notions. First, Mencius‘ ―pull seedlings, help growing, 揠 苗 助 長‖ (2A2) distils his exemplum of a simpleton farmer who lovingly ―pulled seedlings‖ to ―help them grow,‖ to laboriously kill them. This sentiment is expressible in ―doing too much for its good,‖ ―the futility of over-helping,‖ ―acting contrary to the times,‖ but none is as concrete, compact, and compelling as that four-character phrase.
186葉威廉著, ―中國古典詩中的傳釋活動,‖ 聯合文學, 民國七十四年六月, pp. 168-181. 187 A Chinese reader of Mencius would also respond with similar disbelief to I. A. Richards‘s ―experiment in multiple definition‖ in Mencius on the Mind (1932). We will consider him soon and then later in ―§ How to Read Stories.‖ 188 Yip, Chinese Poetry, op. cit. 189 Chow Tse-tsung, ed., Wen-lin: Studies in the Chinese Humanities, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968; Pauline Yu, et al., eds., Ways with Words: Writing about Reading Texts from Early China, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. The English essays by mostly English writers are on diverse readings of identical texts, perhaps unaware that their English lenses on an identical Chinese text reveal their diversity. These essays innocently help us to see English impacts on Chinese understanding. 190 I chose commonest expressions to show Chinese peculiarities. Sinological exotics are out of place here.
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Our second example is also a phrase in constant use, ―push, knock.‖ It describes how Chia Tao 賈島 on horseback bumped into an illustrious writer Han Yü 韓 愈‘s carriage, while 192 wavering between ―a monk pushes the moon-lit door‖ and ―knocks.‖ Han Yü, impressed, decided on ―knock.‖ Thus the two-character phrase, ―push, knock,‖ came to remind us of the story for our casual ―to polish what we say,‖ ―select mot juste,‖ ―fathom meaning.‖ More than life-compelling, stories capture the breeze of life un-trap-able in a conceptual box. Some exempla are concrete beyond neat conceptual packaging; others are beyond capsuling even in gnomic phrases. Here are two stories package-able in gnomic phrases but beyond capturing in a box of logic, ―Uncle Fort lost a horse‖ and ―morning, three, evening, four.‖ 193 First, consider ―Uncle Fort lost a horse 塞 翁 失 馬.‖ An Uncle at the frontier Fort 194 once lost his horse. Condoled, he said, ―How could this not make weal?‖ The horse came back with a noble steed. Cheered, he said, ―How could this not make woe?‖ Then, his son rode horseback, fell, and broke his leg. Consoled, he said, ―How could this not make weal?‖ Soon a war broke out; most village boys fought and died. His son, a cripple, was spared the fight and survived. The story ends here. Is it a happy ending? Do we still hear our Uncle asking, ―How could this not make . . .?‖? Do we see our dear Uncle Fort firm as the fort, ever guarding life against outside annoyance, weal or woe? The story has been taken as ―Just you 195 wait‖ pose, ―Woe where weal leans; weal where woe lies‖ prudence, life changes, life uncertainty, etc. What single concept can capture all such endless variety of sentiments in this compact story-notion? 196 Our next exemplum is ―morning, three, evening, four 朝 三 暮 四.‖ A Monkey Uncle offered ―morning, three (nuts), evening, four‖ to monkeys; they were furious. ―Okay, then, 197 morning, four, evening, three,‖ said Uncle, and they were happy. Does this story express ―Penny wise, pound foolish‖? Giving someone a stone for bread? Making a mock of someone? Being impressed with life vicissitudes? Being fickle? Or being flexible? Is it life 198 itself? Again, the story defies conceptualization. Now, let us consider two of Chuang Tzu the Taoist poet-thinker‘s stories that are even beyond gnomic-phrase packaging. One is a story of him dreaming to be a butterfly, another is he bantering with a name-logician on a bridge over the River Hao. 199 His first story is this.
191The phrase ―推敲‖ sums up a story in ―賈忤旨‖ in 鑑誡錄. 192 僧推月下門 or 僧敲. 193 The story is from the ―人間訓‖ chapter in the Huai Nan Tzu 淮南子 (臺北市三民書局, 民86, p. 965). 194 此何遽不能為福乎? 195 Tao Te Ching, Chapter 58. Cf. Luke 21:28. 196 This story typifies Chuang Tzu‘s (2/38-39) baffling profound Chapter Two, ―齊物論.‖ See my Butterfly as Companion, op. cit., pp. 127, 178, 207, 387, and 419 (note 48). 197 Rather than ―Smoking is hazardous in ways A, B, C,‖ we can persuasively say, ―Not-smoking is refreshing for not-A, not-B, not-C.‖ It is the principle of advertisement to keep our society happily on the go. 198 Chuang Tzu‘s explanation of ―heavenly balance 天鈞‖ is as obscure as the story. I tried to understand it in Butterfly, op. cit., p. 501 (Index, ―monkey‖). 199 I compressed this story that ends Chapter Two ―齊物論.‖ Cf.. Butterfly, ibid., pp. 115-280, et passim.
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He once dreamed to be a butterfly, awoke to deny being a butterfly, and then he was not sure. Was he ―he‖ dreamed to be a butterfly, or ―butterfly‖ dreaming to be he? He did not know and said, ―There must be a distinction; this it is that we call ‗things changing.‘‖ 200
Ineffably delightful, the story cannot even begin to sum up in a phrase. I wrote 500 pages of The Butterfly as Companion, and the story overflowed that book. His second no less hard-to-pin-down story has two ―stooges,‖ a Taoist bum Chuang Tzu and a brilliant Name-logician Hui Tzu. They bantered over the Hao Bridge about why Chuang Tzu, being not minnows, could have said, ―How enjoyable they are, darting back and forth!‖ After some playful jostling, Chuang Tzu declared, ―I know it above the Hao!‖ Again, apropos of the chapter ―Autumn Waters‖ the tale concludes, it floods over the banks of logic, yet not arbitrary, exuding ineffable joy of spontaneous life glowing larger and lustier than 201 fussy logic. We have been elucidating Chinese thinking in English. Thanks to our English translations, these Chinese phrasal story-notions hit us with at least three features of two divergent thinking modes—(a) concrete China vs. abstract West, (b) negative-affirmative 202 vs. the West‘s orderly explanation. China vs. tidy West, and (c) China‘s dot-pragmatics None of these has been noted in China or the West until we parsed China in English. (a) Concrete China vs. abstract West: ―Notions‖ (in China) are notables embedded in 203 actuality; ―concepts‖ (in the West) are ideas grasped out of actuality. Thinking in the West flies off from concrete particulars into an abstract precision of concepts formally stipulated. Concepts stand on their feet to move as pawns on the ivory chessboard of thinking. In China, story-notions inspire thoughts inherently tied to story-actuality, for they are (as ―push, knock‖) unintelligible without concrete stories packed in them (Chia Tao‘s poem and Han Yü‘s response). Far from flying away from actuality, their meanings consist in storyfacts. Stories are actually concrete notions, notable ―knots 結‖ in the actuality-―cords 繩‖ in varied open-ended meanings. The West also has stories, such as the famous ―Pavlov's Dog‖ in a General Psychology class, where they quickly leave that Dog for the formal definition of ―classical conditioning,‖ for though they may not realize it, the Dog-story differs in meaning from ―classical conditioning.‖ Dog, bell, food, and salivation are irrelevant-in-meaning to stimulus and conditioning in ―neutral stimulus, paired with unconditioned stimulus, to turn into conditioned one.‖ Ironically, students are introduced to the abstract ―conditioning‖ by the concrete ―dog,‖ only to be told to discard the ―dog.‖ China stays in a representative case as a concrete notion, as a ―knot 結‖ of an actuality-―cord 繩.‖204 Exemplum in the West is dispensable 200 Compare Franz Kafka‘s dreary dream in The Metamorphosis (1915). 201 Mencius‘ ―pulling seedlings to help growth 揠苗助長‖ is more Taoist than Confucian, and perhaps less joyous than Taoism. Mencius is a Taoist by default, perhaps unawares. 202 A typical dot-pragmatist in the West is of course Henry D. Thoreau. His dots of sentences are strewn all over his books. His keen observations of concrete details and sharp insights into the sense of things somehow settle and gather silently to make the reader feel at home—here now. Too bad he is relegated as nature poet, journalist, and literary essayist, not a thinker. I also wander among wild bushes under bird songs—of notions. My wanderings make me calm and at home. So does Haydn with kids hopping in simple innocence. 203 See my reflections on this distinction in connection with ―time‖ in On the “Logic” of Togetherness: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 1998, pp. 349-353. 204 Ibid., pp. 349-360 has Chinese generalization of concrete particulars.
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appendage205; ―conditioning‖ stands by itself, decorated by Pavlov's Dog. Chinese storynotions vanish when abstracted from their exempla, expressed in gnomic phrases. A storynotion directs the eye to its concrete exemplum, which is the notion, an indispensable notable to really ―knot‖ the ―cord‖ of actuality. ―What is the ‗cash value‘ of concrete story-notions?‖ ―Deliberation‖ is trite, while ―push, knock‖ vividly depicts the perplexity of that monk trying to ―push or knock‖ on the moonlit door. Compact illumination of the story-notions is beyond the abstract clarity of concepts. The entire philosophical Taoism is made of exempla beyond concepts (Uncle Fort lost horse, happy monkeys at ―morning, four, evening, three‖) and exempla beyond phrasing (butterfly dream, just being here to know minnows self-enjoying). China‘s exempla reflect life larger/fuller/livelier than logic. They are Tillich‘s ―symbols‖ that participate in the situation they point to, and grow and die with it and within it; they are 206 Concrete Polanyi‘s ―metaphors‖ that symbolize the situation and impress it deeply on us. exempla in story-notions burn into us and make us understand. Now we know how with those notions to think in concrete actuality beyond abstract thinking. Chinese thinking goes in this actual manner, in this story-notional way as story-thinking—so writes the West. (b) Negative-affirmative China vs. tidy West: We must again note; the West‘s analytical sensitivity elucidates China. Left alone, China would not have realized logical intricacies in its spontaneous story-notions said above or negative affirmation said below, nor would it recognize and confirm them as peculiarly its own. Now let us consider Chinese negation as strong affirmation. Chinese 不 is the flight of the bird of intention up away to arrive 至 at a 207 destination. Denial of A affirms B. Negation in China emphatically affirms as hollows in a bamboo strengthen it, as ―A is not 208 non-A‖ vitalizes ―A is A.‖ Chinese thinking de-fines a notion with a story that de-scribes the situation, where ―de-― is a negative performance, the performance often in storytelling. The notion embodies a story, to ―ex‖-press and ―de‖-fine actuality whose negative confirmations, ―de-‖ and ―ex-,‖ are. Far from being occasional rhetorical decorations, eight examples below reveal how integral/pervasive negation is in Chinese thinking/writing. They exemplify the age-old YinYang cosmic principle that begins with the negative Yin and continues throughout a Yin209 negative operation to ―positivize‖ Yang, traditionally dubbed ―internecine, inter-nascent.‖ This Yin-Yang operation is negation tripled. One, Yin and Yang inter-negate while, two, they negate their inter-negations to result in inter-birthing, and then, three, both negations double up into a Yang unity that negates these negations. Such negations are the strongest possible affirmation. China‘s sentiment was revealed so, thereby to be shaped as such, thanks to Western analysis. Here are eight examples Western analysis reveals.
205 The entry on ―exemplum‖ in The Oxford English Dictionary has good explanations of this sentiment. 206Paul Tillich‘s entire Dynamics of Faith, Harper, 1957, is devoted to this theme. See also Michael Polanyi and Harry Prosch, Meaning, Chicago University Press, 1975, pp. 66-81. 207 On ―不‖ see 9:944-950, on ―至‖ see 9:952-956, in 說文解字詁林，臺北市鼎文書局，民72. 聞一多 has detailed interesting explorations on ―不‖ in 聞一多全集(二)，臺北市里仁書局，民37，II;575-580. 208 Cf. ―不得不,‖ ―無非,‖ and Japanese ―しなければならない.‖ 209 相剋相生.
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One, Confucius‘ Analects opens with three exclamations studded with negatives: ―To do 210 A, isn‘t it such a pleasure?! To do B, isn‘t it such a delight?! Not known and not vexed, isn‘t it such a princely man?!‖ Such exclamations with negatives convey the strongest possible affirmation. Two, the epithet, ―princely man 君子,‖ a person (morally) fit-to rule, is yearned after, never claimed. In fact, Confucius and Mencius explicitly denied that they were 211 sages at all. Kung-sun Ch‘ou (said), ―Tsai Wo and Tzu-lumg excelled in rhetoric; Jan Niu, Min Tzu and Yen Hui excelled in the exposition of virtuous conduct. Confucius excelled in both and yet he said, ‗I am not versed in rhetoric.‘ In that case you, Master (Mencius), must already be a sage.‖ ―O, What word is this! Tzu-kung once asked Confucius, ‗Are you, Master, a sage?‘ Confucius replied, ‗I have not succeeded in becoming a sage. I simply never tire of learning nor weary of teaching.‘ Tzu-kung said, ‗Not to tire of learning is wisdom; not to weary of teaching is benevolence. You must be a sage to be both wise and benevolent.‘ A sage is something even Confucius did not claim to be. What word (of yours) is this!‖
The ―sage‖ was often conferred unexpectedly by others, often by posterity, as Confucius 212 experienced himself. The positive epithets, ―sage‖ and ―princely man,‖ are really selfnegating. Three, Mencius often clinches his long exhortations to rulers with a negative conclusion, ―Doing A, B, and C to care for your people and not being a princely ruler 王, 213 never has such a thing happened in history!‖ 214 Four, Mencius‘ ―pulling seedlings, helping grow‖ seems affirmative—―help‖ and ―growth‖ are affirmatives—until we see that it is a negative to affirm how to nourish growth; the positive (growth) is negative-expressed (not interfere with growth) in a positive-seeming form (help growth). Confucius raises ―one‖ for return with ―three‖ by students; he never ―helped‖ or ―pulled.‖ Five, Mencius urges rulers to extend their innate ―heart that cannot bear people (in pain)‖ to ―governance that cannot bear people (in pain).‖ No stronger persuasion can be than such an ―unbearably‖ compassionate wording (2A6, 4A1). Here as elsewhere, Chinese ideal of government is not legal control on popular welfare (positive)215 but a ―sage rule‖ in ―unbearable compassion‖ (negative) with historical nostalgia (more negative). The rule manifests the Principle fanned by a lack of ideal politics. Chinese political history is antisagely to negatively provoke sagely ideals. Six, both ―cannot ‗stop‘ (不得已)‖ and ―cannot ‗not‘ (不得不)‖ describe our unstoppable spontaneity of ―cannot help but‖ and natural inevitability of ―cannot but be.‖ Two ―inevitabilities‖ negatively express a strong positive in nature inexpressible. Seven, ―no-do 無為‖ is not not-do 不為 but a real robust doing loved by Confucians and Taoists alike; 210 ―Not know‖ scrapes us badly as Jesus‘ ―I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.‖ (Matthew 7:23) 211 This is Mencius 2A2 in D. C. Lau‘s translation (slightly modified), Mencius: Volume One, Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1984, p. 59. Cf. Analects 7/3, 12/3. 212 It was recorded in the Analects 7/26, 33, 34. See also 1/1. 213 Mencius, 1A3, 1A7, 1B4, 2A5, 6B4, et passim. 214 揠苗助長, or just 助長. Significantly, the phrase appears within Confucianism that stresses education, which perhaps should not mean to ―draw out,‖ e-duco. 215 Legalism tried this route, reaped tragedies, and was discarded by the historical wayside. Confucian negativism won the name of orthodoxy in history.
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sensitively refraining from ―much ado about nothing‖ is an apt effective doing that follows along the course of events. Eight, opposing Confucius, Chuang Tzu the Taoist smilingly put his Taoist ideals in 216 to renovate the tradition by venerating-opposing it. Taoism opposes the tradition to him become a major one, as with later commentators following the tradition (as A) to ―develop‖ it (as non-A‘s).217 Again, the West‘s analytical sensitivity has revealed the above Chinese YinYang dialectic; we appreciate China‘s lived allusion only via undergoing Western translation into precise English. (c) Chinese dot-pragmatics vs. Western orderly explanation: Western interpreters notice 218 that China reads the passages not by objective parsing but by memorizing and chanting them while engaged in daily chores. The ―meanings‖ of the passages then ―come‖ to them in daily routines, to guide. Western culture quests for explicit, exhaustive explication; Chinese thinking sits back, walks around, murmurs meditatively, lets the stuff sink in, and then jots down the harvest in analects and journals. It is China‘s soft pragmatics; Western hermeneutic sensitivity discerns how it works, thus. 219 Chinese classics are subtly rhymed ; their sound-sense unity charms to assist lives to 220 come to ―rhyme‖ with the sayings. Enchanted by the rhythm, the reader notices ―a needle‖ here, ―a dot‖ there, beautiful yet incoherent. The reader then goes home, lives with the scattered ―dots‖ of sayings, and one day, the random dots-collection suddenly flips over, and 221 222 there appears a magnificent tapestry of implications! It is an ―Aha‖-experience. 216 On Chuang Tzu‘s various uses of ―Confucius,‖ see my Butterfly, op. cit., p. 400 (long Note 10). 217 We must watch out, however. The ―logic‖ in China can go backward, as said of 墨辯 that it can 旁行句讀. See 墨子讀本，臺北市三民書局，民85，pp. 304, 575ff. This point alone demolishes A. C. Grahams‘ belabored exegesis in the mode of traditional Western logic in Later Mohist Logic, Ethics and Science (1978), The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2003. Chinese ―logic‖ requires a separate treatment, in contrast with Western logic. 218 Our above sympathetic parsing was woven with dots of commonest Chinese phrases. This is dot-pragmatics of China informed by sensitive analysis of the West. 219 See my History, Thinking, and Literature in Chinese Philosophy, Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1991, ―Sound, Sight, Sense,‖ pp. 125-174, and On Metaphoring, op. cit., ―Inter-Aesthetics,‖ pp. 519-566. 220 Take Lao Tzu‘s lilting rhythm, ―道可道, 非常道‖ (cf. ―神也者妙萬物而為言者也‖ of 易經 [卦説, 第六章]). Though ―tao can tao, is-not always tao‖ makes no sense, verbal allusion in the noun, ―tao,‖ dots the saying quite musically sensible. Rhythmic ―sense‖ is enhanced by such sense-dots in the second ―tao‖ as usual ―told,‖ my ―a ‗tao‘ identifiable as Tao,‖ Maier‘s ―walked,‖ and 福永‘s ―stipulate 規定.‖ Mair‘s ―The ways that can be walked are not the eternal Way,‖ is in Victor Mair, ed., The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, p. 60. ―これが道だと規定しうるような道は, 恆常不変の真の道ではなく . . . ‖ is in 福永光司, 老子 (上), 東京都朝日文庫, 1978, p. 31. None of them is satisfactory yet none is wholly wrong, and make a connotative resonance to render the saying alive, alluring, and challenging. This is not exotic; Basil Mitchell shows (The Justification of Religious Belief, NY: Oxford University Press, 1981) how theism, not provable or disprovable as with disputes in history, exegesis, natural science, political theory, and metaphysics, must rely on the cumulative weight of converging arguments not entirely formalizable. His poor explication of this insight exposes the inability of Western ―clarity‖ here; for clear rendering of polyphonic sense, in desiccated monotony, loses its melodic sound-sense unity. To reduce the risk, we try to follow China‘s sonorous sense by puns and wordplay, which may stick in the craw of most analytical readers in the West. 221 The happening could be dubbed ―evocation‖ (興) that is ―metaphor‖ (usually called 比), in this sense. As we ―warm up the old to know the new 溫故而知新‖ (Confucius, 2/11), we call the happening ―興‖ if the new is unexpected if not non-existent before, and ―比‖ if the new is a pre-given novelty to challenge us to understand. Chinese dot-pragmatics is an overall evocation (興). 222 This is nothing exotic. Friedrich Kekule (1865) pictured the benzene molecule as a hexagon. Ideas are metaphor-syntheses in stellar constellations, psychic complexes, medical diagnoses, market analyses,
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The sense is in the sound, united in pithy melodic sentences to irresistibly entice the 223 In joy, the reader jots down the reader to recite, chant, and practice them everyday. experience. The jottings make ―commentaries‖ to the Classics. Then these ―commentaries‖ in turn enchant the readers later to continue to live on those memorable words of the Classics and commentaries, and continue commenting on them. A terse essay has such experiential impacts; it pulsates with the rhythm of actuality to form a musical portrait of daily struggles. Following it follows actuality; Chinese writing weaves-under history224 as readers make journals on such experiential followings. Then, original dots remain225 a standing invitation to another reader to live them and, in that new reader‘s way, to weave another tapestry, a fresh meaning-nexus. The original essay ―raises one‖ for us variously to ―return‖ with ―two, three, ten.‖226 Under-weavings of reflective praxis jot into a ―tradition of commentaries.‖ Let‘s take a simplest of examples. ―Born alike, practice apart 性相近也，習相遠也,‖ says Confucius (17/2). Nothing can be simpler and more boringly platitudinous than this. Surprisingly, such a simple sigh evoked two of his later listeners, Mencius and Hsün Tzu, to develop into two contrary trends of thinking that exerted profoundly influences in China. Mencius took our ―nature‖ to be good, and warned us against pulling at the good seedling to ―help growth‖; he wanted us to nourish our innate life-thrust instead. Hsün Tzu in contrast took our ―nature‖ to be bad, and wanted education to shape our growth, to breed in his students the brutal school of legalism.227 All such contrary developments originated in the provocative power of poetic resonance in Confucius‘ simplest sigh. Exciting poetry is lost in Lau‘s ―Men are close to one another by nature. They drift apart through behavior that is constantly repeated.‖ Even Chan‘s ―By nature men are alike. Through practice they have become far apart,‖228 missed Confucius. So, what else is new? No Mencius or Hsün Tzu would have got excited at such a platitude, didactic, holier than thou. biography, science, history, and religious conversion. To understand is to see a shape of sense made in dots of things. Gestalt psychology, psychotherapy, Lonergan (Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Insight, NY: Philosophical Library, 1970) and deconstructionists say that thinking is such inter-montaging. The dotted style shows how metaphorically relevant to actuality Chinese thinking is. 223 Herbert Fingarette noted such uncanny magical power, albeit obliquely, in Confucius: The Secular as Sacred (1972), Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1998. Huston Smith noted the Koran‘s same effect in The World‟s Religions (1958), HarperSanFrancisco, revised 1991, pp. 234-235. Many Buddhist sutras have such chanting hypnotic effect. 224 ―Subtle‖ is sub+tele, under-woven web. This is the creative Gestalt-experience of ―novelty synthesis‖ noted in A.III. of my On Metaphoring, Brill, 2001. It is Chinese hermeneutics. 225 This is how distinct Chinese culture is—it remains dotted while Greek, Indian, Arabic, and Jewish cultures have scholastic ratiocination besides dot-sayings. Chu Hsi, say, is reputed to be a system-builder, a Chinese Aristotle, and from his scattered sayings people today pick bits and pull them together into ―a system‖ for him. (See Julia Ching, The Religious Thought of Chu Hsi, Oxford University Press, 2000, Yung Sik Kim, The Natural Philosophy of Chu Hsi, American Philosophical Society, 2000). And yet Chu left only scattered analects. What ―system‖ is it? How are we to know what his ―system‖ is, if he wrote none? Does he our teacher need our help? Would ―systems‖ others built for him hurt his ―system‖? These queries show that Chinese dot-sayings remain dots, not arbitrary or logical/analytical but somehow coherent. For various meanings of being ―systematic,‖ see ―§ Concrete Creativity as Real-izing, Storytelling as Cosmos―Systematic‖ above. 226 Analects 5/9, 7/8. Such blossoming has beautifully occurred in 1/15, described in my Chinese Body Thinking, op. cit., pp. 56-57. 227 This quite plausible hypothesis awaits historical-textual confirmation. I am sure it is at hand; I just do not know how to approach it. 228 D. C. Lau, Confucius: The Analects, Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1992, p. 171. Wing-tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, Princeton University Press, 1963, p. 45.
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Literalism flattens and kills Confucius‘ uneasy provocation of poetry that creates novel meanings unimagined before. Hegel sadly missed this power in Confucius and so despised him as a mouther of tiresome platitudes. Every Sinologist, including Chinese scholars, as the above two cited—they are quite famous—missed this poetic thrust in Confucius, who promoted and propagated this creative thrust throughout Chinese history; this is why Chan said that Confucius single-handedly ―shaped‖ Chinese culture.229 Such Chinese way of reading answers Nietzsche who lamented, ―That for which we find words is something already dead in . . . speaking.‖230 Lao Tzu writes, ―Tao can tao, not always-Tao‖; to say is to fix and kill. Lao Tzu‘s saying is self-incoherent; it says nothing to tell us, ―Don‘t say; show it.‖ These Chinese dot-sayings live on in a reader until one day they suddenly configure into a tapestry of meaning-Gestalt. All this while, the dots remain dots waiting for another new configuring, then another. Dot-sayings thus originate writings anew, ever under way toward fresh insights. Dotting renews re-experiencing as written; it is a showing in writing/saying. Here cognition recognizes as generations regenerate. Chinese writings are such free configurations of dotsayings and their re-experiences jotted down. Thus Nietzsche is answered, in this sayingalive, writing-anew, to dot-metaphor into a tapestry, ―Chinese tradition‖ of life-hermeneutics, lived ―tapestries‖ in history constantly reenacted. Here are two examples negatively to show how no Chinese classic can work experiential wonders of readers-shaping-sharing, without going through this hermeneutic circle. The first example is Fingarette, the second is I. A. Richards. Fingarette‘s Confucius231 is filled with breathtaking insights on the ―authentic core‖ of the Analects, while Chinese readers would feel it somehow ―off tune,‖ its tapestry woven by alien threads of analytical reductionism. E.g., ―She is silent about it‖ can mean ―It‘s not in her‖ or ―She assumes it.‖ Emotion-charged Psalms have few emotive words, nor do the Gusii tribe.232 To see if silence means absence or assumption, we must look into the context and commentaries. Fingarette steadfastly refused commentators, ―later additions‖ in the Analects, and Mencius, Chu Hsi, Wang Yang-ming. He just decided silence to mean absence, and reduced warm li-rite to social convention with an inexplicable ―magic‖ to draw people (chs. 1, 5). He took Confucius‘ respect of history (as a matrix of desirables) as his ―strategic maneuver‖ to sway people to local Lu culture (ch. 229
Ibid., p. 14. 230 Socrates preferred speech to writing in the Phaedrus. Schopenhauer also said, ―Thoughts reduced to paper are generally nothing more than the footprints of a man walking in the sand. It is true that we see the path he has taken; but to know what he saw on the way, we must use our own eyes.‖ (quoted, ―Introduction,‖ G. P. Baker and P. M. S. Hacker, Wittgenstein: Understanding and Meaning: An Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations, Volume 1, University of Chicago, 1980). Chuang Tzu‘s Wheelwright (13/68-74) announced that ancient writings are trash/scum. Huston Smith says that orality gives memory, vitality, and poetic rhythm/flexibility of the conversation-tradition to stress things important. Letters rob us of them all. (The World‟s Religions, Harper, 1991, pp. 368-370).Nietzsche‘s epithet is in The Twilight of the Idols quoted in Harold Bloom‘s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, NY: Riverhead Books, 1998, pp. 715, 740-741. For Bloom, Nietzsche captured Shakespeare‘s essence in Hamlet, that (in Coleridge‘s words) knowledge is lethargy to action, and that words so creates the self as to kill action and the self. Bloom claims that Hamlet‘s acting-in-theater resurrects his death-of-action in thinking-speaking (743). Bloom speculated (what else?) that since English is the world language today, Shakespeare as the best/central of English is the universal author unmatched (718). The Chinese tradition responds as above to such Western self-displaying pride in intercultural hermeneutics, and writing China in English. 231 Herbert Fingarette, Confucius: The Secular as Sacred, HarperSanFrancisco, 1972. 232 R. A. Shweder and R. A. LeVine, eds., Culture Theory [1984], Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 82-83.
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4), Tao as a ―social convention‖ to shape us, minus the vast Heaven-earth context (ch. 2), and jen-personality as response to inter-human sociality, minus unperturbed personal integrity, and private-personal distinction vanishes in an inner-outer separation (ch. 3). His book is onedimensionally logical.233 We feel similarly with another brilliant classic, I. A. Richards‘ Mencius on the Mind.234 He cited all logically possible readings of the Mencius 4B26, and so on (30 odd citations), then scrupulously followed through on each reading, without noting the ―possibilities‖ that the Chinese interpretive tradition cuts, and why. He has an analytical ―experiment‖; his ―follow up‖ is Western, for Chinese people do not experiment on logically possible meanings in a passage; they just live it to taste some of its implications, ever open to more possibilities, never exhausted. In short, neither Fingarette nor Richards noticed that what the Chinese texts mean for Anglo-Europeans differs from what the texts mean for Chinese people. Neither of them did cultural hermeneutics in frame-sensitivity. As a result, the texts served as an ―exotic mirror‖ reflecting what they think, and read their ideas into the texts. Now, isn‘t such Chinese discomfort due to their refusal—explicit (Fingarette) or implicit (Richards)—to blend in with the Chinese commentary tapestry in history, to ―smoke‖ and ―cure‖ (薰陶) us into Chinese texture and fragrance? Hellmut Wilhelm writes on the ancient Classic of Changes 易經,235 (We must) keep in mind all the strata that . . . make up the book. Archaic wisdom from the dawn of time, detached and systematic reflections of the Confucian school in the Chou era, pithy sayings from the heart of the people, subtle thoughts of the leading minds: all these disparate elements . . . create (how) the book lives and is revered in China, and . . . we must not neglect the later strata either. In these, many of the treasures of the very earliest origins are brought to light, treasures that were up to then hidden in the depths of the book . . . (W)e shall follow the lines back from the later to the earlier elements, in the hope that from the study of the living development of the book itself we may also derive insight into its meaning.
Echoing what Adams said of More‘s Utopia,236 we can say of a Chinese classic, ―We may interpret it as we will, but the way a classic has been read and lived across the centuries is an authentic part of its nature.‖ To say so amounts to seeing a hermeneutic circle here, a tapestry of inter-weaving. The circle goes thus. To interpret Confucius, we must read the interpretive tradition; to grasp the tradition we must read Confucius. We shuttle between these two poles, Confucius and tradition, to weave out a Chinese interpretive tapestry that is Confucius, whose weaving shuttle is our historical living in Confucius. This is the Chinese way of reading/understanding. 233 His views provoked controversies. See Bryan W. Van Norden, ed., Confucius and the Analects: New Essays, Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 308-309 for details. 234 I. A. Richards‘ Mencius on the Mind: Experiments in Multiple Definition (1932), Richmond, Surrey, England: Curzon Press 1996. 235 Hellmut and Richard Wilhelm, Understanding the I Ching, Princeton University Press, 1998, p. 51. Fingarette and Richards sadly missed this point when they studied Confucius and Mencius. 236 Robert M. Adams said of More‘s Utopia, ―We may interpret it as we will, but the way a book like Utopia has been read and lived across the centuries is an authentic part of its nature.‖ (A Norton Critical Edition: Sir Thomas More: UTOPIA, tr. and ed., Robert M. Adams, NY: W. W. Norton, 1992, pp. viii-ix) Adams did not say, however, that, therefore, to read Utopia we must read how ―it has been read and lived across the centuries.‖ That lack is Western.
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My question on why fish has no umbrella asks not about facts a, b, c, for of course fish has no umbrella, what else is new? The question calls attention to frames that make facts, facts with significance as ―fact.‖ That is, my question points to (d) that makes sense of (a), (b), and (c). All of them are missed when (d) is omitted. Yearley, and Hansen, for example, read the Chinese texts on their own level (c) alone, and did no cultural hermeneutics (d), thus missed China. Let us consider those two interpreters one by one. 237 Lee Yearley constructed a tripartite frame, as a Procrustean bed to fit Mencius, by extrapolating concepts and theories from Mencius‘ ad hoc stories spilled from shifting situations, and then reprocessing Mencius‘ story-persuasions, situation-sensitive, into eternal 238 logical arguments. Mencius was playing with arguments to persuade, saying (2B13), ―That was that time, this is this time now,‖ wholly devoid of explicit consistent line of argumentation, as assumed by Western Yearley. Yearley completely bypassed this Mencius-in-situ, in the fiery thick of the controversy. To someone who said Mencius loved to argue, he quipped impatiently (3B9), ―How could I 239 love arguing? I just cannot help it!‖ His heat Wang Ch‘ung caught, but Yearley never did. Yearley just processed the fiery Mencius into another Western theoretician quietly spinning theories and concepts. Yearley barked up his wrong Western tree, identical between Aquinas and Mencius. Comparison is frame-comparison; claiming to ―compare,‖ he never did. Now, sitting with Richards, Fingarette, and Yearley, Chad Hansen never leaves his Western armchair of external analysis. Hansen is today‘s I. A. Richards, naively taking 240 Western ―analytical logic‖ as universally applicable, confidently pushing his analytical 241 ―unified interpretation‖ all the way through Chinese history of thought, with a subtitle, ―A Philosophical Interpretation‖ that tells how ―philosophy‖ is his Western analytical tradition among Dennett, Nozick, Kripke, Parfit, Quine, Rawls, and Rorty. 242 Hansen is not even like John L. Austin that A. C. Graham espouses. It never occurs to Hansen that reasonableness is wider than analysis, as life is bigger than logic; he never realizes that China has been proposing and practicing life-reason that includes logic but not identical to it. This is worse than Graham who recognizes non-analytical ―spontaneity‖ in China; this is less sensitive than Arthur Wright who takes Chinese thought to be between ―philosophy‖ (Stanford analyticity) and commonsense convention. In his historical rehearsal of Chinese schools, Hansen disregards the historical trend of 243 He never China, and treats all schools of thought equally, on the same analytical plane. 237 Lee H. Yearley, Mencius and Aquinas: Theories of Virtue and Conceptions of Courage, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990. 238 On playing with arguments, see Wu‘s On the “Logic” of Togetherness, op. cit., pp. 150-215. 239 Wang Ch‘ung 王充 said that this Mencius‘ burning heart was responsible for Wang‘s writing of the massive Balanced Critiques 論衡, in 對作篇, 臺北市三民書局, 民86, p. 1469. 240 Victor H. Mair, ed., Experimental Essays on Chuang-tzu, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1983, pp. 2426. Mair has enough sense to take these essays as ―essays,‖ intellectual trials that Watson hesitates about (p. xv); Hansen has none of such hesitation. Clever fools rush in where perceptive angels fear to tread. 241 Chad Hansen, A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought: A Philosophical Interpretation, Oxford, 1992, where ―Dao‖ is logical analysis for Hansen. 242 Hansen rejects Graham‘s reading of China (ibid., pp. 1-2). 243 Revealing is the sentence with which his volume begins: ―A missing text is always an exciting discovery.‖ Causes for the missing are never examined. He just digs up ―obscure‖ schools of thought, treats them, in his way, on a par with prominent schools, and then turns around to disparage their prominence. Such roughshod ride is so insensitive to China!
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asks why all schools except Confucianism were suppressed to fall by the wayside of thought; he assumes that these schools fell out of favor by extra-logical accident. His analytically coherent view of Chinese thinking comes off so palatable to today‘s Western thinking trend. Hansen peeps into China through a tiny keyhole of analytical logic, blind to indirection, humor, non-sequitur, contradiction, storytelling, and laughter, all so Chinese, typical especially of Chuang Tzu. Ironically, Hansen touts his blindness in all his touting of ―Daoist 244 theory‖ in the volume title, and of being a ―daoist,‖ a ―reincarnation of Zhuanzi.‖ That story-thinking in China can accommodate such one-dimensional probes bespeaks how roomy story-thinking is. The reverse is not true in the West, however, for once analytical logic tries to house story-thinking, the move tears logic to pieces (as Alice in Wonderland did Lewis Carroll‘s) to becloud analytical logic (as Deleuze did to Alice in Wonderland by 245 logicizing her ). In any case, Fingarette, Richards, Yearley, and Hansen read the Chinese texts in Western interpretative milieu; they saw themselves reflected in the mirror of mysterious Chinese texts and attributed their own interpretations to these text; the West was read-into China. They are on level (c), awaiting ―cultural‖ hermeneutic on (d) to revolutionize them. Let us repeat this important point. Fingarette, Richards, Yearley, and Hansen never realize that how Chinese sentences mean in the West differs from how the texts mean in China. Their ideas are theirs evoked by the ―exotic‖ Chinese texts; they read their thinking into the texts that mirror it. They did eisegesis, not exegesis. Mind you, Fingarette, Richards, Yearley, and Hansen are not ―wrong‖ but foreign to the Chinese tapestry. They stimulate renovation,246 by showing/shaping Chinese manner of thinking in contrast to their non-Chinese style, atmosphere, and approach.247 Western exegesis exudes unawares the venerable Anglo-analytical tradition; no Chinese thinker would approach the text, pose questions, solve them, explore, and deny other interpretations—that way. Intercultural hermeneutics thus enriches the ―Confucius‖-tradition, as we see this Western flavor distinct from the Chinese. We think we are a clean slate on which to objectively write objects, while our direction and way of research (―writing‖) reveal our bent, our assumptions. Not to realize so is one thing; refusing to admit so is another. Meeting the Chinese different bent that the West reveals also reveals the West. As the West admits to weaving its analytical tapestry,248 a
244 See his Acknowledgement. He did treat ―paradox‖ but always from the West‘s logical point of view, never from Chuang Tzu‘s sort. Why he claims kinship to ―Daoist‖ or ―Zhuanzi‖ is anyone‘s guess. Is it because Taoism tickles his logical palate, more than dull authoritative Confucianism? 245 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, NY: Columbia University Press, 1990. 246 H. G. Creel exclaimed, ―In the fifty years in which I have been studying Confucius, I cannot recall that I have found the work of another scholar more stimulating than that of Professor Fingarette.‖ (Journal of the American Academy of Religion, quoted in Confucius, back cover). ―Stimulating‖ is eye-catching; he avoids the word, ―agree.‖ 247 For all his intercultural sensitivity, Yip did not reach this level of cultural inter-critical inter-enrichment. He stays culturally different, mutually ―distant,‖ ―diffusing‖ as a Western dichotomous approach he laments. Even his style and tone is exclusive as in the West. (Wai-lim Yip, Diffusion of Distances: Dialogues Between Chinese and Western Poetics, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Chinese Poetry: An Anthology of Major Modes and Genres, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997, pp. xiii-xiv, 1-27). Such lack is sad. 248 Richards did, Fingarette was silent.
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healthier intercultural hermeneutics would emerge to enrich both the Western and the Chinese interpretive communities.249 We must go to hermeneutical level (d) to sensitively reflect on (i) how the West‘s logical/analytical reading of Chinese texts differs from Chinese literary/historical reading, (ii) how each should learn from the other, and (iii) how essential such intercultural learning is for co-thriving in our small Global Village today.
D. Inter-Writing to Inter-Culture Three sections above have made two points. One, writing shows to reveal, to shape the writer; my writing-down objectifies me to make me another, who shapes me. Writing objectifies me to social-ize me. Two, I write in my language to write my life-style, my culture; writing China in English reveals China and the West to inter-show, inter-shape. Section A considered the first point, Section B has the second, and Section C has executed both, to show how inter-writing intercultures. Now Section D here concludes, saying writing China in English makes impact on both into an interculture to world concord. Huntington250 wrote that world conflicts today are not of raw power but of cultures, at our assumptive root. World conflicts originate in felt threats of ―alien‖ cultures ―we‖ don‘t know. In response, we note that we write to meet and share/shape; Socrates prefers conversation, and Plato writes it down in Greek for readers to cross-culturally inter-write through history.251 Contacts of two languages reveal two preexisting cultures and shape them further, clarifying, enriching, and thereby confirming them. What would we do about misunderstandings that inter-writing contacts generate? Three answers are here. One, this question reveals ―mistakes‖ no one purposely commits. We can come to know mistakes after committing them, to reveal historical self-reflective Socratism.252 Detecting mistakes now enables us to correct them one by one, sooner or later; this process makes history. How? Two, more inter-writing dispels occasional errors—as more logical argument cures invalid ones and more perception corrects optical illusions—by more people, more than once. Three, today is a cross-cultural era when we can continue cross-checking from many diverse perspectives, to cut errors as they occur.253 Our critical Socratism (Marcel) in crosscultural dialogues today makes a world history of inter-correction, and inter-writing creates a better intercultural world as writing changes and shapes our common communal world. 249
On global and intercultural implications of all this, see ―Chapter 49: ‗Let Chinese Thinking be Chinese‘: Sine Qua Non to Globalization‖ in my Chinese Wisdom Alive: Vignettes of Life-Thinking, NY: Nova Science Publishers, 2010, pp. 451-484. 250 Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1996. Its dated ―tribal clash‖ does point at a sober world fact today that the world clash is clash of cultures. 251 Chuang Tzu wrote for a word-forgotten one to word with, having written that ancient writings are scum/dross (13/68-74, 26/48-49). I wrote ―Learning as a Master from a Master: ‗Chuang Tzu‘ in University General Education‖ (On Metaphoring, op. cit., pp. 615-640), so that the writing-forgotten ―minds‖ can ―meet‖ 會意 at the writing to joyously forget the meal. T‘ao Ch‘ien 陶潛 confessed to such an ineffable joy that forgets meal, ―每有會意, 便欣然忘‖ in ―Biography of Mr. Five Willows 五柳先生傳‖ in 陶淵明集, 臺北市三民書局, 2004, pp. 361-364. 252 My ―Existential Relativism‖ (Ph.D. thesis, Yale, 1965) argues at length for this point. 253 Cf. my Metaphoring, op. cit., p. 668 (index on ―objectivity‖).
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Writing changes the world. ―How?‖ It shows our situation, thereby shapes public opinion that seems powerless, until we watch history to which people in China appeal. They usually rally to authorities, not themselves, yet they affirm the historic principle of highest authority, ―Heaven sees in its people seeing; heaven hears in its people hearing,‖ that is, the supremacy of public opinion, and the world history validates this ―fatuous doctrine.‖ King Wen‘s 文王 sagely rule was credited to attending to his people, collecting their ―songs‖ of opinions in Poetry Classic 詩經. People‘s opinion collapsed the brutal ―First Emperor of Ch‘in 秦始皇‖ in mere 30 years. Tu Mu 杜牧 wept, writing that the people who ―dared not talk but dared fume‖254 finally united to topple the almighty Dynasty. Harriet Stowe quietly wrote Uncle Tom‟s Cabin (1852) to hit the public hard to end slavery. Katharine Graham, the matriarch of Washington Post, stirred up public opinion to pull down President Nixon.255 Written communication shapes the public to change the world. Seemingly powerless, public opinion makes history to revolutionize the world. Communicated public opinion makes democracy in vogue today; the dictator‘s first task after conquest is to muzzle writers on paper that fires no shots, for writing stirs up people to fire dictators. Writing on the situation reveals thinking in the situation, its culture. Writing expresses culture to shape it, as grammar follows writing to guide it. If writing revolutionizes the world, powerful indeed is writing across cultures, writing China in English, that shapes an intercultural world. Jolted by English translation to realize itself as allusive, Chinese culture can strive to clarify its thinking as the West superbly does; jolted by revealing Chinese thinking as concrete, the West can sensitize its analytical clarity as flexuously to actuality as China does. Writing China in English inter-shapes participant cultures; describing the Chinese thinking in English sensitivity, this section initiates their inter-writing in appreciative intercultural revealing. It is an essential step to world self-shaping, to prescribe and produce world concord. Thus China and the West must inter-write to inter-grasp to interculture. Our common destiny hangs on this thread of inter-writing into West-China togetherness, where family-differences thrive in ―family resemblance‖256 of humanity. A language reveals a life-style, a culture, to shape it. Writing shapes the writer; inter-writing inter-shapes us all in interculture. ―Writing China in English‖ frames China to frame the West, to shape both cultures. We have no writing-in-general; a thousand miles of interculture-walks257 start at our feet,258 writing China in English to inter-shape, to let our Global Family thrive today.
254 不敢言而敢怒. 255 This Chinese ―fatuous doctrine‖ is recorded in Classic of History 書經 II. 10a and was quoted by Mencius (5A5). On the Classic of Poetry 詩經, see Arthur Waley, The Book of Songs, NY: Grove Press, 1996, Bernhard Karlgren, The Book of Odes, Stockholm Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, 1950, and Wai-lim Yip 葉威廉, ed. and tr., Chinese Poetry, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997, pp. 31-33. Tu Mu‘s 杜牧 (803-852) elegy of ―Prose-poem on the O-p‘ang Palace (阿房宮賦)‖ drips bloody pathos (see 古文觀止 [among others, 蘇石山編著, 高雄麗文文化公司, 1995, pp. 604-610]). On Harriet Beecher Stowe (18111896) see Ian Ousby, ed., The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English, Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 909-910. One third of Newsweek, July 30, 2001, is on Katharine Graham whose picture is on its cover. 256 This section has interculturally extended Ludwig Wittgenstein‘s ―family resemblance.‖ (Philosophical Investigations, Third Edition, tr. G. E. M. Anscombe, NY: Macmillan, 1958, Section 67, p. 32e) 257 ―World walks‖ is in plural because interculture ―double walks‖ 兩行 (Chuang Tzu, 2/40). 258 ―A thousand miles of walk begins underfoot,‖ said Lao Tzu in Tao Te Ching, 64.
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STORYTELLING IN CHINA AND IN THE WEST Inter-writing of writing China in English is not just a translation of texts, deciphering what the texts say. We have a job to do on the meaning-level. First, we can explicate the Chinese mode of storytelling. (a) The Classic of Mountains 259 and Oceans 山海經 is the oldest extant history in China as its comprehensive worldview, in the form of storytelling. (b) Wang Kuo-wei‘s 王國維 Comments on Words among People 人間詞話 is an aesthetic underpinning of storytelling. (c) Helped by the two that typify Chinese storytelling, we can survey Chinese Classics. Then, we compare such Chinese style of storytelling with the Western by taking Alice in 260 comparing such with Wonderland and its philosophical development by Gilles Deleuze, Socrates-Plato‘s use of myths in thinking. How analytical Aristotle relates to such Socrates and Plato interests us. Thirdly, having discerned what these two types, Chinese and Western, of storytelling are, we now think about (a) what all this storytelling means, (b) and why, (c) and what significance storytelling in general has. This is a fascinating theme where truly hermeneutic 261 thinking comes to its own! (c) The vital significance of storytelling emerges here. A person is made of stories always ready to tell, to weave out the continuity of one‘s integrity; to lose 262 one‘s story is to lose oneself, to be sick with radical sickness of self-loss. One‘s story is made of one‘s communal stories, local gazettes, prejudices, customs and conventions, all constituting local air and style of living. A community is gone when its stories are gone. The community‘s stories are part of a group of stories called ―culture‖ that typifies people in that region. People and communities literally live (in) that culture, and to get out of culture is to get shocked, sick with ―culture shock.‖ Our world today of Global Village is an interweaving of various cultural stories to interenrich and inter-cultivate. This is life; life is a story of inter-cultivation of cultural life-stories. But then what is this ―intercultured world‖ that our inter-writing creates? It is our living and lived milieu. What does ―milieu‖ mean? Here, surprisingly, storytelling also guides us to understand this fundamental query. This query is what we live for. We now consider this fascinating theme, and we hope this consideration helps enhance life.
259 袁珂校注, 山海經校注, 臺北里仁書局, 民93. Anne Birrell, translated with an introduction and notes, The Classic of Mountains and Seas, London: Penguin Books, 1999. 260 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, tr. Mark Lester et al., ed. Constantine V. Boundas, NY: Columbia University Press, 1990. 261 The so-called ―history of ideas‖ all too often ends in the first two levels of pure rehearsal and report. This is a truncated history, lacking in meaning-dialogue. Sadly, the so-called ―Chinese philosophy‖ all too often ends up at just this exegetical/descriptive level. 262 Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales, NY: Summit Press, 1970.
Chapter 5
MILIEU OUR LIFEWORLD We note that Heidegger derives his neologisms from everyday phrases (Befindlichkeit as related to ―wie befinden Sie sich? (How are you?)‖). He finds in common words uncommon meanings (Dasein). As a result, he infuses traditional philosophical vocabulary with untraditional senses (Wahrheit, Sein).1 What is it that enables Heidegger to do so? Clearly, he sensitively ―reads‖ from our common words what it means to be in a daily situation. Literally, ―wie befinden Sie sich?‖ means ―How (do) you find yourself?‖ that is, ―What is your situation-in-which you find yourself to be as you are?‖ This situation-in-which he calls ―Befindlichkeit.‖2 Then, he pursues what such a ―situation‖ means in the most general sense. Situation is where we are situated, and this ―where‖ draws his attention. He calls it ―Dasein,‖ literally, ―being-there.‖ From Dasein he sees Sein, ―being,‖ a favorite of traditional philosophy, which sadly pursues it theoretically, not in the way Heidegger pursues, in terms of daily ongoing. We agree with Heidegger on all this so far here,3 and think ―milieu‖ is the situation-inwhich we are. Milieu is what enables us to find ourselves as we are. However, pursuing ―milieu‖ as ―Befinlichkeit,‖ Heidegger pursues in a traditional philosophical manner he said we should not engage in, to result in an impossible complexity foreign to living actuality that is simple and deep. Instead, we will steadfastly stay in our daily ordinary milieu to understand ―milieu.‖ We begin and stay with living-with-kids, our primal life-milieu; it is what Heidegger has forgotten, to commit the crime of Vergessenheit (forgottenness) himself. Heidegger‘s way is one way to think on actuality. We go another way, to consider instead twofold life-thinking, time-thinking and space-thinking, storytelling rhymed with milieu, and milieu self-ed vs. milieu self-less. All this is ―pursued‖ in the common ordinary life-context, our life-milieu.
1 This is my extrapolation from Joan Stambaugh‘ sensitive comments in her translation of Martin Heidegger: Being and Time, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996, ―Translator‘s Preface,‖ p. xiii. 2 And so, to render ―Befindlichkeit‖ as ―attunement‖ may have stretched too far from the original meaning-setting. 3 Heidegger is cited here again in a context different from though related to previous one. Previously he was cited for his coming-home to actuality without coming home to it; now we cite him for considering milieu in a formidable unnatural way.
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DAWN, KIDS, STORY Jean-Paul Sartre, a great storyteller, said, ―a man is always a teller of stories‖ and lives 4 (in) his stories that coherently connect sporadic random life-events. Sartre may have thought such storytelling a self-deception, but his very description is a story. He took self-deception to be part of human nature, but storytelling as ―deception‖ is loaded, meaningful only by assuming that he knows what is real, while ―what is really the case‖ is meaningful only in terms of a story. Here in this existential self-reference, ―self-deception‖ is impossible. Thus, Sartre may not have realized how radically and penetratingly true his characterization of humanity is, despite himself, despite his self-recursive contradiction. 5 Norman Mailer stresses the importance of storytelling for two reasons, negative and positive. Negatively, fiction is not different from nonfiction; they are ―all fiction.‖ He continued, Working on ―The Executioner‘s Song (1979),‖ I wanted it to be as accurate as I could possibly make it. And yet, when I was done, a couple of major figures in it were unhappy . . . ―That‘s not me.‖ So I thought, all right, it is a novel. I think it‘s very good to get rid of the notion that because you‘ve accumulated some facts, therefore you‘re factual. 6
To say that a mere collection of facts makes no ―factual story‖ means that factual or no, all stories are stories, that is, made up, fictive. Positively, he said we need stories to make sense of life-absurdities, to relieve ourselves from crippling ourselves. We tell ourselves stories in order to make sense of life. Narrative is reassuring. There are days when life is so absurd, it‘s crippling—nothing makes sense, but stories bring order to the absurdity. Relief is provided by the narrative‘s beginning, middle and end.
We must then explore how pervasive in human life storytelling is and should be, and how, in fact, storytelling constitutes human life itself. This fact is no more clearly seen than among kids who mirror our primal and authentic self. Bedside stories put kids to sleep; kids always play stories in their life, always pretending to be characters in stories they love and literally becoming these characters. Kids live in stories and live stories. Stories nourish them in every way. They grow in stories; likewise, we continue to grow story-wise. Someone may object, ―(a) History our life-story is quicksand that keeps changing senselessly, and (b) our storytelling is simply our arbitrary imposition of sense from outside. History is arbitrary.‖ Our answer is simple. Arbitrary or not, we are part of history, history in the making, and our stories made out of events give sense to events to make them into
4 Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, NY: New Directions, 1964, pp. 56-59. This was his virgin novel, and was justifiably a great hit when it first appeared. 5 Both quotations are from Newsweek, January 27, 2003, p. 64. The first is from an interview ―as he turns 80‖; the second is an excerpt from his The Spooky Art published on January 31, 2003. 6 On interesting forays into factual-fictive distinction, see Arthur Waley, The Way and Its Power, NY: Grove Press, 1958, and Lord Raglan, The Hero: A Study in Tradition, Myth, and Drama, London: Watts and Co., 1936. Neither bothers to see how significant the fictive is to the factual.
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history. We must not forget that the above objection is itself (a) coherent, and is (b) itself a part of history. The objection holds only by destroying itself. We humans are peculiar in that we are aware of our past, and our memories accumulate to confront us as history and tradition. We have three options to deal with history. One, the Enlightenment humanism and Thomas Jefferson tried to start all over anew in a complete vacuum of the past, in a naked present. Revolt against the past is yet impossible without the tradition—thinking-mode, concepts, language, attitudes—that shows how history makes us what we are; we are the tradition on the go, what has been handed down from the past. Two, being made by tradition, we can face it as we face ourselves. We can blindly follow tradition, be wholly immersed in it, and we end up contradicting novelty and creativity of the lively present, making an easy, if not lazy, tyranny of the dead over insight and innovation of the present. Yet blind following is impossible, being opposed by ―tradition‖ itself as in Chuang Tzu‘s celebrated story (13/68-74) of the Wheelwright. He pleaded with his lord on how impossible it is to even make a wheel by merely reciting the dead scum of the past leftovers. Besides, what makes the tradition worthy of ―tradition‖ truly so called also objects to our blindly repeating the tradition wholesale without change. We must ask here, ―What is it that makes a tradition a tradition?‖ Answering this question is our third option of how to deal with our past, to be creative within and with tradition. Three, tradition means a handing-down of matters worth handing down, what is excellent. So tradition is a verb, to inherit what makes a tradition to excel its past to deserve 8 handing it down, that is, what is novel, what differs from what has customarily been the case. To say so prevents us from repeating the tradition as it is, because then we are not excelling our tradition, not inheriting what makes our tradition, the élan of surpassing the past. Tradition is anti-traditional. Now, ―novelty‖ and ―difference‖ bespeak creativity that includes culture-continuity, no, enhances culture-integrity. Tradition is that sort of creativity-at-work, that is, reenactment and 9 rejuvenation of past excellence that is tradition. Our present creativity is reworking the 10 tradition in the name of tradition. How? In four ways, says Pelikan. One, we repeat what we deeply feel about a certain passages in old writings, in our ways in ―recitation,‖ to make a ―mosaic.‖ It is history of our own, the tradition. Two, we interpolate what we think are assumptions and implications of the texts into ancient texts, so integral to 7
Jaroslav Pelikan, The Vindication of Tradition, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984, pp. 54-61. It does not carefully explicate loose connections of scattered insights, but embellishes them with colorful quotations from all quarters in the Western history of ideas, making this slender volume (only 93 pages including notes) entertaining. Is this the way a book on history of ideas usually goes? From this vantage point, we see how right Pelikan is when he proposes an interesting threefold distinction of tradition. Tradition can be an idol to be blindly followed (medievalists‘ view), an arbitrary token that points beyond it (Jefferson‘s view), and an icon that points beyond itself to history in which it is inherent. He rightly chooses the last option yet does not give us a reason for his choice. We supply him with the rationale above as we respond to the twofold objection above. Storytelling brings out the truth that tradition is an icon of history, for tradition-as-story is the constitutive part of history itself. 8 Wu, The Butterfly as Companion, op. cit., p. 6-9, where H. J. Paton a traditionalist is quoted. 9 All this is my irreverent extrapolation out of Pelikan‘s insights harvested from years of his research, in The Vindication, op. cit., pp. 65-82. I thus inherit Pelikan‘s tradition. 10 Pelikan‘s report of his experience in historical research (ibid., pp. 73-79) reminds us of the typology of the Chinese historical commentarial tradition; sadly, he says nothing about why what he reported is historical creativity within the tradition, such as that we are part and parcel of history.
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the texts that others may take as ―forgery.‖ Three, we see the texts as instantiations of general principles; when we unpack what we see, and history comes alive. Finally, the tradition provides themes and root metaphors, from which we select some as our directions, as our frame to begin our life our way. These are four ways in which history and its tradition live on; there must be some more. In fact, if we say that history is all our subjective projection, then that subjective stance on history itself is included in history as historical tradition moves on in which we are. Modern 11 science as a part of human civilization, and civilization itself, are various prolongations of historical tradition that is our horizon, ever shifting and evolving itself in us and with us, as history, and this history is part of bigger deeper history, ad infinitum. It is thus that we are history; its tradition lives on in us. Tradition is our parental inheritance that constitutes us, for us to go in to explore, and exploring such our legacy explores and enhances ourselves. Thus it is that history comes alive in us; its tradition grows in us, to grow us. History is alive through us, and we are what we are, vibrantly growing. This is the way we all are, will be, and must be nourished. It is thus that the tradition takes place, our partnership among the dead, the living, and the yet-to-be-born (Edmund 12 13 Burke ), or simply the fellowship with the great Ancients (China ). Otherwise, we would have to doubt if fellowship with the invisible is possible, doubt if understanding someone out there is possible, doubt if what I think I know is what I really know, and end up being buried alive in the quagmire of solipsist skepticism. All this we realize is a matter of course once we reflect on what ―story‖ or ―storytelling‖ 14 is. To live is to tell stories, for storytelling connects what were previously disconnected, even unconnectable—in journals, analects, essays, fictions, even in a ―logical‖ view of ―causal connection‖ among events, and event-connections are what we call ―history.‖ What connects makes life, makes existence to stand-out of disconnected bits. In fact, events themselves are ―concrete‖ because they are ―concresced‖ to appear existing as ―events.‖ Events keep on ex-isting, standing-out of others in their own concrete coherence among other concrete coherences, among other events. This existential concrete coherence is human existence that storytelling accomplishes, cohering things incoherent. We live by cohering things, for we cannot live as ―we‖ among things and events we cannot make sense of, to wit, make coherent connection. To tell stories about them is to make 15 sense of them, to see/make some ―order‖ and ―sense‖ to live it, for without such ordering sense we simply disperse into pieces, into decease. In contrast, kids grow by growing more
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Pelikan even went so far as to say, ―I must go on to point out what Stravinsky himself never tired of pointing out: that he could not have defied the tradition as he did unless he had first learned discipline from the tradition— which was why he urged that ‗Bach‘s cantatas . . . should be the center of our repertoire‘—so that he saw himself, and others now have begun to see him, as its legitimate heir and faithful disciple.‖ (ibid., p. 81, quoting from Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Conversations with Igor Stravinsky, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980, p. 31.) 12 Edmund Burke, Reflections the Revolution in France, ed., Conor C. O‘Brien, NY: Penguin English Library, 1982, pp. 194-195. 13 This is a common saying in China, ―以古人為友,‖ that nourishes us in season and out of season. 14 I had some intuitive reflections on story and storytelling in The Butterfly as Companion, op. cit., p. 506 (―story‖ in Index). I explore here the storytelling aspect of/in life. 15 All this description of events and their connections (and connotations) is called ―history.‖
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and more coherent on more and more events, and they cohere things and connect events by telling stories. No wonder kids simply love stories. The reason is not far to seek. Storytelling creates a coherent order, and stories thus created are the contextual order in which we live, move and have our being. Story is neither true nor false, but that in and by which truth and falsehood make sense, the context and milieu of life‘s relevance, justification, and efficacious meaning. ―Culture‖ is a composite of such stories, and all this shifts as our sense of relevance, justification, and efficacy changes, and our culture and stories determine our sense itself. All this is complex beyond us, since our very sense of decency and rightness that serves to understand things is enwrapped in culture and stories. We cannot understand that by which we understand. This is why the violent word ―revolution‖ is often used to express the shift of 16 paradigms, as Kuhn and Feyerabend did in the sphere of science. We tell stories to fulfill our aspiration to comprehensive precision. Crucially, precision tends to limitation to lose things; comprehensiveness tends to being loose in order to lose nothing. Combined, we have ―The Heavenly Net wide, coarse-meshed yet not leaking,‖ as Lao Tzu (73) said, Story fulfills our twofold incompatible aim by being both open and coherent. A story can be freely added, twisted, and/or abridged, and yet it is so coherent that nothing is allowed to deviate from its coherent structure without changing the structure 17 itself. The structure (story) changes with changes in actuality. This is story-thinking. In this wide sense of the ―story,‖ no human construction is no18 story. We bravely sing ―Song of Myself‖ in ―the Open Road‖ among the ―Leaves of Grass,‖ 19 20 to ―sing the world‖ with ―Song of the Lark‖ for a little girl. How? Well, our words have 21 stories of their lives, ―etymologies,‖ to tell. A person‘s sanity and integrity lies in her life22 story she is ready to tell any time to anyone. Our life-story is our life-etymology. Our ―logic‖ and ―arguments‖ are one way of storytelling, and the more numerous and 23 intertwined logic and storytelling are, the better. They come together to weave compound 24 stories of cultures, utopias, anti-utopias, and many other genres of storytelling. Ch‘ü Yüan‘s 16 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolution (1962), The University of Chicago Press, 1996. Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (1988), London: Verso, 1993. Both volumes are story-books that story-think. 17 Cf. my Butterfly, op. cit., pp. 68-69, 378, whose elaboration the present statements are. 18 This great poem by Walt Whitman (1856) includes these Songs. 19 This is Maurice Merleau-Ponty‘s beautiful phrase in Phenomenology of Perception (1945), London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962, p. 187. 20 This is Willa Cather‘s novel (1915) about a girl who braved small-town provincialism to rise to fame. 21 Cf. Oxford English Dictionary, C. S. Lewis, Studies in Words, Cambridge University Press, 1967, Owen Barfield, History in English Words (1967), NY: Barnes and Noble, 2009, and Brewer‟s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, Fifteenth Edition, NY: HarperCollins, 1995.. 22 See Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, NY: Summit Books, 1970. 23 John Locke (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding [1891], IV:10, Dover, 1959, II:310-312) was against having God‘s existence depend on a single argument (ontological) and for cumulative argumentation, as was Basil Mitchell (The Justification of Religious Belief, Oxford University Press, 1981). 24 C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature, Cambridge University Press, 1964, tells a story of the medieval culture of Europe. Sir Thomas More, Utopia, Second Edition, tr. and ed. Robert M. Adams, NY: W. W. Norton, 1992, has many utopias and anti-utopias. J. R. R. Tolkien wove out of his funds of scholarship in Anglo-Saxon epics and folklores and medieval languages, many imaginative stories such as The Hobbit (1937), The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955), and Silmarillion (1977). C. S. Lewis in An Experiment in Criticism (Cambridge University Press, 1961) tells us how to read stories of whatever kind. Jung and Pepper told us of genres of storytelling as ―archetypes‖ (Carl G. Jung, Four Archetypes, Princeton University Press, 1959) and ―root metaphors‖ (Stephen C. Pepper, World Hypotheses, The University of California Press, 1942).
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屈原 tragic poems, ―Ch‘u Tz‘u 楚辭‖ told and made sense of life‘s painful surprises and disappointments that destroyed him. Huai-nan Tzu‘s 淮南子 (18) story, ―Uncle Fort lost the horse 塞翁失馬,‖ exemplifies, illustrates, and explicates Lao Tzu‘s (58) quip about life, ―Bane—it is what boon leans-on; 25 boon—it is what bane lurks-under.‖ Our scientific cosmology today is as weird as ―Alice in 26 Wonderland.‖ They are all stories to nourish us in story-sense through senselessness. 27 Even pictures tell stories; they are stories without words as music is song-story without words. Story tells our life as ―songs without words.‖ Stories are songs of life in life. No wonder Plato appealed to stories to open and expand on his philosophical horizons, as 28 Aristotle explicated stories in his Poetics. Culture is a network of socio-historical stories as religion is of ultimate ones, and the inter-existence of religions and cultures is an exciting 29 story network. 30 A story is ―out of this world‖ within this world, literally ―the prose of the world‖ so charming, stretching us to make us soar, yet thoroughly within our world of convention and common sense. There are stories and there are stories, however. Some stories are sarcastic as 31 Erasmus‘s The Praise of Folly. Some are full of technicalities protesting Western technical thinking as deconstructionism, too knotty, twisty, viscid, and glum to swallow. Some others are congenial to daily living. China is a culture of storytelling with many congenial challenging stories of life‘s joys and frustrations. What structure, what ―logic,‖ does storytelling have? How does it compare with ―kids‘ logic‖?
25 Philip and Phylis Morrison, The Ring of Truth: An Inquiry into How We Know What We Know, NY: Random House, 1987; Stephen Hawking, The Universe in a Nutshell, NY: Bantam Books, 2001. 26 Martin Gardner, The Annotated Alice by Lewis Carroll: the Definitive Edition (1960), NY: W. W. Norton, 2000, was pursued philosophically by Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (1969), NY: Columbia University Press, 1990. Robert Gilmore, Alice in Quantumland: An Allegory of Quantum Physics, NY: Springer, 1995, demonstrates how Quantumland is Wonderland. 27 A picture advertises a product or a political view. ―I want to share my excitement at . . . the picture of reality that is emerging.‖ (Stephen Hawking, The Universe in a Nutshell, NY: Bantam Books, 2001, p. viii, Foreword) Hawking described his physics-―picture‖ of the universe in the story of his book that has many pictures; his picture is his story. On theories of paintings in China, see 俞崑編著, 中國畫論類編，臺北市華正書局，民73, two volumes. 28 See e.g., J. A. Stewart, tr., The Myths of Plato, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1960, S. H. Butcher, Aristotle‟s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art (1911), NY: Dover Publications, 1951. 29 The following volumes are noteworthy on this theme: John B. Cobb, Jr., Beyond Dialogue: Toward a Mutual Transformation of Christianity and Buddhism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982); Hans Küng et al., Christianity and the World Religions: Paths to Dialogue with Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co., 1983); Peter Phan, ed., Christianity and the Wider Ecumenism (NY: Paragon House, 1990); and Jacques Dupuis, Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism, Fourth Edition (Orbis, 1997, 2002). 30 This is Merleau-Ponty‘s inimitable phrase as a title of his poetic volume (1969, English tr., 1973), but used here in the sense perhaps not intended by him. 31 Among many versions, Desiderius Erasmus, The Praise of Folly, tr, Clarence H. Miller, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979, is perhaps one of the fullest and up to date.
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KIDS’ LOGIC, OUR LOGIC, STORYTELLING LOGIC I once asked Tessie my grand daughter, age two, ―Why fish has no umbrella?‖ She 32 confidently said, ―‗Cause fish has no hand!‖ Her Mom was ecstatic, ―See, Tessie is so logical!‖ Tessie‘s ―logic‖ disarmed mine into laugh, not agreeing not opposing, so invincible. Now, this fact that we adults have no choice but break out laughing, shows that she disarms (―deconstructs,‖ we adults say) adult pretense, rational convention, and cleanses our social soot, heals our hustle and bustle to put us back into us. The child parents the adult, as both Wordsworth and Freud said. Besides, Tessie‘s storytelling reminds us of Marcel saying that Buber‘s saying ―I-Thou‖ turns the I-Thou into the I-It. Buber replies that ―I-Thou‖-addressed brings about the I33 Thou. What is at stake is how we say. Objective de-scription pushes things into the It; calling to address Thou lives things in the Thou. We ask how both these acts are related, or gather. We shiver at the ever-abiding possibility of writing and even just saying to freeze Thou into It, while we cannot help but write and say to direct us to Thou, to keep Thou from vanishing-freezing Thou into It. Look at Tessie. In her eternal world of innocence, Tessie has no such adult problem. She is in the Thou, to keep telling stories. She is always ready with performative utterances, storytelling, to address events, things, and people. In fact, she is writing a ―fiction,‖ now in Chapter Seven, and fiction is forever Thou! The Israelites have three ways to say without saying the holy Name. One is to keep silence in writing, simply to leave the space blank, then, to write an unpronounceable Tetragrammaton, a four-letter word YHWH, lest God‘s name be pronounced to desecrate into It, and finally to call ―Lord,‖ ―El‖ or ―Adonai‖ unspecifiable. These not-sayings cipher the Ineffable Beyond. Kids are experts here, being oral, perceptive, non-literate, and sensitively Thou-ish. They cover mouths to show mystery or whisper a story of ―monster.‖ I used to be offended as a boy when other kids called their fathers ―Dad‖; ―Dad‖ was a sacred Name exclusively of my father. Music is here, kid-played, sing-performed as kid. Kids don‘t have music-scores, we adults do. Scores for music are mere ciphers to occasion it. We all live in the music-of-life, one of which is ―storytelling‖ that can be writtendown without contrived scores of ―emplotment‖ of Ricoeur, Here Thou joins It, telling and calling, winking at each other. Here silence and writing/saying join. Religious scriptures are storybooks of songs of life. The above is, to think of it, itself a story told to embrace Tessie‘s logic and adults‘. Only storytelling can pull off such a stunt. Obviously, storytelling has its own logic, for otherwise we won‘t understand the story. Obviously, the story-logic embraces kids‘ logic and adults‘, to make sense of both, to disarm us into smile in an unspeakable ―understanding,‖ to nod with Tessie, ―Yes, that‘s right!‖ All this is thinking in story-thinking. 32 I then asked, ―Why don‘t fish say water is wet as Granny does?‖ She asserted, ―‗Cause fish live in water and Granny don‘t! Don‘t you know that?‖ If I were to ask further, ―But why?‖ we would have been led into proving God‘s existence with C. S. Lewis in his celebrated Mere Christianity. But that will be a story for adults; kids don‘t need it, in all their being ―very logical.‖ 33 The Marcel-Buber conversation occurs in Paul Arthur Shilpp and Maurice Friedman, eds., The Philosophy of Martin Buber, La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1967, pp. 44-45, 706. Cf. my On Chinese Body Thinking: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 1997, pp. 223-224.
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TIME-THINKING, SPACE-THINKING Here are four points about two sorts of thinking, time-thinking and space-thinking, that makes possible my knowing, and making possible is the way of logic, especially the logic of story-thinking. We usually think that two things cannot occupy the same space, and this is space-thinking. We also know, however, that two things can occupy the same space at different moments, and this is time-thinking. Our thinking is made up of the tapestry of both sorts of thinking intertwined, called story-thinking. So we proceed as follows. (1) We describe two sorts of knowing to (2) realize that examination, doubt, and mistake are motions in space, (3) our ordinary knowing of the self, friends, and history is time-immediate and space-complex, and see (4) how both cocomplement into storytelling. All this description—storytelling—shows that storytelling can powerfully resolve problem in epistemology, in a surprisingly perceptive manner. (1) Epistemology ―describes‖ the way we know and so amounts to a ―story‖ of the way we think, which is of two sorts according to our twofold existence, time-existence and spaceexistence. Epistemology is the twofold story of our space-thinking (space-epistemology) and our time-thinking (time-epistemology). Here is a story of such comprehensive time-spaceepistemology. 34 I once explicated how China understands time ; here I consider how we can think timely (as China does but without referring to China till in (3)), how thinking inter-shapes with time, in time, and in time-ly way, distinct from but related to space-thinking. Both sorts of thinking/knowing are our thinking in space-mode and thinking in time-mode, or spacethinking and time-thinking for short. Space-thinking spreads logically-geometrically; timethinking echoes co-responsively in space and time. Each sort of thinking is distinct to interenrich each without confusion. (2) Three notions, interrelated, stand out as belonging to space-thinking: doubt, scrutiny, and mistake. I must stand outside a thing to doubt and scrutinize it, and ―outside‖ is a spatial notion. Since Socrates touted self-examination self-scrutiny, Western thinking has been in space-thinking. How about ―self-examination‖? If we take self-reflective acts as self-distancing and so somehow spatial, then self-examination and mistake-deception are the spatial self going ―outside‖ itself. Is self-split in space impossible? Then we can appeal to time-thinking mixed with space-thinking; the self re-calls the past, to examine the past self. Retrospection is spatial transcendence in time, ―the self going back in time‖; ―back‖ is a space-notion. This space-time mix to recall the past (for ―examination‖) amounts to surveying the past to know the situation; characterization of the situation is a survey with retrospective examination of what has transpired, ―past.‖ It is likewise with ―self-deception‖ and all self35 reflections. The self can distance itself, stand outside to deceive itself. Or else, selfdeception occurs because the self at first thought to be A, and later realizes, via selfexamination, itself as not-A. Self-deception is thus a version of retrospection and selfexamination, a realization of having made mistakes. Examination of something is spurred by doubt on the possibility of errors/mistakes; ―examination‖ is impossible without ―doubt‖ to check to see if ―mistakes‖ have been made; 34 See my On the “Logic” of Togetherness: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 1998, pp. 342-385. 35 The same explanation holds with all self-reflective acts with 自, such as自欺, 自負, 自反, 自覺, etc.
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doubt and mistake link to examination. They are all retrospective time-notions. Even Plato 36 37 has no timeless doubt; doubt is not an eternal Form but thinking-in-time. I must doubt something ―there‖ in the past, at present, and/or already ―there‖ as projected future. ―Already‖ is a time-notion, ―there‖ is in space, and so doubt is a space-time-notion and a retrospective act, ever toward the future. Being about potential or actual existence of mistakes, doubt is closely related to ―mistake,‖ which is clearly a retrospective time-notion—for no one consciously makes mistakes now, much less plan to make mistakes tomorrow. Instead, I re-collect my past, compare what I took as ―A-before‖ with what I realize to be real ―A-now,‖ collates both and realize; collation is space-notion, the self-now recalling the self-past is time-operation, so 38 mistake is a time-space-process, a retrospective process-act. Thus, mistake is a mistake-realization that results from comparative judgment, requiring retrospective recollection. Therefore, ―mistake‖ is a retrospective time-notion where collation and judgment between collated items is a space-action. Mistake, doubt, and examination are space-time action words. (3) Now we can consider our ordinary knowing. Here are three case-stories: One, I know I am hungry; two, I know friendship as mothers know their babies; three, I communicate with my friends-in-history. Knowing hunger is self-knowledge that is immediate in time (instantaneous) and space (self knowing self); friends mutually knowing is immediate in time (spontaneous) and spread in space (friends here and there); historical knowing is spread both in time (now, then) and space (here, there). The first and second cases are immediate and instantaneous, but how about the third case? It is as instantaneous, spontaneous, and situational, as the other two. Norman Rockwell captures the moments of truth in the early twentieth century America; his paintings strike us with our nodding smiles of ―Yes, that was as it was in those days!‖ Ancient and medieval paintings in China convey as compellingly the milieus and sentiments of those days. Now, Chinese writings are such paintings, and such writings are history. I interact with myself constantly even though the psychology and physiology of selfreflective behaviors are enormously complex. Friends chatter and laugh while sociologists and psychologists devote lifetime to probing the intricacies of interpersonal communication. We recall the past spontaneously, yet the phenomenology of recollection is only beginning to 39 emerge. So spontaneous/complex, knowing is difficult to know, yet its remains so simple. Thus, all these three cases of knowing communication, with my inner knowledge, intimate friends, and ancient friends, are all immediate, instantaneous, spontaneous, and situational, despite their complexity in epistemological structure. To notice only their complexity in doubt and examination of the possibility of mistakes, as Western
36 Both Augustine and Descartes seem to have treated doubt in this time-less spatial manner, even though both argued performatively from a doubting act. Doubt is considered time-ly here. 37 Doubt of nothing in particular is ―dread‖ on which Søren Kierkegaard wrote The Concept of Dread (1844). 38 Plato (Theaetetus), Augustine (Confessions), Descartes (Meditations), and Royce (The Religious Aspect of Philosophy) all treated ―mistake‖ or ―error‖ logically (in a transcendental, abductive manner); they all spread spatially. Besides, they all used mistake as a launch pad to jump into the unmoving realm of eternal comprehensive Truth, never stayed in mistake as such to watch its epistemological process. This is typical Western space-thinking. 39 Edward S. Casey‘s study of recollection is 362 pages long (Remembering: A Phenomenological Study, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).
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epistemologists have been doing, is to miss the simple spontaneous happening of daily 40 knowledge, the moment of truth of its epistemology. Moreover, since we are wholly spatial-temporal, doubting historical communication with ancient friends would lead to doubting the other two cases, our friendly intimacy and then our intimate self-knowledge. We would end up being unsure of our own hunger, having to rely on an outside testing that in turn relies on a testing outside of that testing, in an infinite regress, to end up having no assurance at all—if we doubt historical communication. Historical understanding is as immediate and instantaneous a communication as intimate friendship and self-knowledge of hunger are, for they are all interconnected; we find our root in the ancients as we are alive social and feel hunger. In short, incredible as it may sound, doubting history or friendship denies self-knowledge and human existence. No wonder, 41 Confucius wanted to offer sacrifice to forefathers as they are present here now, and once lamented, ―How I have gone downhill! It has been such a long time since I dreamt of the 42 Duke of Chou.‖ (4) We are naturally curious on how spontaneous immediacy could be complex. Let us rehearse the twofold epistemology above. We are space-time, so our knowing is spatiotemporal. The spatial yonder is an outside to soon consider. The time-yonder is the 43 44 past that takes time to come to be yet can be recalled in no time. So, knowing-in-time is presence unfolding in my immediate consciousness, all at once, co-resonating throughout heaven, earth, and humanity, present and past inter-enriching, ever ―sacrificing to our forefathers as present here now.‖ All this tells a story of how the immediate presence of my self-knowledge to myself, friendship to myself, and my historical communication to myself; totum simul extends from myself through community to all history in the Infinite Community of the many in one and one in many. The story pervades myself here now, to togetherness in time (history), in space (society), and expands yonder into the ultimate of Heaven and Earth in History continuum. The Yonder is ultimately the Infinite in a time Dynamics. In contrast, my yonder in mere space is my outside. I must go out of myself to laboriously reconstruct it to myself physically, logically, in order to reach there, whether the yonder is my parental past, my friends, or myself. Here the so-called epistemological problems prop up; space-thinking is the place for doubt, mistakes, and demonstration, and ―complexity‖ emerges in the time-world of immediacy. What we must beware of here is twofold: One, we must not let this space-thinking intrude and deny the time-thinking of the immediacy of co-resonance in ―knowing.‖ At the same time, two, we must not be so naively locked in the time-continuum as to neglect the possibility of error in it, to which space-thinking rightly calls our attention. We must remember, then, that my immediate recall of the past can and should be checked by others‘ memories, historical imagination, and historical evidence. My call to the other 40 Chuang Tzu‘s story (17/87-91) of bantering with his friend name-logician Hui Tzu, on how Chuang knows minnows‘ joy of darting around ends in Chuang‘s simple declaration, ―I know it over the river Hao here!‖ 41 The Analects 3/12; I modified William E. Soothill‘s translation in Confucius the Analects (1910), NY: Dover Publications, 1995, p. 13. 42 Analects 7/5; this is D. C. Lau‘s translation in Confucius: The Analects, London: Penguin Books, 1979, p. 85. 43 And the future also, but to simplify the matter we consider only the past. 44 ―Experience‖ we call it, in retrospect. We are always wiser after the fact. This is why history is always wiser and is the judge of all that has been done and happened.
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whom I thought is my friend can be checked by that other‘s response. My awareness of hunger can be a twitch in the stomach, to be checked by taking in foods, my other, to see if I am really hungry. All these appeals to the ―other‖ are my various reachings-out to the spatial outside where mistakes are ever potentially present. In this other-me divergence of call and recall, epistemologies in time and in space join; here divergence can appear as a presence of mistake. This is where immediacy-in-time joins complexity-in-space without one negating the other, but instead each complementing, establishing, and enriching the other. Now, we see again two dangers here. One, we may be so cautious about potential mistakes and their spatial checking as to miss the basic immediacy of time, without which spatial checking will be lost in infinite regress of uncertainties. Two, we may be so convinced of time-immediacy as to fall into dogmatism; epistemology-in-time is a will-o‘-the-wisp parapsychology without epistemology-in-space. Space-epistemology alone in the West is empty; time-epistemology alone in China is blind. Both must inter-complement to become themselves, though tend to be in tension. My brother Aliong emailed me, who urged him to be our family archivist, as follows. ―Preserving old mementos is good, making a museum time-capsule. But, in my humble opinion, we are the torch (not things), to carry on the message, the love, the good tradition, etc., to hand over to the next generation. For example, I often talk to Joy and Ken my kids starting with: ‗Ama used to say....‘. Take care. Aliong‖
I e-replied, ―My dear Aliong: My hearty agreement with you can go in three points. One, ‗tradition‘ is living tradition; it is life-performance of ‗handing-over‘ and so tradition throbs in and through us, as Darwin‘s ‗evolution‘ tells us that we ourselves change from the past as we struggle to survive and thrive. In this sense, Darwin is an exponent of living tradition. Two, at the same time, historical relics are obviously the fossil fuel that powers our living ahead, powerfully reminding us of our parental past that pushes us forward. Thus our parents‘ past staring at us in their pictures, writings, letters, and the like, amply deserves careful preserving. Their mementos demand preservation as our lives demand pressing forward. Three, it remains valid, however, that as you wisely said, our living and lived tradition, our practice and prolongation of parental legacies, are crucial; mementos are important only as they help us press forward parental tradition. Sadly, we tend just to embalm ourselves in their mementos against their true intention/meaning. This is the all-pervasive temptation of historicism risking ‗rotten scholarship 腐儒.‘ Thus your affirmation is most apposite, important, and necessary.‖ Now, mind you, we have described ―epistemology‖ as a story covering both how we know the time-beyond and how we know the space-yonder. This ―description‖ is storytelling. We have been telling stories of such twofold comprehensive storytelling, of which we are made. Why do we desire storytelling, however? It is that storytelling gives us a milieu to live in, without which we simply perish. Storytelling makes our home where we are born to grow. The yonder storytelling-in-time makes is our home, our milieu. It is the logic of storytelling, story-thinking.
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STORYTELLING RHYMES WITH THE SITUATION, OUR MILIEU We must not miss the fact that telling stories is powerful because telling composes a milieu inside us, making sense to rhyme with our milieu outside to live in. Storytelling is the dawn of a milieu, the inward morning of life with myriad all. Again, kids know best. We must go back to kids to learn again, but in our own adult way, for we cannot be otherwise. The ―situation‖ can be ourselves, and can also be the milieu in which we are situated, and they both in the end coalesce. The situation is the air that imbues us imbibing our style of living. The situation is where we perceive ourselves, relate to others, adjust to adversity, and all this is what we understand to be our purpose of life, to be our living. Situated milieu imbues our value, our happiness, and helps us understand where we come from (our heritage), who we are (our identity), why we exist (our purpose), what drives us (our motivation), and where we go (our destiny). Historian of science such as Thomas Kuhn says that even a scientist‘s milieu—worldview—influences what he investigates and how he interprets what/how he investigates. Our worldview—milieu—tells more than other aspects 45 of history. Mind you. All this is revealed by storytelling. Let‘s continue stories in areas other than science. Sociopolitical art of ―governing a big state 治大國,‖ is to rhyme (―as if to cook 若烹‖) with small people (―small fish 小鮮‖ as Lao Tzu says (60) for ―small people 小人‖ to rhyme with princely person, as Confucius says (12/19)). This is the art of rhyming with the situation of people-together (society), to listen to heavenly people 天民, to follow ―Heaven (that) hears from (the perspective of) people hearing 天聽自吾民聽‖ (Mencius 5A5), as Poetry Classic 詩經 was thus gathered from the people by the Chou royal court. Rhyming with the situation is to chime in with sociopolitical milieu, ―with nature (inside to) harmonize with nature (outside) 以天和天‖ (Chuang Tzu 19/59) to obtain ―natural balance 天均 ‖ (2/40, 27/10). This is the only supreme practicality (實際) of the real Realpolitik. Now we are convinced of the importance of fitting actuality, harmonizing with reality, rhyming with the situation, our life-milieu. Our life consists in living praxis to rhyme with life-milieu. What is this life-milieu, however? We turn to our kids.
KIDS, DAWN, MILIEU Soft dawn glows around me to softly mix with birds chirping, lapping my ears. Dawn opens out a vast tender field, all amber green, inviting me anywhere I go, everywhere I want to go; riding on the bus, I feel ―I can do anything‖ as any kid would say. Kids are running, and of course kids are the dawn. Dawn begins anything, which means nothing is done yet then. So kids can do anything while they know or do nothing yet, for life has just begun—and at every dawn I am a happy kid. At dawn here now, ―anything‖ joins ―nothing‖ in the kids‘ ―can,‖ and kids begin everything at dawn; nothing is here, they ―have to make breakfast from scratch,‖ as an
45 I freely rifled from Dr. Armand M. Nicholi, Jr., The Question of God: C. S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life, NY: The Free Press, 2002, p. 7. The book is a story about both men.
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exciting camping program says. Kids are making things, things brand new ―that have not existed before‖! We are at the dawn of kids when we are on top of creativity to join nothing-here-now with everything-to-come. After all, ―everything‖ can come only if we have nothing here now to make way for it. John the Baptist was a creative nothing, a mere ―voice in‖ the fresh dawn of bare ―wilderness,‖ ―preparing the way for the Lord‖ of everything. Kids are the greatest in the kingdom of perfection, not because they have accomplished anything but because they have not accomplished—yet. Their being infantile indicates they are at the dawn to accomplish something, anything significant. ―Dawn‖ and ―kids‖ show, shape, judge, and create life as a story does. Each explanation (show, shape, judge, create) depends on and completes the other; we need not itemize, analyze, and relate them. Every dawn is such a fresh story of my life, the story of being a kid who loves and lives stories. Dawn is my life-story at its best, my milieu just begun to do everything possible, as kids ―can do anything.‖ Storytelling accompanies the kid my dawn-milieu, me the creative kid. Storytelling, the dawn, the kid, and new creation, they join in me, for I am the kid of story-lover and story-maker at dawn. How so? Well, to ask this question and to answer it is already to tell a story, which is no story unless it is heard fresh every morning and every night. It can be ―an old, old story I love to tell‖ or a new one unheard of before, and kids love both dearly. To tell a story is to create, not preveniently but actually in our scheme of things. A story is a spread of storytelling, and every time we tell a story we pro-duce a new lifeprocess, draw-out the ongoing of new creation. Life always lives, goes on living; storytelling dawns, begins, and continues our living. Living expresses life, expression tells, and telling is telling a story, a ―history‖ of how we have lived and what we will do. ―History has no end‖ because it is a story of us who keep on living since time immemorial, and we must fill the gap of our memories by telling stories to create history anew, stealthily, for a new history is still unknown to us as we create it. A kid was drawing; his teacher asked him what he was drawing. He said, ―How‘d I know? I‘m not done yet.‖ Teacher then gave up on him, but it was the teacher who was hopeless. We are still drawing a picture and telling its story; we aren‘t done yet. Our life-story keeps on telling, drawing us ahead into pro-ducing new stories. Mind you, I said, ―we‖ have not finished yet. When I die, you take over, and our story goes on. That is how we write our story, as history, science, and civilization, and as epics, folklores, and myths. Besides, old stories behind us are the dawn of new ones before us. Bultmann tried to ―demythologize‖ the Gospel stories and ended up writing a new myth, remythologizing himself, and we had better take him over—and we have just told that story, a history of his conscientious Gospel-telling. Kids are here creating; they are our milieu.
SELF-ED AND SELF-LESS MILIEUS ―Man is by nature a storyteller‖ (Sartre); without stories to tell, no person, community, culture, much less world culture(s) can live. Storytelling gives them life, value, and existence
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itself. Someone tells us, ―Take it easy, but take it.‖ We tell stories to take it, thereby to take it easy. Why? Well, to take it is to take account of it, to tell a story of it. To tell a story about it is thus to take it, thereby to take it easy, i.e., to be on top of it, dwell in it, and en-joy it, i.e., to take it easy. Now, to dwell in it is to dwell in a setting, horizon, and milieu, to have a horizon-world 境界 and enjoy oneself in it. Wang Kuo-wei 王國維 said, our horizon-and-milieu can be of two sorts, the self-ed milieu (有我之境) where things are ―self‖-looked, and self-less milieu 47 (無我之境) where things are thing-looked. This is one way to classify our horizons, from the self‘s point of view, as self-ed or self-less. An American Indian elder, Alan Old Horn, 48 proposed another classification, in a story told by an anthropologist interviewing him. In my desire to learn, I bombarded him with questions . . . he was patient with me (, and then) pointed . . . ―You see that tin shed? . . . It‘s like my culture. You can sit back here and describe it, but it‘s not ‗til you go inside, listen, feel it, see from the inside looking out, that you really know what it‘s all about. You‘ve gotta go inside!‖
Alan proposed two ways of looking at things, from outside and from inside; Wang did worlds self-viewed and thing-viewed, self-ed and self-less worlds. These four ways of proposing two worlds show how self and things are entwined. It is essential that we exercise all these four ways of relating to things to understand them. Disasters follow if we obstinately adopt only one way, excluding the rest. In order to avoid the disaster, we must resort to ―storytelling‖ that sinuously follows and expresses these four ways of seeing things. Our knowledge of two worlds is intimate and objective, and goes from intimate to objective knowledge. I know when I am hungry and parents are pricked as their child is 49 pricked ; I can ―not bear‖ your pain (Mencius). That is intimate knowledge, both selfinternal and other-related. Such intimate knowledge is expressed/expanded into objective 50 knowledge that analytically reaches out, step by step, to the other-than-self ; this is what is usually taken as ―knowledge.‖ Two examples from China and Japan show what objective knowledge looks like when treasured. Chinese thinking is ―concrete,‖ a clear lake whose bottom is visible but recedes as we go in to reach it. The lake is actuality; clarity of seeing shows how ordinary it is; receding bottom shows depths of implications, layer after layer, to awe us as intimate-knowledge is expanded objective. Agriculture China and Japan traditionally engage treasures of the soil in, of, and by which we are, on which we live. Our life is intimate with earth, on which we depend; one handful of soil is one handful of gold. This is the ecological respect absolutely essential for our thriving survival with Nature, as intimate knowledge expands into intimate and objective technology managing nature, as shown in ―§ Agriculture in Technology in Japan‖ before. 46 Wu, History, Thinking, and Literature in Chinese Philosophy, Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1991. 47 王國維, 人間詞話, I.3, 臺北市三民書局, 民91, p. 4. Sadly, he did not elaborate. 48 Rodney Frey, ed., Stories That Make the World, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995, p. 5. 49 My son John told me that when his baby David was pricked for blood test John felt pricked and shed tears with baby David. My student Péng-bûn told me that he and his wife cried when their son Tiat-sîn cried at having an injection. I was in tears when told about both incidents. 50 Medical science and psychology as science try to objectively know the self and self-knowledge, objectifying even intimate self-knowledge, and nothing else.
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Such an engagement, cognitive and managerial, has two aspects to make two worlds, the self-ed and the self-less, from inside the thing-shed and from outside. We responded that the two worlds interfuse, and that storytelling most aptly expresses such intimate/objective engagement. Japan‘s heartfelt stories of Taketori Monogatari 竹取物語, Hōjōki 方丈記, and Tsuretsure Gusa 徒然草, and the like, poignantly exemplify this twofold world. All essays in China and Japan are in a journal-form, sui-pi or zuihitsu 隨筆, ―following the writing brush‖ 51 to tell stories. Thus, we should judge the ―fantastic‖ stories of the Bible less with outside criteria today of ―what actually happened‖ than take them as expressing the inner conviction that sustains 52 those who persist through adversities. ―The universally valid criteria‖ of truth such as scientific objectivity are our ―mythology‖ so as to adjust to other ways of understanding to inter-complement, by telling stories. Storytelling liberates us from blind one-track mind; there is no other way to say things than for the self to say, but for the self to say, as Wang did, bespeaks the existence of the self in both milieus, the self saying in different manners, self-ed and self-less. This point is quite significant. The West tends to innocently forget the subject-self that says as in an argument that takes off with a logical life of its own. Storytelling also takes a life of its own story-logic. The story tells itself as its characters move by themselves. Naturally there comes naïve realism of selfless ―scientific objectivity‖ and philosophy as 53 seeing ―from nowhere‖ (Nagel ). Later, there also naturally comes a reaction against such ―self-less milieu‖ with self-ed one, as in ―scientific revolution‖ (Kuhn) and in ―theories are nothing but sociopolitical and ideological pushes-and-pulls‖ of deconstructionism—nothing exists except the ―self-ed milieu.‖ So, the West says, ―Self-less or self-ed, never the twain shall meet.‖ China has the milieu-distinction intertwined subtle and complex as actual situation is. We have three examples. The first is that great storyteller, Chuang Tzu who always straddles two milieus of the self and of the not-self, always displaying the paradoxical character of such 54 straddling. A person turned as if he were ―dry wood, dead ashes,‖ that is, self-less, for ―I have lost me. 吾喪我.‖ Here one who is self-less spoke, and speaking indicates a self-ed subject (2/1-3). The speaker was in a self-less milieu to perform a behavior possible only in a self-ed milieu. And then Chuang Tzu told a story of ―Chuang Chou 莊周,‖ his own name. Is he here self-ed or self-less? He is both, because he spoke of himself (self-ed), and he spoke as if it 55 were someone else with his name (self-less). ―Chuang Chou 莊周‖ may show how the storyteller becomes the story he tells, by telling it. The self-ed telling of the story goes into its
51 This heartfelt intimacy/respect of knowledge can be typified as ―religious.‖ 52 For example, such a seeing makes sense of otherwise quite an unsatisfactory ―defense‖ of the Book of Daniel in Louis F. Hartman and Alexander A. Di Lella, The Book of Daniel, The Anchor Bible, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978, pp. 103-110. 53 Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere, Oxford University Press, 1989. 54 This is perhaps how Picasso paints, to juxtapose two perspectives at once. 55 On two other implications of ―Chuang Chou‖ see my The Butterfly as Companion, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990, Note 10 on p. 414.
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self-less content, for here the (self-ed) storyteller is its (self-less) subject matter. Two milieus here interchange (物化) in mutual distinction (有分) (2/94-96), lived and enjoyed. Chuang Tzu ended up looking for a word-forgotten one to word with. Why? As we throw away the rabbit-trap after getting the rabbit, so we throw away words, forget words, once we got the ideas via words, lest words obscure the ideas (26/48-49). Now, as uttering words requires the self-ed speaker, ―forgetting words‖ shows a self-less one. The word-forgotten one, who is self-less, is really the one who deserves self-ed-ly to word with. The simple act of speaking thus requires a complex blending of two milieus, self-less and self-ed. Our second example is a tragic scholar, Ssu-ma Ch‘ien 司馬遷 (145-90 BCE). His devastating story is well known. General Li 李陵 his friend was captured by the enemy. He defended and guaranteed the general‘s loyalty to the Emperor. Sadly, General Li later capitulated to the enemy; Ssu-ma was punished with castration. Instead of committing suicide, Ssu-ma sublimated his indignation by devoting the rest of his life to writing the sweeping legendary Records of History 史記, biographical stories of peoples, great and small, good and bad. Now, is his writing in the self-ed or self-less milieu? The answer is again, both. The Records is self-ed, impregnated with the passionate judgment of the world, but it is self-less, objectively tracing out the biographies of historical persons. The two milieus are interimplicated yet mutually distinct, for Ssu-ma‘s passion is not those historical persons he described, yet it was his passion that propelled the writing. Our third example is a Neo-Confucian Chang Tsai (張載 1020-1077). His ―The Western Inscription 西銘‖ describes how ―I 吾‖ have Heaven as my father, Earth as my mother, what fills between them as my body, what guides them as my nature, and so on. 57 Here, its ―I‖ is in both the self-ed milieu (I describe all this) and the self-less one (the description is in the cosmic perspective far beyond me). Here are both milieus fused in one (I in them, they in me), though mutually distinct (I am no Heaven, Earth, or things between them). So, to make a long story short, the West tips either to the self-ed milieu or to the self-less one, forever unsettled in abstract clarity. Kant and Schopenhauer so influenced Wang Kuowei as for Wang to notice the two distinct milieus; he was unaware of their complex interweaving in actuality. Chinese writers innocently/faithfully tell the story of actuality that is both self-ed and self-less. Wang, influenced by the West, jolted us to realize how complexly inter-involved the two distinct milieus are, self-ed and self-less. Let us return to two ways of looking at a shed, to lead to a third possibility, the shed as it 58 actually is. Two interesting points are here. One, we can neither have the actual shed, nor 56 This is a Taoist principle of education (see my ―Learning as a Master from a Master: ‗Chuang Tzu‘ in University General Education,‖ On Metaphoring, op. cit., pp. 615-640). For Confucius, all education is education in history, for we are educated on the past-―1‖ so we would return with our own ―3‖ (5/9, 7/8). Confucius expounds the past for us to create (not create himself) (he 述而不作 7/1 so that 述而使作). Education goes back to go forward educed enriched. 57 Such bodily organicism of the cosmos is intimated by Plato (the Republic, books 2-4) and Paul (1 Corinthians 12), but faded away in many ways. China develops it in medicine, cosmology, and political ethics, thriving in Chinese medicine, feng shui 風水, t‘ai chi martial arts. 12 animals paired to our birth years, calendar, etc. All these offshoots today show how the cosmos is my body writ large, and my body is the cosmos writ tiny. I am one with Heaven and Earth, and I am born with myriad things in them. 58 We would not consider here the fourth possibility, shed as it really is. Significantly, it is difficult to express the difference between the real and the actual in Chinese or in Japanese.
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not have it. We cannot have it because the actual shed is objectively outside us, and we cannot jump out of our skin of subjectivity or intersubjectivity, when we look at the shed. We cannot not-have the actual shed, either, for subjectivity is senseless without objectivity, and the very looking at the shed, from inside or out, already assumes the actual shed to look at. The shed and I interdepend to inter-exist. Two, amazingly, we suddenly realize that the very raising of this dilemma indicates that we are already away from the realm of subjectivity, inside or out, individual or intersubjective. At the same time, the raising of doubt/dilemma enables us to see that the shed-looking, inside or out, is a subjective looking, ever with my own frame, mindset, and horizon. Whatever the objective actual shed is, whatever dilemma we have about it, our awareness of it enables us to look back at ourselves in doubt. We can be away from subjectivity or in it, thanks to that ―shed‖ our milieu. In short, looking from inside or out, self-ed or self-less, we are thus forever gently wrapped in a milieu in which we are, and as we live there, we look out to look from inside things. The milieu on its part quietly embraces us, while remaining as it is, motherly smiling 59 at us, self-ed or self-less. Besides, whenever we forget the air of milieu we breathe, we must go back to the kids, and watch them how they live on to play growing, taking things as in a milieu of their mothers in whom they thrive.
59 I explored a powerful application of this milieu-consideration in ―Realism (Fajia), Human Akrasia, and the Milieu for Ultimate Virtue,‖ Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, December 2002, pp. 21-44, and ―The I-Milieu: Its Implications for Culture and Thinking,‖ (pp. 1-60, 2007 December, pp. 1-68, 2007 June) in Journal of World Religions, Dalin, Chiayi, Taiwan.
Chapter 6
PAIN Being in a milieu does not ensure quietude; in fact, pain is possible only in a milieu, disease in health-milieu, poverty in money-miliey. We must consider pain in life. This is a big theme, and two Sections need to cover two aspects of pain. In this Section we consider pain in general, pain and evil, pleasure involved, loving one‘s enemy, bottomless ―futility‖ of charity, and global ethics. The Section that follows considers pain as ―akrasia,‖ a gnawing enigma on social and individual levels. We begin by considering breaking our life-frame. Pain originates here at frame-breaking.
FRAME-BREAKING We must tell stories, for we must join the disjointed, weave the disparate elements in life, into a story-web of sensible coherence, our ―natural laws‖ of our milieu. However, ―miracles,‖ literally our ―wonderment,‖ keep erupting to disturb us more than fascinate us. What ―actually happens‖ that we innocently experience is very hard to pull into our expectant 1 web, our ―laws of nature‖ we painstakingly weave with storytelling. Worse, disjointed elements arise not just outside us but also right from inside us. We ourselves have an inherent tendency to break out of conventional frame—cultural, interpretive—into a disturbing novelty, scary and exciting. Pain originates also in our inherent urge to break our frame of thinking, our milieu.2 We create our own painful miracles that are ourselves. It is miracles, inner and outer, that give us pain. Creativity is pain. Many geniuses are in pain that creates. This tendency seems ―miraculous‖ until we consider what human life is. Life is an organism, organizing into a coherent unity that is itself. Coherence is an act of cohering, pulling together different physio-psychological elements, and ―pulling‖ requires and implies getting out of oneself toward elements different from oneself. An organism ex-ists, stands-out of what it is, growing out of itself, which is to break its own cocoon of the status quo. An organism exists by breaking its own frame, and human life 1 Cf. Richard Swinburne, ed., Miracles, NY: Macmillan, 1989, with a helpful bibliography. Swinburne should have included natural weather, tornado, tsunami, as miracles, for they constantly disturb our ―natural laws.‖ 2 Dialogue we need to make headway is an inter-smashing of our pet-frames; dialogue is life-revolution.
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is special in that it is self-conscious of its own frame-breaking. Being self-conscious is to be con-scious, aware of oneself, which is to stand out of oneself to look back at oneself, i.e., to break one‘s own frame that constitutes oneself. Existence thus makes ―routine miracles‖ and is con-scious of it, existing in double miracles, miracle watching miracle, yet quite routine, for human life routinely ex-ists selfconsciously. Now, ―routine‖ opposes ―miracle,‖ so ―routine miracle‖ is itself a miracle breaking the frame of the routine. Human existence is by nature a frame-breaker. This general observation of existence extends in eight implications. 1. Frame-breaking happens even in the most jealously self-guarding and other-exclusive of religions, Christianity. Cornelius and Peter in Acts 10 are both frame-breakers. Cornelius breaks the Roman frame and Peter, the Jewish frame—so as to meet in dialogue that surprises both expectations, both Roman-frame and Jewish frame. They underwent life-revolutions. They met and soon departed, no more we heard again, to break their fledgling friendship-frame. So, the story of Cornelius meeting Peter breaks the frame twice over, once when they met, the second time when they left. The Bible reports none of their pain, though we can easily surmise they felt pain that may have stopped their meeting again. The incident cuts deeper. Our life is a mundane frame-breaker. Today is the beginning of tomorrow, by breaking into the crack of dawn of tomorrow. We die daily to meet the daybreak, again and again. This is why Christ has to die and to rise up again, to leave us with ―linen clothes‖ (Luke 24:12) of yesterday, to leave us to go ahead into Galilee (Mark 16:6-7) where he gave us the ―glorious liberty of the children of God‖ (Romans 8:21). He gives us our childhood-fulfillment over and over, one tomorrow after another. The pain is undergone in repentance and rebirth as Nicodemus did (John 3:1-2, 7:50, 19:39). We need not be kids or wait till birthdays to celebrate birthdays, yours and everyone else‘s. If today is the beginning of the rest of our life, as every birthday is, and as every kid is, then of course today, every today, is our birthday, and all kids are our birthday angels—in fact, we are all birthday kids and angels, as we are kids of all ages to whom, surprisingly, the Kingdom of God belongs.3 Isn‘t this announcement the biggest of frame-breaking? ―Children‖ are for tomorrow, in tomorrow, and of tomorrow. That is why kids grow up so fast—into tomorrow, to which they belong. Kids are those who live, move, and have their beings in tomorrows, whose God is the God of the ever Fresh Future. We are kids; we cannot help but be kids of tomorrows. We are frame-breakers, breaking the familiar frame and systems of today. Frame-breaking as life describes the Kingdom-as-verb, the growing pain into the glorious liberty of the children of God. 2. Frame-breaking is no chaos-mongering, however. The frame is there to be broken, often with pain of chaos, for the sake of the dawn of Galilee, the New Circle, the Frame never breakable ahead, for ―Galilee‖ means Circle leaking nothing, breaking nothing. Jesus by going ahead of us to Galilee may well symbolize that he is going toward the Circle ahead-ofus, embracing us in tomorrow-circles ever coming at us, one day at a time. His being ahead-of-us is his tomorrow ahead of our today, every today, to turn us into our tomorrow. Tomorrow is out of our hand to break us into us-ahead. Our hand in Jesus‘ hand takes the bread of the frame of today and breaks it, to look forward to cracking the dawn of 3
This saying of Jesus is so surprising that all three Gospels record it almost identically. Matthew 19:14=Mark 10:14=Luke 18:16. Cf. John 3:3 that surprised scholar Nicodemus.
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Galilee ahead tomorrow, to which Jesus, emerged alive out of dead yesterday and today, has gone ahead of us, beckoning us with our forefathers and foremothers ahead of us. Jesus said, ―I will not sup with you till that Day,‖ that glorious Tomorrow forever ahead and unreachable (when tomorrow arrives, it is ―tomorrow‖ no more), yet we keep celebrating the Lord‘s Supper today. We celebrate the tomorrow-Supper by breaking today‘s bread, breaking its ―Last‖ Supper, again and again. Tomorrow breaks into today by breaking today, and tomorrow does not break. We break today toward tomorrow beyond breaking. ―Exciting painful changes are on your way,‖ our today whispers. Our today changes to break today, and breaking is pain. ―Vanity of vanity, all is vanity,‖ for all that exists today breaks in pain toward tomorrow that exists not—yet. Our ―vanity‖ of today changes with the ―winds‖ of tomorrow that we ―grasp‖ today. Our today breaks in vanity to catch the wind of tomorrow, in vain, that blows through today. Catching the winds in vain is pain; catching tomorrow‘s winds today is to go on living ahead now, and being ahead now is tensed, pain. 3. Ancient Heraclitus‘ ―All flows‖ is our science‘s ―evolution‖ today that is science. Our science may not have realized, that it must itself evolve to evolve out of itself, deconstruct itself, breaking its own frame, shifts its paradigm repeatedly, in order to ex-ist, to stand-out of dissipating today. Such self-shift is inherent in science. Science has to be beyond science, into the future. Kuhn did not elaborate on the significance of his discovery that science is 4 paradigm-revolution; Feyeraband did. Science beyond science is our god beyond god, the beyond-now to which we grow. Sadly, however, science has been framing itself in the ―past‖ in causal nexus. Science theorizes and experiments on the premise of ―as in the past, so in the future.‖ It must break that scientific frame of the past into the new ―science of the future.‖ The net of science must be the net of the future, forever casting ahead of itself, forever evolving out of itself. Sciencesense must break into nonsense—wavicle, time-warp—to make sense of itself, only to break into further nonsense, and further, and the process of self-evolution goes on. Evolution is revolutionary nonsense of today. Science is beyond science. 4.‖Frame‖ expresses itself in theoretical systematization, unfit to express tomorrow, as dramatically shown in otherwise refreshing Nicola Abbagnano (b. 1901), a sensitive thinker who seriously devotes himself to the notion of ―possibility.‖ To him, possibility is not Aristotle‘s ―potentiality‖ necessitated in determined actuality, nor is it Avicenna‘s ―contingency‖ that is necessary on account of the other. Even existentialism defeats itself, for it either foredooms human projections to failure, reducing possibility to impossibility (early Heidegger, Sartre, Jaspers), or negates existence by turning human possibilities into potentialities necessarily destined to succeed in the end ever out of reach (Marcel, Lavelle, Le Senne). All thinkers in the West, then, propose ―impossible possibilism,‖ in contrast to Abbagnano‘s radical ―possible possibilism.‖ All this is so refreshing, yet two hesitations remain, on possibility and on actuality. One, this is pure ―possible possibilism‖ cut off from actuality. Nor does it exist, for possibility does not-yet-exist, to wit, does not-exist. Possibility can exist only in relation to actuality that does exist, what actually exists as the projected future or as an envisioned ideal—yet none of it exists now. Possibility does not exist; he catches nothing, in vain. Two, actuality on its part is not just dead determined state of being, but goes on actualizing. Actuality as the end-of-possibility is endless; it is an endless actualizing process. 4 Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (1988), London: Verso, 1993.
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What exists now is infused with what-comes-to-be, the future, and what-ought-to-be, an ideal. Actuality is meaningful only in relation to projected possibility, in the future, in our ideal. Possibility and actuality inter-depend to inter-occur as verbs, in one, yet inter-differing. These two hesitations elude Abbagnano in the heat of controversies; his thinking remains undeveloped as staid ―possible possibilism.‖ As a theoretical thrust, a reasonable vision of actuality, Abbagnano‘s ―possibility‖ opens out a new refreshing horizon to the free future, only sadly to get mired and lost in controversies today with other existing views in the Western arena, to turn into a finished product of a pure theoretical system, without developing further on what that horizon of possibility amounts to. Theoretical thrust eludes logical systematic roundup, as Hegel‘s ―moving logic‖ ended in locking in an immovable system. 5 Worse, sadly, few thinkers in the West even took note of Abbagnano. Is it because he is not dialectical enough to see the unity of opposition between possibility and potentiality or contingency, or perhaps his possibility-nisus to the free future is foreign to the West‘s systematizing penchant? After all, breaking the system-frame is a Western anathema, too 6 painful to take note of. Did Abbagnono take note of the pain of frame-breaking inherent in 7 possibility? What is his philosophy of pain of possibility? 5. ―What is the structure of such frame-breaking quite unstructured, the making of 8 nonsense that makes new sense?‖ It is metaphoring as storytelling. Storytelling is the ―milieu‖ where broken frames thrive together. Story breaks to join. Let me explain. The exciting rub lies in the connection between metaphor and storytelling. ―Metaphor‖ is the creative process of making the strange into the familiar, to make the new Family of family differences. The most radical of differences is enemy, demanding to be turned into the most different of family difference. Incredibly this is precisely what Jesus said (―enemies are your family‖) and did (―Father forgive them (crucifiers), for they know not 9 what they do‖). The Family is the milieu where we live together at home. We simply must take enemies in, to rid of their threat to destroy the family-milieu we need to live in, to live on together. Enmity must be turned into family difference, and the ―turning‖ is painful struggle, as Jesus did in mortal pain on the cross. Now ―milieu‖ is that-family-in-which the I-It and the I-Thou emerge to coexist. Description covers the I-It; invocation conveys the I-Thou. Sadly, Buber who proposed both I-Thou and I-It missed I-Milieu, so he had to put I-animals just below I-Thou (in a twilight zone) and I-God as forever entrenched above I-Thou (the Eternal Thou). They may well be as
5 Abbagnano‘s writings in his Italian language were mostly un-translated into English. I got his ideas from Paul Edwards, ed., The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, NY: The Free Press, 1967, I:1, and Antony Flew, ed., A Dictionary of Philosophy, Revised Second Edition, NY: St. Martin‘s Press, 1979, p. 1. The only volume completely devoted to him to my knowledge is Critical Existentialism by Nicola Abbagnano, tr. and ed. by Nino Langiullo, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969. 6 After all, it is pain to break things. 7 These separative queries are actually incredible in the West that tends to separation—breaking out of itself—since the ancient days of mythical theomachia, men fighting gods, as gods fight gods. 8 I meditated on ―metaphor‖ as an intercultural verb in On Metaphoring: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 2001. Here I take storytelling as one mode of metaphoring. 9 Matthew 10:36, Luke: 23:34. These are incredible sayings.
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he said but the whole picture is thereby blurred. He may not have realized that perhaps both animals and God are in the realm of I-Milieu that makes possible I-It and I-Thou to emerge. ―How is I-Milieu a possibilizing thrust?‖ Here we see the importance of storytelling. Kierkegaard said in his Journals dated ―15 11 April 1834,‖ You always need one more light positively to identify another. Imagine it quite dark and then one point of light appears; you would be quite unable to place it, since no spatial relation can be made out in the dark. Only when one more light appears can you fix the place of the first, in relation to it.
―In relation to it‖ describes a milieu that emerges with telling a story about it, as Kierkegaard just did. Telling a story of two beams of light combines them to let the relationmilieu of meaning emerge where we can ―place‖ one light—one emerging event—―in relation to‖ another. This placing-in-relation is made by storytelling, a ―mythmaking,‖ where we live; our knowing is here. We call it ―paradigm‖; to change myths is a ―paradigm shift.‖ To tell the 12 story of paradigm shift, as Thomas Kuhn and Herbert Butterfield did, tells of the critical change of paradigm-milieus. Here a new milieu is ever on the rise, nothing definite is yet. At the dawning of a new milieu, we ourselves are responsible for its birth, its determination, and its development. It is quite inexcusable to sit back and do nothing but throw an epithet, ―irresponsible relativist,‖ at Kuhn the storyteller of the milieu-shift and the milieu-dawn. Here what we must do is to tell a story; it is what we can do for now, as Kuhn and others did. Storytelling brings out the milieu, the milieu-dawn, in our milieu-responsibility to shape it further by adding to it and changing it, by storytelling. In any case, in the milieu, science describes and religion invokes. To confuse description with invocation is chaotic superstition, for superstition is chaos. ―Storytelling‖ deals with such superstition by combining description with invocation, and combination is not confusion. Story-combination is not superstition that confuses descriptive It with invocative Thou, to imprison metaphor in literalism. In contrast, storytelling moves within metaphor-milieu free from literalism. Combination is a storytelling, a metaphorical means of acknowledging the enemy-milieu to follow along and manage our living. Science, religion, and myths are all stories. How does storytelling push the myths of science and religion? Not accidentally we unravel this implication 5 by describing how Christ made enemies into our Family. Superstition simply identifies It with Thou; metaphor turns hostile-It into family-Thou with pain-struggle. In ancient days, our environs our milieu was often hostile. Our forefathers had to frame this enemy-milieu into their home-Milieu by combining description with invocation, to turn 10 See Martin Buber‘s murky ―Postscript‖ in I and Thou, translated by Ronald Gregor Smith, NY: Charles Scribners, 1958, pp. 121-137. Its later editions in 1986 and 2000 change little of its content. 11 Søren Kierkegaard Papers and Journals: A Selection, translated with introduction and notes by Alastair Hannay, London: Penguin Books, 1996, p. 19. 12 See Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The University of Chicago Press, 1962, 1970, 1996, The Copernican Revolution, Harvard University Press, 1957, 1959, NY: Vintage Books, and Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science, NY: The Free Press, 1957. These volumes are just a drop in the bucket of scholarship claiming the ongoing revolutions in knowledge, following Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Galileo, Copernicus, Einstein, Hawking, etc.
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the enemy-milieu, their myth of hostile cosmogony-cosmology, into a recalcitrant member of our metaphor-family. Christ did so with bloody pain; our forefathers did so in no less pain. Today, ironically, our flexing of technological muscle engulfs us in pain. Metaphor is storyturning in pain, in bloody pain. 6. The above claim amounts to taking all our thinking as storytelling. Our query then is what counts as no-story. The answer is, a sheer brute happening not even recognized as ―fact.‖ A quotation from Kierkegaard a while back is relevant here. To place an unintelligible beam of light in relation to another, and telling such a story, throws an intelligible light to both beams. Doing so brings the no-story brute happenings into a meaningful milieu. Once the story enables us to recognize a happening as a ―fact,‖ it in turn tells a new story of what has-beenmade as fact, for a ―fact‖ means ―what has been made,‖ to acquire a meaning as ―fact,‖ and such meaning makes a new story in turn. The new story may be the same as the first one that enables events to emerge as meaningful, but they differ in significance. The first story is a prospective project; the second is a retrospective history. In any case, where there is awareness there is story-making, which makes for the life-milieu, the milieu for human awareness—of the I-It, or the I-Thou, or both. 7. ―How does a story come about?‖ Let us trace the ―genealogy‖ of storytelling. Someone utters words about something unfamiliar; she then throws her words, familiar ideas, beside that odd object, as a ―parable‖ thrown-beside the unfamiliar. Thus words come about as a parable, to ―co(r)-respond‖ to something in response to its call. When it is something obvious, words describe; when less obvious, words allegorize (as Aesop did); when obscure, words metaphor; and when general, words become a myth. Furthermore, to whom is it ―obvious,‖ ―obscure,‖ or ―general‖? The answer is of course ―to those who hear‖ the words. Words are thus always calling on us to hear and respond. To ―call‖ for response is to ―correspond‖ to describe. Something calling to someone is at the base of description. Description does cor-respond, typical of the It, while the Thou is called forth, to respond. Called forth by something, an It-as-Thou, I cannot help but respond, and inevitably write-down my responses, de-scribe them, and then with my description I call forth 13 a Thou to respond. Thus something out there calls for someone to utter words, for someone else to respond. So, words always invoke, whether in description (something invoking someone to word) or to 14 someone else (words uttered to describe to someone, or to call for response, or both). Sometimes someone uttering and someone else responding can be the same person, and then someone‘s words shape that someone. This shaping often changes the subject, and the change can be pain. 8. What is the ―milieu‖ in which all this occurs? It is the surrounding world as our terms and assumptions of thinking and discourse, the air we breathe and our bones and sinews, our vital structure, to which our daily life supplies meat, skin, and bouncy colors. It is our 13 Maurice Merleau-Ponty marvelously describes this primal proto-scientific process of co-responding in his ―Eye and Mind,‖ The Primacy of Perception, ed. James M. Edie, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964, pp. 159-190. See also my meditation on ―correspondence‖ as ―co-responses‖ in On Metaphoring, op. cit., pp. 74-93. 14 Interestingly, Chinese ―name 名‖ means someone calling by mouth 口 in the darkness of the dusk 夕.
說文解字詁林, 臺北市鼎文書局, 民72, II:1154-1157. Words (names) describe the story of call and response.
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meaning-habitat where we breathe, move, think and communicate; it is our net/nest of storysense built by storytelling. This life-atmosphere is our music when de-scribed sonically to our ears, our poems, pictures, and literature when done visually on paper, our sculpture and architecture when done plastically on a solid. Poems mix music with pictures and literature. Poems musically sculpt days into our dwellings, and sculpture and architecture are our home, our poetic music of pictorial literature. They are all stories told, down-written, of the air we live and breathe, and such storytelling is itself the way we live and ex-ist, stand-out, as human. Not surprisingly, when this milieu is impacted radically by the unfamiliar that continually arises in daily lives, we are existentially ―culture shocked.‖ We call it ―pain.‖
STRUGGLES IN REAL LIFE ―Life is an ocean of pain, for our dream is shattered everyday,‖ we say. Pain came as we look back at the past that accumulates all shattered dreams. The scene changes as we shift our gaze. Eleanor Roosevelt said that the future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams, to turn our backward gaze to a forward look toward dreams. After all, except for a few chronic cynics and pessimists, we live for the future, for dreams and tomorrows often belong together to form an intertwined pair that never dies. Dream and tomorrow are not synonymous, for future for some adults is fear. We nonetheless must live on by looking forward to our ―better tomorrow‖ for which we dream and plan, for planning is dreaming in action. China looks to the glorious past to plan for the future. In China, the golden past is really the golden future. Kids also show us how to do so to live abundantly in fresh laughter playing the tomorrow. For kids, playing is planning in dreaming. Kids are pleasant, often even to themselves, and few adults dislike them, because they are tomorrows with no yesterday. Kids join dreams and tomorrow, to live them here and now. Since dream and tomorrow are not ―here,‖ kids pre-tend, stretch-forth ―now,‖ to play their tomorrow‘s dreams today. They live tomorrow today by pre-tending the future dreams here now, to play life. To pre-tend the future here now is to stretch-forth what is to come into the present, living it here now, playing it; it is life-as-game all kids of all ages play. The heights of adults playing like kids that I experienced are the incredible team of Yehudi Menuhin and Stéphane Grappelli who combine classical elegance with jazz abundance. They, in playful abandon, are ineffably 15 warm, comforting, and relaxing. Let us put it another way. We are surrounded by the horizon, not confining but inviting us to go on ahead. As we go on farther to it, the horizon there recedes, inviting us. It can never be reached. It is there, never here, to keep expanding us here today. Gazing at the horizon over there to keep going,16 we are ―unfinished‖ today, ever on our way. Menuhin was unfinished in his ―todays.‖ Now he is silent today; his today has turned into our today; his ―unfinished‖-then turns into our ―unreachable‖-now. He turns into the horizon 15 Menuhin and Grappelli Play Berlin, Kern, Porter and Rodgers and Hart, EMI, 1988; The Very Best of Grappelli and Menuhin, EMI, 1998; Menuhin and Grappelli Play . . . , EMI, 1999 (Two CD set). 16 The sky vast above is the clear lake in front that recedes as we go in. The sky is the lake that recedes.
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himself, unreachable by us, ever inviting us today; now we are unfinished ourselves, as he silently invites us to expand us. We are unfinished here today ever expanding, thanks to him who is our horizon there surrounding us, ever receding from us unreachable, silently inviting us today. We are surrounded by him our horizon beyond us. We are always in a horizon to set a scene of peculiar scents, hues, senses, all in a peculiar direction. Our horizon is all this scene expanding as we go forward into it; our horizon surrounds us to expand us. At the same time, we can always get out of one horizon and enter another new one. As we switch horizons, we realize we are ever in a milieu in numerous horizons, for us to take a deep breath to soar high this way and that, as we wish. Let us return to kids. Born of parental past, kids have no past, constantly looking up to their parents their past who brought them into the world; they in turn inspire their parents by constantly inquiring about what none has ever thought of before. Kids‘ fresh ignorance renovates the world they have just entered; their whole beings revolutionize the world. 17 That is also Menuhin the kid! No wonder, Tully Potter sighed, Menuhin was brimming over with musicianship, yet he always brought something more than musicianship to his playing. He seemed to express and experience the music with his entire being, so that his performances had an aspiring quality. No wonder they so often ended up being inspiring as well. 18
Menuhin is kid forever, whose ―journey‖ is forever ―unfinished.‖ His entire being performs the musical creativity of yesterdays as the eternal future of tomorrow. Menuhin plays existence in kids‘ spontaneous play of the aspiring future now to inspire us all. Let us repeat. Kids pretend tomorrow and play its dream today in daring joy; they live the games of tomorrow, rejoicing in its dreams. Thus kids are the future, playing its dreams here now, forever existing in joy and in dancing laughter of future dreams fulfilled now. In the meantime, all sages and all religions skillfully urge us adults on, showing us how to persist today in kids‘ persistent dreams of tomorrow, even though our dreams keep being shattered today. Confucius kept going, confessing that he did ―not know ageing about to come‖ (7/19); he is forever young in his world of constant frustrations. ―The Great One is one who loses none of one‘s ‗baby‘s heart,‘‖ says Mencius (4B12). It takes kid‘s persistence to keep our baby-heart. This dream-persistence is kid‘s pain persistently dancing today as tomorrow that conquers adult‘s pain of having dreams shattered. Persistence is repeated here, to tell us to repeat it in actual life. To repeat is to do it every today, to repeat every dawn we undergo. Actually, childhood dawns everyday; it cracks the dawn of every today. We should always carry with us our child in us as ―today‖ grows. As the day of life grows, however, the unlimited dawn often takes on a sinister hue. The unlimited creative possibility grows into a dark bottomless pit of suffering and of struggles in vain to pull us out. In response, we have two thoughts in two stories, here. 17 This is an insert to a CD of Yehudi Menuhin playing Brahms‘ Violin Concerto, Violin Sonata, No. 3, and Hungarian Dances, compiled and digitally remastered in 2004 by EMI‘s ―Great Masters of the Century‖ series. 18 Yehudi Menuhin, Unfinished Journey, NY: Alfred K. Knopf, 1977, and Unfinished Journey: Twenty Years Later, NY: Fromm International, 1999. No one did ―unfinished journey‖ twice; Menuhin is a kid, indeed. Cf. Ruth St. Denis, An Unfinished Life: An Autobiography, NY: Harper and Brothers, 1939. She dances her unfinished life forever.
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One is on suffering in general that seems interminable; another is on co-suffering through charity that seems futile. Both can be a glorious joy if we just let them be. Between the two stories is inserted a little thought on what loving our neighbor could mean. We wonder, though, which is more painful, to undergo pain or to describe it; it is a meta-reflection we can forego for now.
PAIN AND EVIL One of the closest of notions to human psyche and emotion is ―pain.‖ Pain is often taken as synonymous with ―evil‖ to present a challenge to why Creator God as all good and almighty allows pain as evil to exist. But can‘t we see that evil can be illicit pleasure, and every pain is not evil? Pain is known by the heart mortally shot by ―Cupid‘s arrow,‖ parents laboriously raising children, and painstaking effort at improvement, yet no one would dream of accusing Cupid, children, and parental effort, all causing pain, as evil. Evil is not pain; evil is illicit experience, pain or pleasure. Pain itself is multifaceted, multifarious, and multidimensional. Maturity of human life shows in sensitivity to complex shades and sorts of pain, and nothing is more powerful in aiding us here than a good storytelling. Literature shows God as beyond our critique based on pain-as-evil and pleasure-as-good. Stories freely use both pain and pleasure to declare God‘s ―mercy‖ to pass all our understanding, and show that, whatever happens, we can trust Him. 19 ―Though he may slay me, yet will I trust in him.‖ Storytelling is a good access to God all-good and almighty who is mature enough to ―personally deal with pain‖ for us with us. Storytelling is good ―theodicy‖ in defense of the ultimate legitimacy of the combination of goodness and power, precisely in pain. It is precisely pain that shows convincingly, demonstrates beyond our commonsense rationality and validity, the ultimate poignancy of the good, goodwill, and power unified beyond our understanding, to strengthen us. Stories enable us to dare to ―know that all things work together for good to them that love God,‖ that nothing ―shall be able to separate us from 20 the love of God.‖ This does not mean, of course, that storytelling is a cheap pep-talk of moral exhortation. Good storytelling as a good in-depth history presents the pathos, all too unbearable, of things as they are and have been, and happenings as they ―actually transpired.‖ These stories stir us deeply, arouse us into heartfelt judgment, and force us, steer us, into actions that we deem best as a result of such story-arousal. There is pain and there is pain, as previously noted, and illicit pain must differ from licit one. We can and must discern their difference by actually undergoing pain itself, directly or vicariously via storytelling. Perhaps this is one reason why pain is among us, always, everywhere, either to train us into maturity or to goad us to judgment, decision, and action. Pain is the process of our maturity through which the ultimate unity of goodness and power is accomplished, objectively in our undergoing of pain. 19 Job 13:15. This statement is so obscure that every version of the Bible has an ingenious rendering all its own. I suspect that its obscurity came partly from our attachment to pain-as-evil and pleasure-as-good. I followed AV here because it is simple and straight, not shirking its difficulty. 20 Romans 8:28, 39 are unintelligible and reckless unless we discard our hang-ups about pain as evil.
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Pain is a process of dynamic fruition of the ultimate power-goodness unity. In all this, stories are crucial even in our actual undergoing of pain to weave into our awareness some 21 story-coherence, to give us sense and meaning, if not purpose, to our experience. Stories cleanse us, empower us, compose us, and direct us to what is compellingly appropriate. Here is no room for facile suffocating exhortation. Here is only honest reportage, full of passion and compassion, to appeal to our bone marrows, to stir us into action out of depression. Stories are news that stays news, ever fresh and gripping. This pathos in fact-reportage, this good storytelling, shows and brings to pass, through our judgment, decision, and action it arouses, the ultimate goodness-power unity—ever poignantly in pain. We partake of this divine mission through pain—―Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden. . . . Take 22 my pain-yoke upon you . . . and ye shall find . . .‖ rest to our souls in pain, yoking ourselves with the divine to accomplish the divine unity-in-pain of power and love. To see how, we tell stories about it. Telling stories about pain gives us pain—for a while. Then, in painstaking storytelling about pain, somehow our pain disappears, all by itself. That‘s the wonder storytelling works. It is thus that we see ―pleasure‖ in pain. We understand through storytelling how pain ennobles us into joy unspeakable, enabling living on, not why.
WHAT GOODNESS/RIGHTNESS MEANS ―Good‖ and ―evil‖ appeared above in connection with pain. We must consider good and evil before considering pain and pleasure in life. We all desire to be good and behave rightly. What do goodness and rightness mean here? As usual, a story of life can help us consider such important matters of life. Here is one from Confucius‘ Analects:23 The Governor of She said to Confucius, ―In our village there is a man nicknamed ‗Straight Body.‘ When his father stole a sheep, he gave evidence against him.‖ Confucius answered, ―In our village those who are straight are quite different. Fathers cover up for their sons, and sons cover up for their fathers. Straightness is to be found in such behaviour.‖
We are bewildered at taking these behaviors as ―straight 直,‖ but such behaviors do exist that pass as ―right.‖ We could see that the first villager‘s behavior is right intrinsically, in the sense that ―stealing‖ is wrong no matter what. ―Justice‖ judges the behavior as such; it is ―blind‖ to extraneous circumstances. We could then see that the second villager includes the interpersonal relation in considering the right behavior. Being the root of the Five human Relations 五倫,24 the fatherson relation looms crucial as the primary ―right behavior.‖ Thus Mencius (7A35) judged legendary ruler Shun right as, in an imagined case of his father having killed a man, Shun would discard his throne, secretly shoulder his father, flee to the seashore faraway where he 21 See Harold S. Kushner, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, NY: Avon Books, 1981. Viktor E. Frankl, Man‟s Search for Meaning, Boston: Beacon Press, 2006, and many other books by Frankl. These books tell stories of ―meaningless‖ suffering to stir us upward. 22 Matthew 11:28-29. This is the sole passage in all Gospels, no parallel passages in any other. What this textual fact means is another matter for meditation. 23 Analects 13/18. D. C. Lau‘s translation in Confucius: The Analects, London: Penguin Books, 1979, p. 121. 24 Analects, 1/2.
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would live happily, forgetting the empire. In all, the right is of two sorts, intrinsic and interpersonal, and the good is likewise of these two sorts. The two headings, intrinsic and interpersonal, open out quite a panorama of the good/right. The intrinsic good/right has eight varieties. One, the first villager‘s straightness reflects Kant‘s ―universalizability of an act,‖ i.e., an act that is consistently right no matter when. Two, Euthyphro asserts that his behavior of bearing witness against his own father as murderer is right because he follows the Greek gods25; he is intrinsically right on theological ground. Confucius (3/17) also responded to a disciple‘s desire to skip sacrifice, ―O Ssu, you love the sheep; I love the rite.‖ Three, the intrinsic good is felt so, says Hume,26 in our core. Four, it is Plato‘s ―health‖ in harmony,27 a ―virtue ethics.‖ Five, felt goodness is Confucius‘ self-truthfulness (chung 忠) or human authenticity (jen 仁). Six, it is Taoists Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu embodying Tao of nature, to be natural, self-so 自然. Seven, it is Mill‘s ―high pleasure‖ for which happiness is calculated; ―better to be Socrates dissatisfied than pig satisfied.‖28 Eight, Aristotle‘s right act balances bounties (distributive justice), redresses damages (retributive justice), to Golden Mean.29 All these are variety of ―intrinsic good/right. Now, we note that both Mill‘s dignity in calculation of happiness and Aristotle‘s consideration of restoration of justice border on interpersonal goodness/rightness. Mill‘s maximization of happiness of the most people30 can be seen as calculation in interpersonal dealings for happiness, and we see it to originate in the maximization of our intrinsic satisfaction. Confucius‘ ―humanity, jen 仁‖ is also the humane31 best of interpersonal reciprocity 恕. This is where his other virtues originate, such as rightness 義 and fidelity 信 that are interpersonal.32 Thus, we see how interpersonal goodness/rightness includes the intrinsic one, to naturally flow into the interpersonal one. The intrinsic good/right has an abiding aspect and a dynamic aspect, and both inter-involve, composing human nature. This is what is noble and tragic in humanity, for the abiding easily slips into immobility, and the dynamic can quickly turn irritating, and then interpersonal interaction turns pain.33 Now we are ready to continue to consider pain in general.
25 Plato‘s Dialogue of Euthyphro. 26 David Hume, An Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1752). 27 Plato‘s Republic. 28 John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (1863). 29 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics. 30 ―The greatest number of people‖ is not a simple majority that stays as such, but a progressive maximization of the number of people until the greatest happiness for everyone is reached. 31 ―Chung 忠‖ can also mean both fidelity to the self and loyalty to others. 32 This is why, when told by Confucius to thread his Tao into One, Tseng Tzu responded with faithfulness to the self 忠 and reciprocity to others 恕 (4/15). 33 Victor Hugo‘s Les Miserables (1862) is a dramatic case in point. The now-converted criminal Jean Valjean had to contend tragically long with the police inspector Javert so inflexibly loyal to the letters of the law. We will consider later the struggle between heresy and orthodoxy called ―democracy.‖
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PLEASURE-PAIN INVOLVEMENT We instinctively shrink from pain in unthinking reflex to pursue pleasure. So, following our instinct, Buddhism came to stamp out pain as bad, and utilitarianism declares that pleasure is good and pain bad, that producing the most happiness for the most people is the right thing to do. Nothing is farther from the truth in all of this. Actual stories tell us why. The Cupid‘s arrow shoots at the heart, causing pain to make love tender and true; no pain, no love. Exploiting the minority to produce most happiness for most people is wrong. To have bad people suffer is right; to have them prosper in pleasure is wrong. Bribery makes both briber and bribed happy, yet they are both bad. If the good suffer and the bad prosper as much as the good prosper and the bad suffer, the first set would upset us and the second satisfy us if not please us. All this shows how ―pain vs. pleasure‖ is irrelevant to ―good vs. bad.‖ All this shows that neither pain itself is bad nor pleasure itself is good. Pain is a fact of life, so is pleasure, and that is that; there is no ―problem of pain‖ that Buddhism, C. S. Lewis,34 and many others tackled. The whole problem of theodicy (why all-loving almighty God allows pain) and the Buddhist vision of life (how to get out of life an ocean of pain) are misplaced and misguided. Pain requires sensitive storytelling to bring out its crucial essential point, negative, positive, and factual. Les Miserables is a great story for this reason; it should have been titled, ―The Poignant.‖ We would not be surprised if Victor Hugo was inspired to write this fiction by the Bible that is immersed in pain, but the Christian Bible‘s relation to pain is much more complex than the Buddhist scriptures that are no less dipped in pain. Buddhism simply wants to dissolve pain, while the Bible uses pain to redeem the world. We see how the Bible, the book of stories, tells stories of how pain, quite unpleasant, is used by God for many purposes. Asked, ―Master, who did sin, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?‖ Jesus answered, ―Neither . . . but that the works of God should be manifested in him.‖ ―Suppose ye that these Galileans were sinners . . . because they suffered such things? I tell you, Nay: but except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.‖ 35 Pain is unrelated to evil or to God; God uses it as a means to manifest himself as creative mercy, as warning justice. This point has two implications. One, it is God who uses pain, and pain is not automatically evil. Two, since God who is just love uses pain, we can be sure that we are in Good Hand. Pain is not evil but has a purpose beyond our comprehension, and is often used as a means to manifest Mercy in Justice. Such is a twofold theme in so many stories of the Bible that is the storybook of life. The stories of Joel and Amos, to cite just two gems in the Bible, clearly bear out this twofold point. Everyday is coming as the holy Day of the Lord, so frightening in his Justice, so gratifying in his Mercy. Gratifying fright is too much for us humans, so we instinctively prostrate in awe before the Day of the Lord. No wonder Jesus ingeniously proclaimed, ―Blessed are you who are poor, hungry, weeping, hated, excluded, reviled, and defamed for me. Rejoice!‖36 You are in God‘s hand 34 C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (1940), HarperSanFrancisco, 1996. 35 John 9:2-3, Luke 13:2-3. 36 Luke 6:20-23 (NRSV), adapted.
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when you are in pain! Jesus draws the delightful aspect of the awesome Day of the Lord, precisely when we are in pain we do not like. Let us ask, however. Why all this pain? What does all this mean? Perhaps pain has much to do with our yearning for homecoming. We all need home; nothing is more painful than getting lost. How dreadful it is to lose even the spot on which we rest our soles! A culture shock it is, dizzy, reeling, and nauseous, to be exiled from our familiar home; our fear of life lost in death breeds a quest of immortality that we instinctively know is nowhere. Thus we all go home to the Soil when we die (as in primal, Shinto and Buddhist faiths) or search of our roots in ancestral history. The Lord is Christian Home; the Day of the Lord is the House of God. We can tout our freedom only because we are convinced of our home, whether in us (thinking we can create home by our freedom) or in our parents (kids shaking off parental hands to wander out, assured instinctively of their presence). We yet could, however, wander homeless at home, in nightmare or in depression.37 All this struggle of ours is in unconscious response to the Lord who keeps looking for us by sending us pain to goad us back home, as the disastrous Day of the Lord. That is the Gospel of Suffering (Kierkegaard), the pain as our homing (as Joel and Amos shout). How terrifying, and how blessed, it is to fall in the Hand of God our Home! So the world turns upside down (Acts 17:6) when the Lord is our Home that ―goes out‖ as our Shepherd and our Lady who pursue us, until He and She find us in woes as a lost sheep, a lost coin, a lost prodigal son, and a lost angry older son. Our Father ―comes out‖ to persuade us into the feast with sinners. Luke 15 is indeed our Gospel of Suffering of Home coming after us, to turn our everyday into the Day of our Lord, in unspeakable woes and in ineffable weal. Lao Tzu intoned (58), ―O woe where weal leans! O weal where woe hides!‖ For Jesus they are the same, woe and weal, for one is in the other, forever beckoning us home.
A FIG TREE, JOB, AND CHUANG TZU: TO SUFFER AND TO ENJOY ―How do we find our suffering way home? How do we suffer with other religious people?‖ OK, here is one way to combine many religions to suffer with gusto, in four ways. (a) Jesus scolded a fig tree to show that persons are wrong, ―out of season‖ or in. (b) Disasters made Job realize he was under God, to become godly and good. (c) Genuine humans live and die happily ever after, in season, out of season, says Chuang Tzu. (d) Such is ―religion‖ as shown in these three tough cases. 38 (a) To begin, let us consider perhaps the least favored of Jesus‘ stories. On the way to Jerusalem, Jesus was hungry and went to a lush fig tree for fruit. Finding none, being out of season, Jesus said, ―No man eats fruit of thee hereafter for ever.‖ The next day they found it withered. We often take it as his ―acted parable‖ warning us not to be lush outside without 39 solid ―fruit‖ of the Holy Spirit. The tree, however, could not have borne fruit out of season, and it is unjust to make the tree wither because it does not bear fruit out of season. This interpretation does not fit. 37 And God would come to look for us as his lost sheep, lost coins, and lost children (Luke 15). 38 Mark 11:12-14 and 20-21. 39 See, e.g., The Interpreter‟s Bible, NY: Abingdon Press, 1951, VII: 828.
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We on our part have four simple responses. One, a fig tree out of season satisfies no hunger; a seasonal believer, as fair-weather friend, is a fake satisfying no one. Storms train steady stamina and fidelity in all seasons. Personal character is shaped in failures and disasters; we should bear human ―fruit‖ precisely ―out of season‖ (2 Timothy 4:2). ―Though he slays me, yet will I trust him‖ (Job 13:15). Two, being fruitless with lush leaves is deadly Pharisaism. Jesus said (Luke 18:11-14), The Pharisee . . . prayed thus with himself, ‗God, I thank You that I am not like other men—extortioners, unjust, adulterers . . . I fast twice a week; I give tithes . . .‘ And the tax collector, standing afar off, would not so much as raise his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‗God be merciful to me a sinner!‘ I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other.
The Pharisee is not ―justified.‖ Outer good shows lack of inner good, in season or out of season; decent acts touted instigate other‘s contempt and contempt of others. It reveals an 40 existential lie, a duplicitous person, showing ―white-washed tombs‖ that deserves death as it already is. This is why Jesus acted out this fig tree parable to show us the gravity of not bearing fruit of the Spirit, in season or out. Three, we say, ―Poor fig tree! What did you do to that tree, Jesus?‖ and note that Jesus then went into holy pharisaic Jerusalem to be ―cursed on the tree‖ as the dead fig tree was, to bear our death. He bore the curse of the fig tree cursed by him. His curse was an act of responsible love. Our question remains as to why Jesus cursed, however, for he must have had good reason for its curse. The next point is what we have found. (b) Four, good people can so easily turn so bad, for they often confuse pain with evil. We 41 all dislike pain, but our dislike does not make it evil. Let us repeat. Pain is one thing, while 42 evil is quite another. Pain becomes evil (Luke 13:3) or good (John 9:3), depending on how we relate to Jesus to relate to pain. Pain can be good for us, and good people can commit evil painlessly. Some concrete cases explain this unsuspected fact. 43 A well-behaved person can so easily despise others as beneath his decency. Contempt is evil, coming from ―judging‖ others. ―Evil‖ appears by judgment, which belongs to God. To judge ―pain‖ as evil plays God as Job did, another good man, to violate the First Commandment, the human presuming the divine, the hubris condemned even in ancient Greece. To regard pain as evil is the prime crime against God.
40 Matthew 23:27. The whole chapter poignantly describes in tears this tomb; Jesus died for it. 41 A basic muddle of utilitarianism is to equate pain-vs.-pleasure with evil-vs.-good. Aristotle perhaps originated the muddle when he said that everyone wants happiness, even though he separated happiness from pleasure. The damage is done. Common sense is sometimes risky. 42 Both are stories. In Luke‘s story Jesus tells us, pain as punishment cannot be used to judge retrospectively, much less to judge others, and such equation and judgment are themselves sin that invites disaster and deserves repentance. Job‘s friends poignantly represent this situation. Instead, John‘s story tells us what we ought to do, to take action as Jesus does for the victim. 43 Lazarus‘ story (Luke 16:19-31) shows that pleasure can easily turns hellish evil. That nameless rich man‘s (for we have so many!) daily meal in simple disregard of poor suffering Lazarus sent the rich man to hell. No wonder Jesus wails over the risks of being satisfied in life (Luke 6:24-26).
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To realize this simple point must have shaken Job, who was a righteous man, as admitted even by the devil. Pain led him to question with his unblemished good the ―justice‖ of leaving good people in pain. It is a ―good question‖ that yet exposes his need to become a really godly man. How is his need satisfied? Let us see how the whole event transpired. Struck by one terrible disaster after another, Job was driven to question God on the justice of the whole setup, the world. In his question, Job himself stayed unmoved. His ―friends‖ talking with him so incensed his frustration; he finally vowed to stake his whole existence on this ―good question.‖ Everyone was silenced. And then God as the Creator comes to question Job‘s manner of questioning-on-his-pain. Job then saw the terrible disasters that bashed him were in fact God the Beyond bashing Job to shake him at the foundation, and must have compelled him to realize that pain consists not just in disasters that are after all parts of human lot, as Buddha realized. What made Job suffer was instead the ―injustice‖ of undeserved pain good people are made to suffer. God now made Job to reflect on the assumption behind his question. Job perceived ―injustice‖ because Job (and his friends) assumed that no good people should suffer, any time, anywhere. Such ultimate question and assumption are beyond us humans to entertain; they properly belong to God who alone can ask Job‘s sort of question. Since Job did not create the world, Job is no God, and his asking amounts to playing God, a sin of the greatest dimension of the First Commandment. Disaster shakes Job out of his sin of ultimate seriousness. 45 Some people told Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. . . . Jesus answered . . . , ―Do you suppose that these Galileans were worse sinners than all other Galileans, because they suffered such things? I tell you, no; but unless you repent you will all likewise perish.‖
To callously judge others as they did amounts to playing God; they must ―repent‖ of playing God. It is disastrously easy to callously judge others in pain, especially when one is good, in pain or in no pain. Job the good man was driven by pain to play God with ―being 46 good.‖ God challenged good Job in his ―good question‖ to realize his prime sin, shaking Job at his foundation. The shaking humbled Job to realize his proper place, being human before God. God accepted this realization, and God‘s acceptance proved to be blessings from Beyond, ―living 47 doubly happily ever after,‖ to conclude the Book of Job. Later,
44 Sadly, arguments both for and against God usually miss this evil-pain distinction. Even the recent Rethinking Evil: Contemporary Perspectives, edited by María Pía Lara, Berkeley: University of California, 2001, tends to assume suffering as closely connected with evil, if not a measure of evil. 45 Luke 18:9-14, 13:1-3. (NKJV) 46 Thus all debates, pros and cons, about God, philosophical or otherwise, deserve God‘s challenge. All such debates redound to debaters themselves who are no God debating on God, who is Beyond arguing that is a logical absurdity and religious blasphemy. 47 Such existential approach seems the only coherence in Job. Otherwise, propositionally, big Creator simply bullies Job into silence, bypassing Job‘s good question. All explanations Marvin H. Pope sums up (Job, Anchor Bible, 1973, pp. lxxiii-lxxxiv) tackled this enigma in vain.
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―This man‖ was also Job; ―the works of God‖ were ―revealed in him.‖ The revelation here opens his eyes to twofold happiness—being godly to turn being good, to later devastatingly rebut those in authority, to earn excommunication, and then to happily meeting/worshipping Jesus the God, his God. Now, we round up the matter before we go on. ―Questioning God‖ can be of three sorts. We can question God with our closed mind, refusing to believe in God in virulent atheism; we can sincerely open to God in quest of him; and we can be angry, arguing with God against divine injustice. ―Belief in God‖ inherently includes the latter two sorts of questioning God, so that we grow; cutting questioning closes us and chokes up our growth. Fundamentalism joins atheism here. Job was in the third sort of questioning God, arguing angrily with God against injustice done him. God so loved Job‘s sincere anger as to show him two things. One, our questioning God must not question as God, for questioning God as God would do is a prime crime against God; piety strangely tends to share it with atheism. Two, pain is not evil. Both points metaanswered Job to dislocate his frame on which his questioning was couched. Now Job was happy, symbolized as ―restoration to former prosperity doubled,‖ for he was now happily pious as before, with the knowledge he had not before. (c) This ―happiness‖ comes with obeying the command, ―Judge not, that ye be not judged.‖ Judging disasters plays God and worsens pain. No judging can make us realize 49 ―Blessed are ye who hunger and weep.‖ Would people be happy as they suffer themselves 50 to death? Still, is there any positive blessed happiness in pain? 51 Chuang Tzu of ancient China would smile in his stories as these. Messrs Oblation, Carriage, Plow and Come talked to one another, ―Whoever takes nothing as his head, life as his spine, and death as his buttocks, whoever knows dying, living, existing, and perishing as one body? I will be friend with him.‖ The four mutually looked and smiled. Nothing was against their hearts-of-being, so they became friends. All too soon, Mr. Carriage fell ill. . . . Mr. Oblation asked, ―Do you hate it?‖ He said, ―No! Why should I? Soon (it) changes my left arm into a rooster, and I will seek (during) night-hours (to crow). Soon (it) changes my right arm into a pellet, and I will seek an owl to roast. Soon (it) changes my buttocks into wheels, and with my spirit I will ride it; why (then) need I change a carriage? Besides, to gain is timely, to lose is to follow; dwell in time, stay following, and no grief or joy can enter. This is what the ancient called ‗bonds loosened.‘ . . . Why should I hate it?‖ All too soon, Mr. Come fell ill, gasping, dying. His wife and children circled him and wept. Mr. Plow who went to visit him said, ―Shoo! Out! Don‘t startle change!‖ Leaning on the 48 John 9:1-3. (NKJV) 49 Luke 6:37, 21. 50 We have been relentlessly pursuing Job‘s problem because the problem is most poignant in the Judeo-Christian context. We are now to quest for ―happiness‖ in pain, and Taoism answers this question clearly, together with Frankl‘s pursuit of ―meaning‖ (Viktor Frankl, Man‟s Search for Meaning, Boston: Beacon Press, 2006). 51 Chuang Tzu 6/45-60; I tried to bring out the vigorous original. Paul also thought about not objecting to our Creator in Romans 9:19-21. Paul (not Chuang Tzu) has God as Love, but did not think (as Chuang Tzu did) on how we ourselves should behave—joyously—under the almighty Creator.
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door, he talked to him, ―Great! Change molds! What will you make next? Where are you going? Will you make a rat liver? A bug‘s leg?‖ Mr. Come said, ―A child under parents goes anywhere, only at their bidding. The Yin and Yang to us are not less than our parents. If they bring me near death and I do not listen, then I defy. What blame is there in them? Huge Clod loads me with a figure, labors me with life, eases me with age, and rests me with death. So what ‗goods‘ life is why it ‗goods‘ death. Now if as a great smith casts metal, it jumps and says, ‗I must become an Excalibur!‘ then the smith must think the metal inauspicious. If one who chanced to be shaped a man insists ―Just a man, just a man!‖, then Change the Molder must think him inauspicious. If the heaven and earth are a great forge, the Molder-Change a great Smith, where could I go and not be all right?‖
How ebullient is such looking forward to self-journey after death under Heaven! Truly 52 this is ultimate happiness without happiness, ―wu wei,‖ doing nothing adverse to life under 53 Heaven. Storing all under heaven under all-under-heaven, and nothing gets lost, even after my death. Job‘s agonizing questioning proved to be a blessed one, after all. Pain challenged him to 54 question all his what and his how. His questioning confirmed his freedom to question, so as for the Beyond to challenge him, to reshape him to live happily ever after in piety, even unjustly suffering pain. Divine disasters challenged Job, exposed Job‘s ―good question‖ as beyond human, and cleansed Job of his supreme sin of playing god into piety—all in one sweep of pain, physical (disaster) and mental (questioning). Now, after this Job-detour, ―why Jesus cursed the fig tree‖ may be seen to be beyond our human ken to ask. If Job‘s personal problem of the ―injustice‖ of someone good suffering undeserved disaster cannot be asked, much less can the question of ―injustice‖ of cursing the fig tree for not bearing fruit out of its season, especially when sinless Jesus was ―unjustly‖ cursed on the tree to redeem us. (d) Now, this basis-shaking shaping Event is ―religion.‖ Religion is not simply the Beyond—that would be a view called ―deism‖—but the active Beyond that makes me to suffer to shake and shape me. ―Blessed are ye who are poor, who weep and hunger,‖ Christ 55 said, and suffers with me, for me. My fruit may well be the Taoist‘s ―wu wei 無為,‖ that is, doing nothing so nothing interferes, nothing not done (wu pu wei 無不為), being happily fit and worldly, inside and out, dead or alive, in season or out of season, fig-tree cursing or no. Chinese people love negatives for an emphatic affirmation. Put positively, ―doing nothing‖ is ―The Way to do as simply to be, listening to myself and to myriad all, accepting all,‖ and then ―I find myself adequate in things everyday,‖ which positively expresses 56 ―nothing not done,‖ i.e., everything as they are, accepted and freely moved in and out. No wonder, Jesus seeks fruit hidden in a lush fig tree out of season. We must bear fruit as Job did in trying times, and be grateful always to spread such Good News in season or out
52 Chuang Tzu 18/11. 53 Chuang Tzu 6/26. 54 God did not curse or condemn Job. 55 Luke 6:21, compressed. 56 I freely combined Carl R. Rogers‘ statements (On Becoming A Person, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1961, pp. 164, 17). He claimed the first statement to be Lao Tzu‘s who actually did not say it verbatim, though he does convey Lao Tzu‘s sentiment.
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(Paul). Religion is the business of realizing oneself under the Beyond to be godly-―good‖ as Job, enjoying living/dying with Chuang Tzu, in such fruitful living, in season and out of season, as Jesus taught us with that fig tree. Job, Jesus, and Chuang Tzu would also agree with audacious fix-all psychotherapy spun 58 out of our common sense, and embrace its audacity with religious depths and its tender heights. Thus it is time to turn from religions fighting to religions-together healing suffering from good-and-bad. In pain, we are all blessed by religions; here the Christian faith and nonChristian religions shake hands, that is, stand ―apart to join‖ hands. With ―pain,‖ we depart from inclusive view (Tillich), exclusive view (Barth), and pluralist view (Hick) of religions.
“LOVE THY NEIGHBOR AS THYSELF” Having considered pain that just comes, we now consider pain that comes by loving the needy and enemies, but we must first consider loving people in general, altruism, i.e., otherism, of two types: one based on oneself and one on no-self. Self-ed love has three aspects, love as oneself those close to me, to spread worldwide. Mencius‘ love is out of unbearable sensitivity 不忍人之心 to those in pain, Jesus loves neighbor-close-to-me in visceral pain (splagchnizomai), and Mo Tzu jointly inter-loves 兼相愛 in exchanges of inter-benefit 59 交相利 toward worldwide benefit 興天下之利. These three aspects shared by Mencius, Jesus, and Mo Tzu are of course inter-involved. All three begin other-love with oneself, unbearable sensitivity (Mencius), love as oneself in visceral pain (Jesus), doing others from doing oneself 為彼者由為已, loving people as loving oneself 愛人若愛其身 (Mo Tzu). Jesus‘ loving neighbor as closest-to-me, as someone I meet, joins Mencius‘ release of a species-distant ox that one meets to loving one‘s closest old folks to reach others‘. Mo Tzu spreads them to inter-benefit the world, stressing with Mencius that 60 the spread is so ―easy.‖ In contrast, altruism based on no-self uniquely manifests Buddhist ―sad tender pity (karuna, 慈悲)‖ on all people of the mundane world still stuck in the illusion of the self, hopelessly self-obsessed. Buddhist altruism is not love, not passion but com-passionate pity out of vacuity, on all people without distinction. Such pity co-suffers in com-passion with people suffering—without itself suffering. All is vanity vacuous, serene joy of no joy. 61 Hospitality flows out of pity of all. Such love-in-general called ―hospitality‖ has been a responsibility agreed to among all people since ancient days, Buddhists included. Odyssey is full of stories about those who thrived by extending hospitality to strangers in need and those who perished by refusing 57 Mark 11:12-14, Ephesians 5:20, 2 Timothy 4:2. These are all difficult passages. So far, what we did seems to be their only feasible explanation that makes sense of them all. 58 Cf. Richard Carlson, You Can Be Happy No Matter What, Novato, CA: New World Library, 1997. 59 Mencius 1A1-7, Matthew 9:36, 14:14, 15:32, 20:34, Mark 1:41, 6:34, 8:2, 9:22, Luke 7:13, 10:33, 15:20. Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. G. Friedrich, Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1971, ―spagchnon, etc.,‖ VII:548-559. 墨子，臺北市三民書局，民85, 兼愛上，中，下，pp. 88-113. 60 Mencius‘ stress on ―how easy the spread is‖ is in 1A1-7. Mo Tzu stressed it in 兼愛下. Oddly, Mencius attacked Mo Tzu who agreed with him. In any case, how the world discarded such ―easy‖ altruism for ―difficult‖ intercruel aggression is a mystery of human akrasia we will consider soon. 61 All this is my interpretation of Buddhist ―pity‖-love, awaiting confirmation.
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hospitality. The Old Testament is equally intent on hospitality to anyone; Abraham and Lot 62 entertained angels unawares when they extended their hospitalities to wearied travelers. Whoever and whatever they are, all travelers who are wearied deserve our hospitality. 63 Here we consider the problems of what such ―indiscriminately‖ loving people means, 64 and why we must so love. Jesus‘ famous injunction, ―Love thy neighbor as thyself,‖ has at least two different interrelated senses. One is a popular interpretation, ―to love others as youlove-yourself,‖ implying that you must love yourself first before you can love your neighbor. After all, how could you love others without first loving yourself? This interpretation distinguishes other and separates neighbor—from yourself. Another interpretation is obvious but unsuspected. It is ―to love your neighbor-asyourself.‖ Your neighbor is yourself expressed in your caring for him in need, as the good Samaritan did, as a teacher cares for her students, one by one, as a leader cares for her people, one by one, as counselor helps her clients help themselves. You find your neighbor by loving and helping whoever is in need, one by one. The latter interpretation fits better with the ―neighbor plēsion‖ that literally means anyone 65 66 close to me, as ―neighbor‖ is one ―nigh‖ I meet. Nothing is more natural than loving 67 neighbor-as-myself, for my neighbor is one closest to me, myself, and nothing is more natural than loving myself as myself. This injunction, seemingly so tautological, surprises us by making four points. One, loving my neighbor as myself produces a miracle: if anyone closest to me is myself, then I am as many as my neighbors! Two, this point says my neighbor may be so many, yet he is one who is closest to me. So my neighbor is one and many, both at once. That is, as I go on paying my special attention to this my neighbor, my neighbor expands, with you doing likewise, and with him, and with her, doing likewise. Three, if our neighbor, the one closest to us, comes and goes, we understand Jesus our neighbor saying, ―Me ye have not always,‖ though we have the poor always (John 12:8). 62 Genesis 18, Genesis 19, Hebrews 13:2. 63 This was supposedly Mo Tzu‘s ―兼相愛 joint inter-love‖ that Mencius condemned oddly vehemently. 64 From here on, we focus on Jesus, obviously because he has more problems than any other, so he has been more thoroughly discussed, thus resolving problems clustered around him would resolve most if not all of problems clustered around others. As for Buddhist pity-altruism, it has a not-so-secret escape hatch, a black hole of vacuity that sucks all problems away; the pity-altruism has the least problems, and the most, for if all is empty, pity or no-pity matters little, and injunction to pity everyone is rendered senseless; why can we not kill everyone, instead? 65 Luke 10:31 (cf. Exodus 32:27). Joseph H. Thayer, Thayer‟s Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament (1896), Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1997, pp. 518-519, William F. Arndt and F. Wilbur Gingrich, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, etc., The University of Chicago Press, 1957, p. 678, Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon (1843), Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996, p. 1420, Gerhard Friedrich, ed., Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (1968), Grand rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1979, VI:311-318. 66 A sad point in Lazarus‘ story (Luke 16:19-31) is that a nameless rich man‘s (for we have so many!) daily meal in simple disregard of poor suffering Lazarus (less than a dog‘s regard), right there under the rich man‘s table, sent the rich man to hell. Clearly Lazarus (literally, the man ―without help‖) was the rich man‘s neighbor whom the rich man did not love, much less love Lazarus as himself. Poor rich man did not realize that Lazarus could have sent him to heaven instead of hell. 67 Someone may object that ―closest‖ is not ―identical,‖ and so someone closest is not oneself. This objection misses a strange constitution of the human self as self-reflective, self-distanced, and self-objective, not like other species that are solely self-identical. Only humans love themselves, sticks or stones don‘t; animals ―love themselves‖ instinctively, i.e., self-reflexively, not self-reflectively. Among us humans, oneself is another, and so my closest other, my neighbor, is myself.
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Four, this point fits Jesus saying, ―Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren (whose needs come and go), ye have done it unto me.‖ Those close to me are Jesus‘ brothers under the same Father in Heaven. This saying chimes in with ―All within the Four Seas are brothers,‖ my ―t‘ung pao 同胞 (fellowmen)‖ from the ―same Womb‖ (as I), ―the Gate of the Mysterious Female, the Root of heaven and 68 earth.‖ That is the closest I can go to ―neighbor‖ the-one-close to me. All in all, this latter interpretation of the neighbor as someone close to you thus differs 69 from the former interpretation where your neighbor differs from yourself. These two interpretations differ; each spins out its own stories of caring. How they are related, that is, how my neighbor is both different from me and close to me as I am to myself, is not a logical curiosity, yet ―what the relation amounts to‖ is beyond our understanding. We only know that the relation originates and reflects self-reflexivity such as dressing oneself, talking to oneself, examining oneself, shaping oneself, being self-conscious, being proud or ashamed of oneself, and so on. I am me while I differ from me; I am my other. This is the glory and mystery of my self as human, and often misery, as will be shown below. This completes our story of what loving people means, and why we should love. We now apply our understanding to loving our enemies, contra capital punishment, and bottomless charity, to finish with global ethics. All this expands myself-as-another, human reflexivity that inevitably spreads throughout Heaven and Earth. Is this spread bliss or blight? It is both, we would sadly confess, and we would not solve this problem but simply, innocently tell all such stories in the following section.
THE BIBLE AS STORIES OF LOVING THE ENEMY Loving neighbor expands to painful struggle to love enemy. At the time, as any time in history, when violent hatred is all over among Arabs and Jews, Muslims and Westerners, ―loving enemies‖ is ominously relevant but impossible, for ―enemy‖ means someone to hate and destroy, and Jesus tells us to love those who want to kill us, those we (should) hate, to love those not-to-be-loved. Such a shocker, logical and psychological, must have some hidden truths. Thanks to storytelling of the Bible, we see ten elaborations on two logical points. The two logical points are that loving enemy extends the Two Great Commandments, and that loving enemy is divine, not human. Here are ten inter-involved elaborations on these two points. One, however contradictory as the injunction to love enemy seems, it is a natural logical extension of the second Great Commandment, ―love your neighbor as yourself.‖ ―Neighbor‖ is someone ―close to me,‖ my enemy is one close enough to hate, so I should love my enemy as myself. No wonder Jesus overhauled our commonsense, ―love your neighbor, hate your enemy,‖ to extend his commandment. His ―love your enemies, bless them who curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you,‖ climaxed his Sermon on the Mount. He put such incredible love as the highest act of the children of our Heavenly Father, 68 Matthew 15:40, Analects 12/5, ―東方朔傳‖ in 漢書 (history of Han), Tao Te Ching, 6. 69 Does a person differ from oneself? Yes and No. To be human is to be both identical to and different from oneself. A person is same different.
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naturally extended from the obligation to love Him with all our hearts, minds, and souls (Matthew 5:43-47). Two, the saying still remains humanly incomprehensible and impossible, however high it is placed to climax his Sermon-Story on the Mount to ―be perfect as your Father in heaven is.‖ Jesus must then be urging us to go beyond the human to become ―perfect as our Father in heaven.‖ On our human level, ―enemy‖ is the one to hate and destroy. In the trans-human realm, enemy deserves our love ―as God loves him‖; we hate our enemy but we should love him as God does him. We are in God‘s realm when we love our enemy. Ten points explicate both points here. (1) A formal solution is to put quotation marks around ―enemy.‖ The phrase is now ―loving my ‗enemy‘,‖ loving the so-called ―enemy‖ who is really my brother, my fellow beloved creation of God. It shows how ―God‖ makes us go beyond human relations. The problem remains as to what this formal solution, if valid, really means, and how to put it into human practice. Romans 5:10 comes to help us, ―when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son.‖ We are ―forgiven sinners (=enemies)‖ accepted into God‘s family by Christ‘s death in love of us. We as God‘s accepted enemies must now also forgive and accept our enemies as our beloved brethren—through Christ‘s death in love of them and us. So, Matthew 5 is Romans 5. ―Loving enemy‖ stands between the law and the Gospel. Jesus‘ Gospel ―fulfills‖ the law (justice to enemy) by going beyond it (love to enemy). We grow in Grace beyond becoming moral to fulfill morals, for loving enemy results in moral behaviors, to express how we ―become as perfect as your Father in Heaven,‖ as Jesus expressed it on His Cross. In Jesus we bear our cross of loving our enemies to be ambassadors of his Reconciliation to them. Thus the Gospel remains contradictory as ―loving enemy‖ and ―forgiven sinners‖ are. Growth in grace is not growth in morals but in loving my enemies. Its contradiction is dissolved (not solved) in God‘s infinitely intense love of his creation, however hostile it is to God, ―for God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.‖ Christ enables us to fulfill this humanly impossible mission of Reconciliation, loving our enemies. However familiar the above may sound, (i) Jesus and Paul now join, and (ii) Paul‘s declaration of God‘s love now appears as painfully paradoxical as loving our enemy is to our human reason. Our mission of divine Reconciliation is our superhuman task to love our enemies, enabled only by Christ who performs it himself. In short, we have seen how much beyond our logic of law/morality God the Beyond is, practicing and enabling us to practice the contradictory ―love of enemies‖ that fulfills God‘s Love beyond our comprehension. God is indeed the God beyond our best gods of logic/morals. This pilgrimage sees the coherence among various story-notions—loving enemies, God‘s love of sinners in Jesus‘ death, law and Gospel, ambassador for Christ, and Jesus and Paul. Such is our formal understanding of this shocker of Jesus. Now we must consider its concrete content. 70 (2) What does ―loving‖ enemy concretely say? Jesus‘ story tells us that love is actions, bless, do good, pray for. We don‘t feel favorably before acting favorably; we just care for that ―stinker‖ we could not care less, and then we may come to care about him. Our acts of loving enemy destroy enmity to change enemy into our friend. We remain incredulous, ―Are you 70 Matthew 5:44.
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kidding? Look at what he did to me!‖ This love of enemy is not human; humans cannot do so. This is God‟s behavior. (3) We read again, and see that the Story-Sermon on the Mount is full of negatives (mourn, hungry, persecuted, break the law, angry, lust, divorce, swear not) to lead up to this positive climax of loving our enemy to be ―like our Father in Heaven.‖ We now realize that being merciful, peacemaking, meek, salt, light, and law-fulfilling, and these negatives, are all stories that describe loving our enemy. So, importantly, by loving our enemy as God loves him (not as we do), we partake of being divine. To hate is human, to love, divine, and we turn divine by human cares. In our human caring of enemies we turn divine, become as perfect as our Father. We call this the fruit of the Holy Spirit—to love the enemy, even on the cross. We shoulder the cross and 71 follow Jesus as we love our enemy. No wonder, we shudder at the enormity. (4) (a) Practicing loving our enemy, we become Christ-like; remaining human, we become Beyond-human. (b) So, paradoxically, our enemy helps us become as Christ. ―By 72 your love you will be seen as my followers.‖ All this is displayed by our enemy, as Jesus‘ 73 love was seen by the Roman centurion who ordered His crucifixion. (c) To destroy enmity 74 by loving-caring for enemy is thus the complete victory ever, as Paul also so describes. Loving enemy is as perfect an act as our Father‘s love. (5) ―Father‖ here is the crucial key to unlocking our dilemma, for fatherly love has no 75 ―anger.‖ Jesus equates anger with murder that violates the law, punishable by hell. We rub our eyes in amazement and watch Jesus himself described in his Gospel stories, and are surprised to find him never angry in all his acts, favorable to people or not, painful to himself or not. When he overthrew moneychangers at the temple, he was burned with ―zeal for the lord‖ but not anger. When he healed as he sighed at people‘s slowness to belief, he was frustrated but not angry. When he was upset at his disciples trying to chase children away, he was not 76 angry. When he told a fig tree that people would no longer eat its fruit, he was not angry.
71 Lincoln may well be sanguine when he said, ―Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends with them?‖ We wish to ask him how he does it. 72 Cf. John 17:23. 73 Matthew 27:43. 74 Romans 12:20-21. Sun Tzu agrees from a tactical perspective, not from ―love.‖ See Mark McNeilly, Sun Tzu and the Art of Modern Warfare, Oxford University Press, 2001, esp. Chapter Three. Sadly, he missed Sun Tzu‘s irresistible beauty of lilting rhyme that belies its dead seriousness. See 謀攻篇第三 in 孫子, 臺北市三民書局, 民87, pp. 17-23. 75 Matthew 5:21-22. 76 Mark recorded Jesus was angry or quite upset at our insensitivity to [1] the helpless sick and [2] children. [1] He was ―in anger (órgē)‖ (Mark 3:5) against his injunction against anger (Matthew 5:22, the same word). [2] He was ―áganaktéō‖ (Mark 10:14), i.e., ―displeased‖ (KJV, AV, New Living Translation), ―indignant‖ (NRSV, NAB, Moffatt, Phillips), or ―vexed‖ (Lattimore). Significantly, these are the only two records on Jesus‘ anger, and only Mark recorded ―anger‖ in both incidents that all the synoptic Gospels recorded (for Mark 3:5, see Matthew 12:12-13=Luke 10:9-10; for Mark 10:14, see Matthew 19:14=Luke 18:16). He must be ―upset‖ (New Century Version). In Liddell and Scott‘s A Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford, 1996), ―órgē‖ is ―natural impulse, propensity, temperament, mood,‖ then ―anger, wrath‖; ―áganaktéō‖ is to ―feel violent irritation [of the effects of cold on the body],‖ then ―to be displeased, vexed, grieved,‖ ―pain, irrigation, anger, wrath.‖ On órgē in general, see Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, op. cit., V: 382-447. Kierkegaard finds another contradiction in Jesus, Matthew 5:39 vs. John 18:22-23.
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After he devastated the Pharisees with his scathing condemnations he broke down in tears; he 77 was sad, not angry. How Jesus died is the greatest wonder in his story. He was silent throughout to the priests, the Pharisees, Pilate, soldiers, and Peter, and even prayed an incredible prayer while dying an agonizing death on the cross, ―Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they 78 do!‖, for he was not angry. ―They‖ regarded Jesus as ―enemy‖ they so hated as to have succeeded in killing him, while he was not angry with them at all! His enemies he loved to death caused by them. We can understand none of these until we look at his ―Father,‖ for no true parent hates their children, however prodigal or heinous or hostile. The elder brother was angry at seeing his prodigal brother come home, but not his father, who was overjoyed at seeing his son back, and went out to persuade, plead with, the brother son. Absalom tried to kill David his king and father, yet upon his death David wailed, ―O my son Absalom! My son, my son, Absalem! Would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!‖ (2 Samuel 19:4) That father David‘s heart-rending wish Jesus fulfilled dying on the cross, praying for forgiveness of those who killed him. His enemies he loved to death, for them. (6) Jesus said that we should likewise destroy our subjective enmity to others who hate us, rid us of our festering hatred and anger inside, and become as clean, healing, and healthy as God our Father is, by doing as He does. But we can guarantee no cessation of enmity from others, now or later; not even Jesus or his Father could. Still, our obligation under our Father to love our enemy brethren remains with us. (7) Does God have enemies? Well, the above point answers yes and no. Yes, because God is love, to let his beloved free even to the extent of hatred/anger that is its enemy, but No because cosmic Fatherly love itself has no room for hatred its enemy. Yes, because Perfection is so perfect (love) that it includes imperfection (enmity). No, because parental love described above conquers enmity. God is almighty, so He (a) cannot be conquered (so God has enemy) and (b) unconquerable, i.e., ―conquest‖ in the parental world is meaningless (so God has no enemy). Our Father‘s heart has no room for enmity, but his creatures may choose to oppose him, to be his enemies, and he loves them so much as to allow them to hate him. (8) Now that we understand the shocker, ―Thou shalt love thine enemies,‖ as above described, we must be careful lest we lose sight of the shocking contradiction that originates in its being at the crossroads of the human and the Beyond-human. Jesus the God-man, the Beyondman-man, deliberately places this paradox at this crossroads to provoke us into the Beyond. The saying about the Beyond is always contradictory, for the act of saying belongs here while what it says about is Beyond-here, and so the saying mixes here and the Beyond. (9) Can we generalize this saying to cover all incredible sayings and deeds of Jesus the man beyond man? We can and should, for the Bible proclaims God as love that loves all, even enemies. This Fatherly love of enemies is the key to understanding everything incredible, everything incomprehensible, in the Bible, the grand collection of incredible yet factual stories of love. 77 Matthew 23:37-39. 78 John 2:13-17, Matthew 17:17, Mark 10:14, 11:14, Matthew 23:37-39 (Luke 1941), Mark 14:61, 15:5, Luke 23:9, 23:34.
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(10) However far we extrapolate to understand Jesus and the Bible, however, we extrapolate from this shocker of Jesus, and remain shocked. This is Jesus‘ story that jolts us to bring us up to the Beyond. All stories lead us beyond us. Now, in this pan-love realm, we would oppose ―capital punishment.‖ We must consider this theme now.
CONTRA CAPITAL PUNISHMENT We know the clock cannot be set back, and our life is time-sensitive; once gone, lifechances keep going unreturned, irreplaceable. We live inexorably in the unrepeatable timeriver. ―There is always a tomorrow‖ is a good strategic attitude only after we realize that today is today and is never tomorrow, and so ―this life‖ and ―this chance‖ are timely, uniquely belonging to this time-milieu ―now‖ and no other.79 Only on this assumption does ―There is always a tomorrow‖ comfort us to push us ahead inexorably. This realization is ominously relevant to capital punishment. Here is a story about it in a dialogue and debate. USA Today80 featured a long story, ―Death penalty gains unlikely defenders: Professors speak out in support of executions.‖ Robert Blecker, professor at New York Law School, (1) cited ―Barbara Jo Brown,‖ an 11-year old raped, tortured, and murdered, as a reason for death penalty, plus three more, i.e., (2) wrongful executions are less numerous than reported, (3) capital punishment does deter, and (4) death penalty upholds the victims‘ rights. It is sad that such reflective scholars as law professors, though small in number, are insufficiently thoughtful on the serious matter of death penalty. Here are my rebuttals, one by one. (1) To begin with, it is unclear what reason(s) the ―dramatic case of Barbara Jo Brown‖ is meant to offer. I can only surmise: the case could imply two reasons—intense emotional reaction and passion for retributive justice. I have four points to rebut them both. First, the Brown-case boils our blood in indignation; should our emotional intensity execute the murderer, then? I hesitate. If loss of a car incensed owner-A more than owner-B with loss of a car of equal market value, can A be compensated for more than B? Obviously it cannot be. Assessment of the seriousness of the crime, theft or murder, depends on no 81 emotional reaction to the crime. Theft and murder are both crimes that qualitatively differ, but their degrees of criminal intensity depend on no emotional reactions to them. Secondly, retributive justice requires that the murderer pay for his heinous crime. I agree. But can a murderer pay life ―with his life‖? Again, I hesitate, for two reasons not very 82 obvious but quite important. Reason one, a mass murderer such as Hitler has only one life
79 Even cloning is subject to this inexorable fact and its realization. 80 USA Today (January 7, 2003) on its front pages (pp. 1-2). 81 This point, that emotional reaction alone is no objective assessment of the crime, differs from another point, that emotional reaction to the crime is relevant to objective assessment, as unfelt report of Auschwitz is pathological and immoral (James H. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power, HarperSanFrancisco, 1989, p. 3). For all their differences, there is no ―casual‖ murder; all murders are so serious as to be beyond retributive/distributive justice among goods. To shout a ―dramatic‖ murder case barks up at the wrong tree. The issue here is not to impress us on how heinous murder is; it is to consider the appropriate measure to deal with the murderous wrong. 82 Hitler is an indisputable example of a ―mass murderer‖ to help us clearly see the point at issue.
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to live and ―pay‖; he cannot possibly die millions of deaths for millions of lives he unjustifiably murdered. Thirdly, reason two, more seriously, why is it that we no longer practice ―an eye for an eye‖ because it is a ―cruel and unusual punishment,‖ while we practice ―a car for a car‖? Obviously it is because an ―eye‖ is a part of the person, never a material possession as a 83 ―car.‖ Life is no part but the entire person; we cannot a fortiori practice ―a life for a life‖ on a par with ―a car for a car.‖ Fourth, but retributive justice still demands that the murderer pay for his heinous crime; we must devise a fitting punishment. The society could impose the murderer, not the same 84 85 horrible evil of murdering his life but, say, ―social work‖ for life under severe conditions, and work for life to earn for victim‘s family and the society. Such punishments can be severe as execution if not more, for today we have ―humane execution.‖ Besides, a wrong life-imprisonment can be retracted later, but not wrong execution; this is one more reason for life-imprisonment over death penalty. Such is our basic rebuttal on death penalty; the other three reasons are subordinate. (2) ―Wrongful executions are less numerous than reported, so capital punishment is justified.‖ In contrast, we insist that ―one‖ wrongful execution is one serious miscarriage of justice; one mis-execution is one too much of a miscarriage of justice. Qualitative intensity of execution cannot be measured by quantitative frequency; seriousness of wrong execution cannot be weighed by numerical frequency. (3) ―Death penalty does deter, so it is justified.‖ Three objections are here. One: Blecker interviewed 60 killers (presumably on death row), and found all ―cognizant of whether they are operating in a death-penalty state before they pull the trigger.‖ Despite knowing this fact, the killers did kill; where is deterrence? Two: if death penalty deters, USA should have less capital cases than the European nations without capital punishment; the fact is otherwise. Three: deterrence by death penalty is illicit even if it works, for human life is no material, as argued above. (4) Here is an important claim for capital punishment; ―death penalty upholds the victims‘ rights.‖ Does it really? One, doesn‘t death penalty uphold only the ―right‖ to vent primitive emotion to vengeance, though strong and understandable? Two, does putting the murderer to death bring back alive our beloved victim? Thus, isn‘t death penalty futile? Now, let us go a positive way on the claim. The victim‘s family does have some right; what is it? ―A car for a car‖ makes less sense as ―your car-loss for my car-loss,‖ for then nothing is recovered, than as ―my car-restored for my car-lost.‖ Similarly, ―a life for a life‖ is no ―your life-loss for my beloved life lost by you,‖ for then no life is recovered. I must have ―my beloved life restored/revived for that life lost by you.‖ Is it impossible? Zukav has an amazing story of a family adopting the murderer as their murdered son. ―‗The young man became a devoted son,‘ Brown Bear continued. ‗By the time he died, he was
83 That is why we banned slavery the ownership of humans as chattel, for human person is no chattel. 84 Such socially endorsed killing may encourage callous murderous sentiments among citizens. 85 Life-imprisonment, with mere two hours a week to watch the sky, frequent beating, risks of raping, and cruel regimented days, is no vacation. Saying so is not to endorse social cruelty but to note that life-imprisonment may not be ―happier‖ than ―humane execution‖ to end the matter once for all.
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known in all the tribes as the model of a loving son.‘‖ Thus, in the actual world, the most we—the victim‘s family, the society—can demand as ―right‖ is ―your labor for life for my beloved life lost by you.‖ The victim‘s family has such a right. In sum, capital punishment is wrong (1) in principle (life is no possession) and in practice ((2) one execution of the innocent is one too many miscarriage of justice, (3) execution does not deter, we can devise alternative punishments fit for murder), and because (4) death penalty fulfills nothing. All in all, our consideration negatively demonstrated that ―a life for a life‖ is senseless, that capital punishment has no place in the imperative of loving our enemies.
GLORIOUS “FUTILE” CHARITY BOULDERS So we must love our neighbors as ourselves, and we must practice charity. Sadly, however, charity is also a source of pain. Listen to this shout of mine to charity organizations: ―Dear Admired Persons of Assistance to the Suffering People: With profound appreciation, I wish to make three points. One, unquestionably my heartfelt admiration goes to you all, silently putting in much thankless and reward-less labor and time, day and night, with uncertain resources to go on, with no end in sight—all for people suffering, not for yourselves. Two, contributing a bit to your huge efforts, I am drawn into your struggles. I feel so futile. The more I give, the more ceaseless piles of mail I get, each as urgent as others, each as legitimate. I can neither ignore them nor afford to give adequately. I‘m trapped! Three, this no-win situation makes me think. (a) Even with all Bill Gates‘ resources, we are no near pulling all sufferers out of pits, and yet their desperation allows no pulling back of ourselves. (b) I cannot help but ask, ‗Are we not hopelessly inefficient?‘ (c) Or, is ‗efficiency‘ here an illegitimate word? Should we just bury our heads in sands 87 of suffering and try helplessly to help sufferers? Perplexed, I am buried in tons of mail for donations that are drops of water to the raging world-conflagration of suffering. I myself need help. What can we do? Futilely yours‖
I was in as bottomless a pit of flames as those charity organizations with those who suffer interminably, burn insufferably. Next day, an answer shouted back at me. ―The same goes with everything else in life, politics, employment, business, family feud, you name it; the troubles are limitless. Do you want to quit? You will quit life itself. Do you want to keep trying? You won‘t win, you can never win, yet you still have to keep going and trying if you want to keep on living.‖ The 86 Gary Zukav, Soul Stories, NY: Simon and Schuster, 2000, pp. 113-114. This is an alternative ―punishment‖ to work-for-life suggested above. 87 We will soon see that this is indeed the case, minus futility.
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answer in all its reasonableness simply shouts back at me, shouting me down. The problem stays inexorably. The charity-pit is only a part of life-as-a-pit where we keep struggling, turning the treadmill senselessly, a Sisyphus pushing a boulder ceaselessly up the hill, only to see it roll down, to push it up again. The whole boulder-pushing wins nothing; it makes no sense. Then 88 comes Camus to tell us that the boulder belongs unmistakably to Sisyphus; no one can steal it from him. Besides, the pushing is his; no one steals it from him. In the pushing he finds himself; no one takes it from him. ―Therefore, we must judge Sisyphus happy.‖ In his ceaselessness of pushing is the ceaseless joy of finding Sisyphus himself—the joy every time he puts his both hands to the boulder and arches himself, straining at rolling it up, and up, and up. Can Sisyphus give us a push to our charity-pushes? He could give us six. One, our pushes give us our own integrity as his does his; we give to charity for our own sakes! Two, his boulder is more senseless than ours are, for his is callously nameless while ours have a compassionate name, ―charity.‖ Three, Jessica Pue said, our sensitive boulders change 89 callous us and cultivate us into compassion—from ―needs great; requests rain-fall; my wastebasket fills‖ to ―unbearable hearts‖ to those in pain ―as if caring for my sick baby‖—as we push charity-boulders. Four, my friend Tom Sachse told me that each of those people we help, a mere few as 90 they are, is actually helped, as Mother Theresa said to a critic on her futility, ―I will let you worry about that. Here is a dying man who needs me.‖ Charity works on each individual, not 91 92 in general statistics; ―Love thy neighbor as thyself,‖ love not mankind for duty‘s sake. ―I cannot do all the good that the world needs, but the world needs all the good that I can do.‖93 Five, both my friends, Jessica and Tom, showed me that even though we each must push our own respective compassion boulders as Sisyphus must push his penalty, we each can 94 95 encourage and strengthen the other, as Sisyphus cannot. This task of ours is a camaraderie that strengthens each as we each fulfills each one‘s obligation. We are luckier than Sisyphus. 88 Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 1945. Sisyphus was sneaky, dared to cheat death, and Camus outsmarted Sisyphus and Thanatos to make Sisyphus happy! Camus‘ twist is truly a stroke of genius. 89 ―Since so much of human suffering is manmade, we can try to change our attitudes that lead to the endless violence, inequality, and destruction that breed suffering,‖ says Jessica. One of our attitudes, callousness, is serious. Turning my blind eye to fellow suffering humans turns me blind and hollow. My human soul I throw into a trashcan as I throw into it ―useless‖ letters for hands to fellow humans, for cutting off letters for handouts cuts off my hands and heart. To keep helping humans helps to keep me human with my fellow humans. What about cheaters on our compassion? Well, doctors won‘t turn away all patients because of some fake illnesses; we don‘t throw away all apples because some are rotten. Compassion stopped by some cheaters is no compassion. 90 He said, ―I understand what you are saying - I feel the same when in Mexico and see all the poverty where only a few dollars can help an individual - but there are so many individuals! There‘s a story about some one walking along the beach where starfish are washed up every day left on the beach to dry out and die - thousands of them - and this person walks along tossing the starfish he encounters back into the ocean. He is told that what he is doing won‘t make a difference because he is saving only a very small percent of the starfish, to which he replies that it will make a difference for the ones he saved - I guess that‘s how to approach it - we can‘t help everyone, but what we do is significant to those that we are able to help – That‘s all we can do - - -.‖ 91 That Good Samaritan meticulously cared for one single stranger-victim and no other. 92 Jesus said, ―Let her alone, . . . for the poor always ye have with you, but me ye have not always.‖ to Judas‘ ―Why was not this . . . sold for three hundred pence, and given to the poor?‖ (John 12:5, 7-8) 93 This is a line from a song written for the Global Mission Event held at the Convention Center in Minneapolis, August 2001. 94 ―Bear ye one another‘s burdens. . . For every man shall bear his own burden.‖ (Galatians 6:2, 5)
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Finally, his boulder remains the same, while we could push aside one boulder, and our 96 one successful push readies us with better ingenuity and stronger resolve for a next boulder. All this perhaps explains the Preacher‘s calm enigmatic saying, ―Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days. Give a portion to seven, and also to eight; for 97 thou knowest not what evil shall be upon the earth.‖ Now we may pause to reflect on what it is that resolved my/our charity-problem. It is Sisyphus‘ little story; in a small dark corner of the underworld, Sisyphus has to accept the boulder-chore of futility, and Camus says it is OK to accept the futility. Sisyphus accepts it; Camus is flexible enough to accept Sisyphus, for the latter to be flexible enough to accommodate the boulder. How? By accepting things as they are, as kids and grandpas do, by describing the situation. We often call the life-situation ―absurd.‖ Stories absurdly yarn whatever is, and we are at home. Absurd are life-surprises that stories etch out, against the backdrop of decent, proper logic, and somehow tame them. Kids‘ innocence matter-of-factly lets abound all sorts of ―ugly‖ irresponsibility, ―absurd‖ atrocity. Think of Ann Frank in her diary, and many kids on their singing way to Auschwitz. Look at bloody Greek mythology, the theater of the absurd today, and even Grimm Brothers have a bunch of dark stories. Zen Buddhists‘ ―koans‖ are so many insolubles, whose answer is ―But do we have to solve them?‖ Chuang Tzu‘s Seven Chapters end with an absurd story of the death of that world-hotchpotch, Hun Tun, for two world rulers gratefully made seven holes into him. Curing absurdity kills the world. Absurdities become stories to somehow relieve us, no, strengthen us, as do Sisyphus‘ nameless boulder and our charity-boulders. In short, our considered story of charity effort seemingly futile makes us realize some lessons as follows. We are in a dilemma of being able neither to quit charity nor to continue it. We cannot continue sprinkling drops of water of assistance into world conflagration of poverty and suffering, nor can we quit sprinkling it. As Sisyphus pushed his senseless boulder, so did we ours of futile charity, as follows. First, we realized that we quit, only to grow callous, to quit our humanity, which is serious. We then pushed the dilemma in a positive direction, that our futility does harvest fruit—our task gives us integrity, is sensible beyond results, cultivates us into compassion, actually helps people, can inter-encourage, and can push away boulders one at a time. It is thus that such a push of boulders strengthens charity givers as it helps receivers; as refusal to help kills us, so does helping others help us. We are boulders, we realize, and our 95 Until Camus came, perhaps, but even then Sisyphus hardly knew it. 96 I desisted sending my above letter to charity organizations, lest they get discouraged. I once felt terrible at an allyou-can-eat restaurant, feeling I was robbing starving people of their food. Then I heard a voice, saying, ―Go ahead and eat as much as you need, as long as you would share later whatever you have with those people who are your brethren.‖ I did so later. I debated over whether to donate $20 to one charity organization or $5 each to four. I decided on the latter, for [$20=$5] in the vast ocean of suffering, and [$5x4] spreads wider.To counterbalance this view, we must ―do the best we can with what little we have, to help those most in need‖ (Edmundite Missions) closest to us. The one ―closest‖ is my ―neighbor (πληίον),‖ the single one in dire needs to love as myself. The good Samaritan cares for one victim, leaving others alone; the shepherd goes out in the wilderness for the one lost, leaving 99 in the wild; the lady does her best for the one lost coin, leaving 9; the father runs out to the prodigal son, leaving his elder one alone; when ―I‖ was sick, in jail, hungry, you came to me, leaving others ―always with you‖ (Luke 10:27-37, 15:, Matthew 25:25-36, John 12:3-8). Similarly, answering letters of appeal for help need not be answering all letters. Now, this second view differs from the first, but perhaps not opposed, although how they could come together remains to be seen. 97 Ecclesiastes 11:1-2 (King James Version). This is perhaps one of the most Taoist of Bible sayings. It combines the seeming uselessness of today‘s performance for the sake of unknown tomorrow.
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story pushes them to resolve the charity dilemma by persisting in it. This is what we have learned so far with stories after stories of common but unnoticed actuality. Let us shift our focus. What can we do with the poor and those in pain? Jesus said, ―The poor you have always, but not me,‖ and also told us that as often as we do it to the poor, we do it to Jesus, and since the poor is always with us, as often as we do it to the poor, Jesus is with us. Jesus is always with us while not always with us. Our Buddhist friends chime in; for them ―begging‖ is a practice and ―giving‖ a virtue,98 for ―begging and giving‖ identify ourselves with the suffering poor who are always with us. Without meeting the world‘s fourfold suffering (birth, senility, illness, death), Gautama would not have awakened to enlightened Buddhahood. The whole New Testament is dipped in suffering; Christ should suffer to perfect his salvation, and we rejoice partaking of his sufferings.99 To suffer pain is futile, while to suffer endless suffering can be an endless blessing, wrapped in the knowledge that to suffer is to partake of Buddha‘s and Jesus‘ suffering, and Job‘s and Chuang Tzu‘s. To suffer with these Four Greats is a great honor. ―What honor?‖ Some religionists say all religions are many roads to the same goal (of the Ultimate); some say they are the same road (of salvation) to many goals. We say, whatever may or may not be known about the Ultimate beyond here now, the very lives of those Four Greats show us that we all share the same road and goal of serving and suffering with those who suffer. Such co-suffering is our blessed honor of the Ultimate-in-this-world. Pain in suffering injustice is the hardest to bear. The wrong of injustice-infliction remains, however, with those who inflict it, not with its sufferers. In fact, suffering injustice can and does cleanse the sufferer, while injustice never benefits but always injures its inflictors. This fact enables sufferers of injustice to be ―blessed‖ by Jesus who suffers it, and opens them to the possibility of forgiving those who inflict injustice on them. Injustices often occur, for ―to err is human, (but) to forgive, divine‖; forgiving enlightens (Buddha) and even redeems injustice-perpetrators (Jesus), as all sages since Confucius, then Socrates, have been doing. No wonder the sages are often injustice-sufferers, never inflictors, and so to suffer is an honor and blessing. Blessed indeed are those who are unjustly poor, hungry, and weep now, for the ultimate Glory of blessedness is theirs, with partakers-incharity in futility. This concludes our consideration of the pain of charity-futility, charitysuffering. Thus we can answer ―Yes‖ when asked, ―The whole world is in pain; I can do just a minuscule. Is it OK to do this on this problem, while all others groan in pain?‖ This question is based on the false scandal of historical particularity. Jesus seldom mass-heals or -solves problems,100 but approaches one at a time, the ―one of the least.‖ Having lived just three career years, he healed just so many and no more. God promises salvation to ―everyone who 98 ―A Buddhist priest practices a mendicant life living on alms. He is proud of living a hand-to-mouth life.‖ ―According to Buddhism, for one thing, begging is doubly blessed, for begging helps charity. A Buddhist priest, who lives entirely upon alms or, as he claims, on what the Lord Buddha gives him, lives only in devotion, doing nothing by way of earning his livelihood. He goes begging, practising a Buddhist mendicancy and chants a passage from the Buddhist sutra, door after door, praying for the salvation of the people, who repay him in money or in kind. Besides, we have a saying to the effect that one who goes begging for three days will never quit begging, and there is a philosophy in this saying, which appeals to the nature of man...‖ Atsuharu Sakai, Japan in a Nutshell, Tokyo: Kyōbunkan, 1949, pp. 19-20, 101. Merriam-Webster‟s Encyclopedia of World Religions, 1999, p. 149 (―Buddhism‖). 99 Luke 9:22, 17:25, 24:26 and 46, Hebrews 2:10, Philippians 3:10, 1 Peter 4:13, et passim. 100 This seems to be the Devil‘s temptation in Matthew 4:1-11 and Luke 4:1-13.
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believes,‖ that singular ―one.‖101 Mother Teresa and other unknowns do one thing at a time; so should we. Such is our love-imperative, effective yet quite inefficient. Why go this way? Why pain at all? Such puzzles are beyond humans. We only know love shines, and should keep shining,102 against pain in which love itself suffers. We omit a Buddhist approach to pain; pain is too urgent to go around for its phenomenology.103
ETHICS THAT IS GLOBAL, PLURALISTIC, AND ECOLOGICAL We are now confronted with two problems, a challenge to charity efforts and the plurality of today‘s world. We must first (I) respond to (A) Hardin‘s ―lifeboat ethics‖ that prevents charity, (B) religious plurality, and (C) if religious co-suffering is worthwhile. All this (II) leads us to global ethics pluralistic and individual, compassionate and ecological.
I. Responses Contra Hardin Our charity effort is jeered at by Garrett Hardin‘s cynical/cognitive ―lifeboat ethics.‖104 It says that population increases geometrically while foods increase only arithmetically (Malthus); letting the starved people die keeps the current natural balance between population and foods without increasing the disastrous number of the starved; so, we in the well-fed lifeboat should let the starved die and not feed them. So we have a ―dilemma,‖ ―To feed and be guilty or not to feed and feel guilty—that is the question.‖ (Joseph Fletcher) Actually, nothing is more blatantly unethical than such ―ethics‖story, so calculatingly, brutally, and unforgivably inhumane. Here is an alternative story, in four points. One, people dying is a sad misfortune, but calculating to let people die shares responsibility for their deaths as co-conspiring a mass murder. Acts calculated to effect the most people‘s most happiness overrides no evil of sacrificing the fewest of people, much less here where the vast number of people are killed for a few people‘s happiness. So much murder is committed on so many by so few in ―lifeboat ethics.‖ Two, the ―lifeboat‖ is grabbed in centuries of exploitation of those now starving. Asking ―Whose lifeboat?‖ ought to cut into the conscience of those not starving in the boat that belongs to all humanity, for the boat is our shared world. Three, the Malthusian premise was bound to its period. We should genetically expand harvest of foods in deserts, oceans, arctic regions, and on the moon in ―green revolution.‖ 101 Matthew 25:40, Luke 15, cf. Mark 1:37f, John 5:3, 5, John 12:5, 8, Acts 3:2, et passim. John 3:16, Raymond E. Brown‘s translation in his Anchor Bible commentary, I: 129. 102 Matthew 5:14-16. 103 For Buddhists, pain is a spark in the clash of selves; we can stop the spark by ceasing the self we can control. 104 Its debates are conveniently summed up in Lifeboat Ethics: The Moral Dilemmas of World Hunger, eds. George R. Lucas, Jr. et al., NY: Harper and Row, 1976. Lifeboat ethics then vanished from academic scene. Lester R. Brown‘s Tough Choices: Facing the Challenge of Food Scarcity, NY: W. W. Norton, 1996, mentions no ―lifeboat ethics.‖ We go our own way in refuting Hardin. In our opinion, there are no ―dilemmas,‖ much less ―moral‖ ones, about world hunger.
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Mass media should encourage birth control, which can also naturally occur as the living standard rises. These are alternatives, viable and imperative, to Hardin‘s inhumane starvation of ―others.‖ Four, to take actions above (point-Three) is not an option but an unforgivable humanitycrime committed by those not starving, unspeakably unethical and inhumane. In sum, we should help us all out of starvation; we cannot shirk this responsibility. Mutual help is the categorical imperative of humanity.
B. Religious Plurality We insisted, against Hardin, that we are all in the same boat, but our boat our world is radically divided. Having challenged Hardin toward co-suffering charity, we now turn to the world torn hopelessly. Religions are the most radically divided. The uniqueness of each religion is in conflict with so many others; religion is ―ultimate‖ that excludes ―many ultimates,‖ which yet in fact do exist.105 Christianity honestly confronts the problem. One, we logically have only two sorts of uniqueness, exclusive and non-exclusive, yet two, none of them can describe religions, much less Christianity. In this awkward religious ―one-and-many,‖ three, our religious obligation must be carefully delineated. To simplify, we focus on Christianity where the problem arises most acutely. One: We constantly see two groups of Christians. The proud conservatives take Christian uniqueness as ―no salvation outside Jesus Christ‖ and so ―infidels shall go to hell!‖ Thereby they are asphyxiated in their ―rightness,‖ their own divine orthodoxy of literalistic fundamentalism, i.e., verbal inspiration of bibliolatry. They play gods up there to crush down here to die unawares. Then amicable liberals are open-minded-hearted-handed; ―we‖ are as unique as ―you,‖ all human under the One ineffable Ultimate who blesses us with religious variety,106 as if there were religion-in-general as there were face-in-general. The truth is that Christianity may have both these aspects yet is completely at home in neither. How so? Two: The one-and-many dilemma of religions is crucial and insoluble in our world down here, but is ―embraced‖ in the Beyond—the ―home‖ of religion—beyond numbers, where the dilemma is not unimportant but not fatal. Take children and sexuality. ―To children belong the Kingdom of God‖ where married couples are ―like angels and are children of God.‖ Gender distinction exists for children as for seniors, yet they are neither sexed, not-sexed, nor neuter. They are sexed beyond sex.
105 We have human sociological causes for the upsurge of new religions. New inspiration/revelation revolutionizes one‘s whole life to challenge the institutional authority. New revelation could reform/invigorate-enrich established religions, as did Protestant Reformation (in Christianity and Hinduism) and Catholic orders. New revelation could also prove too much for an establishment, which persecutes or even kills individuals-withnew-revelation, and thereby a new religion is launched. We bypass such causes. Sociological explanation is human; it touches no theological dilemma. 106 John Hick (Peter C. Phan, ed., Christianity and the Wider Ecumenism, NY: Paragon House, 1990, pp. 89-103, etc.) is a prominent exponent of this view. Subtle members of this group are surprisingly various, John B. Cobb, Jr. (Beyond Dialogue: Toward a Mutual Transformation of Christianity and Buddhism, Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982), Hans Küng (Christianity and World Religions: Paths to Dialogue with Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co., 1986), and even Karl Barth (see ibid., p. 447, Index on ―Barth, Karl‖), Harvey Cox, and some Harvard New Testament scholars, among many others.
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They nonchalantly embrace sexuality. ―In the resurrection, (people) neither marry nor are given in marriage.‖107 As sexuality is important to adults who are not seniors, so the religious dilemma of one-and-many is crucial only to those out of the Beyond. The religious absolute that excludes other absolutes is not unimportant or important, as sexual distinction is no crucial distinction up there. Three: ―How about our obligation here in this world, however? How should we behave in this world, where the One Truth of a specific religion clashes universal embracing of other religions?‖ That Christianity is unique neither exclusively nor non-exclusively shows that our faith is beyond human understanding. This fact tells of two obligations in the Christian living. We must reject two extremes. Neither should we lock ourselves dead in smug exclusion of others,108 nor lose the uniqueness of our faith in ―the more, the merrier‖ inclusion. We should grow with Boy Jesus ―among teachers, listening to them and asking them questions,‖109 learning from various religions uniquely non-exclusive, and as convinced as Boy Jesus, asking, ―Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father‘s house?‖,110 to stand out unique. To be unique non-exclusively is difficult, however; it requires constant vigilance in humility before the Beyond-human among other beyond-human‘s, i.e., other religions. Ironically, the least palatable fact of life, suffering, presses into us a timely assistance to our difficult practice of being together religiously, humanly, for all religions focus on human suffering, and all propose ―co-suffering‖ as its resolution, although each in its unique way, differing from all others.
C. Salvation in Co-Suffering All religions propose ―salvation‖ from suffering in co-suffering. We consider Christianity first. ―Perfect love casteth out fear . . . he that feareth is not made perfect in love‖111 sounds strange until we realize that ―perfect love‖ is a full being-power, ―fear‖ is no-power, and so love-power casts out fear-powerlessness. Accepting God‘s power enables us to fulfill the Ten Commandments in suffering. Love casts out various evil-deficiencies listed in Paul‘s love hymn; it is more power-blessed to give than to poverty-receive.112 Those in unjust pain are blessed as the children of God,113 for unjust pain is how we enter Love-Power. In powerless fear/jealousy Pharisees killed Jesus, who accepted them in LovePower that ―driveth him into the wilderness‖ in temptations of lack, pain, injustice. Thus all problems vanish—why unjust pain is blessed, why Jesus died without a fight, etc. LovePower of overflowing Being delivers us from evil and pain. ―(Nothing) shall be able to separate us from the Love of God‖ (Romans 8:39) powerfully comforts us in suffering. The Buddhist center, deliverance from suffering, is that an active cosmic ―black hole‖ sucks all; nothing counts any more, not even suffering. A Taoist way is to room all. One who self-forgetfully follows the Tao-flow of things pushes no river, to swim in suffering out of suffering. It is between Buddhist emptiness and Christian fullness. 107 Luke 18:16, 20:36. 108 Matthew 23:27, Luke 18:11, John 9:34, 40-41, etc. 109 ―[D]o whatever they teach you and follow it‖ (Matthew 23:3 NRSV). Boy Jesus is a powerful image (Luke 2:46, 52) to egg us on to ―learning‖ from all quarters to vitalize the Christian integrity. 110 Luke 2:49, NRSV. 111 1 John 4:18. 112 1 Corinthians 13, Acts 20:35. 113 Matthew 5:3-12, Luke 6:20-23.
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Here in co-suffering, we see with Chuang Tzu114 three friends-for-life looking at one another and smile. In order to mutually look and smile, friends must face one another. Buddhists, Taoists, and Christians do not agree on how they see things, but face one another to see eye to eye on co-suffering. They need not, indeed, must not, face in the same direction to see eye to eye and smile at one another, precisely in this ubiquitous matter of co-suffering in the world. This is not identity but togetherness, religious, cultural, and ethical; here we meet and oppose Hardin, globally. In all this, being humorous alive is ever fun in dancing smiles here, there, and everywhere, bubbling vivacious. ―Humorous‖ is life. Being humorless in contrast lives death; nothing moves but in wailing cynicism. Things are everywhere twisted brittle, dark, dried up, and no fun. ―Humorous‖ against ―humorless‖ is kid alive against dead twigs. Life is made of such ―against‖-attitudes for us to always choose. ―Always choose‖ tells a story of being ever alert to live a humorous kid every moment, less continuously giggling than living every moment to the kid-hilt, ever bouncing, curious, heartfelt, in joys and in sorrows. Buddhist black-hole cosmic is quite comic, as Jesus‘ Kingdom of God belongs to kids of all ages, and as Taoist pillowing on a roadside skull casually making season-rounds. Diverse religious ultimates—hole, whole, self-so—are so many worlds of fun without end to tarry and bounce in. All such makes global ethics.
II. Global Ethics Shared suffering (contra Hardin) leads to global togetherness we should strive after. Ethics should be global, but we live in the globe radically pluralistic in culture, religion, and geopolitics. We must find a common guide in life-ideal diversity; traditional ethical principle on the assumptions of one culture is out of touch with pulverized actuality. Mutual giving in co-suffering sensitivity is relevant today, for radically differing religions converge here. Buddhism‘s calm realization of pan-emptiness somehow breathes cool ―sorrowful mercy‖ for all beings. In Christian Paul‘s exultation that nothing separates us from God, God takes away no suffering. Chuang Tzu‘s meadow of ultimate virtue—co-sharing—has peopledeer roam under ruler-branches. Mencius‘ unbearable sensitivity lets the scared bull go. In all, not only do we perceive how, reacting in their radical differences to our common suffering, all religions converge on humane sympathy, but also their co-suffering sensitivity to consist in inter-mothering co-presence, to allow/enable each of us to grow on our own. We gather as babies in pain, intently watched by Mother our Ultimate the Beyond in this world of pain, yet ―helping‖ nothing grow, as Mencius warns us. What does it mean? To ―love my neighbor as myself‖ tells me to be a ―neighbor‖ ever present to my fellow being to ―love,‖ to inter-mother, much ―as myself‖ in need of growing into myself. Not quite ―Do to others as they wish done,‖ much less ―Do to others as you wish done,‖ Confucius‘ (12/2. 15/24) ―What you want not, never give to people‖ wins our soul to guide our heart. We gather close, never meddling, never indifferent, but ever mother-watching. This is our divine being-with among humans, Emmanuel, God-with-us, incarnate. Practicing vigilant co-suffering, we are surprised to find our Emmanuel extend far beyond humans. In fact, our human togetherness is part of species-togetherness. Mencius‘ 114 This scene is identical to Chuang Tzu‘s moving description of it in 6/60-76, etc.
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―unbearable sensitivity to people‖ (1A7) arose from a human ruler letting go of a bull in mortal jitters. Here unbearable interspecies-sensitivity extends inter-human. In the end, close feelings-with interspecies-beings ―breathe (to) flood‖ the heaven and earth (2A2). Chuang Tzu was in joy feeling the minnows‘ joy darting around in River Hao, despite his species-difference from them, as Name-logician Hui Tzu reminded him. He told incredulous Hui Tzu how it happened, ―I know it (here) on the Hao‖ (17/91). He was there, Sitz im Leben, with the joys of fellow species-beings, enjoying darting around arguing with Hui Tzu above the Hao, as the minnows enjoyed darting around there in the Hao. In the end, being with fellow species-beings inter-befriends, inter-being with without inter-being with, inter115 forgetting in the world. Here is an ecological convergence of species sensitivity. Thus the Confucian, in interspecies inter-human compassion, breathes to flood the cosmos; Taoist conviviality stays interspecific inter-human. This species mutuality is the ―grain in existence 理,‖ running through them into the family of Heaven, Earth, and Humanity of Chang Tsai‘s ―Western 116 Inscription.‖ Cosmic Household Ethics, sensitive, convivial, replaces Lifeboat Ethics. In a grain of sand we see the world with Blake, Newton, and Einstein, individual pluralistic, compassionate cosmopolitan. A desperate person heals personally only by our being-with him. ―We . . . must clearly show (him), by the way in which we act toward him, that he is not alone and (we) are in communion with him.‖117 We must ―respond‖ to him ―with a firm assurance‖ that his ―abysssituation‖ is ―not final,‖ that his despair-milieu is embraced in our communal milieu of intermothering, our heartfelt co-presence where he is at home in simple unspoken comfort. We are just there with him as his ―given‖—with no ready-made ―trap of conventional conception‖ such as ―causality or determinism‖ or ―traditional consoling words.‖ He on his part is just there as well, independent, with us all, as he is, not alone. It is in our heartfelt copresence—co-mothering nursing milieu—that we huddle together at home and heal pain wordlessly.118 We are healed here as he is. A homograph of a Chinese character, ―ch‟ing 情,‖119 elucidates this situation as it is illuminated. We now know why the character can mean objective reality (e.g., ch‟ing shih 情實) and subjective feeling (ch‟ing kan 情感). A psychosomatic saying quips, ―How (one) feels is how ill (one) is, 心情即病情‖; here the same ―how 情‖ straddles over intangible ―how-feel‖ subjectivity and tangible ―how-ill‖ situation,120 as ―birding‖ has birds and birder, 115 Chuang Tzu, 6/23, 47, 61, 62, 73. 116 Wing-tsit Chan conveniently translated it with a long comment in A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, Princeton University Press, 1963, pp. 497-500. Sadly, its poetic pathos and nuanced punch is lost in his bland explanation-as-translation. 117 These words and the subsequent ones in quotation marks are Marcel‘s (The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel, op. cit., p. 241). We cannot repeat them often enough. 118 Saul Scheidlinger (―On the Concepts of Amae and the Mother-Group,‖ Journal of the Academy of Psychoanalysis, 1999, pp. 91-100) did not say counseling is a counselor-client inter-mothering-growing. 119 Here I depart from Chad Hansen‘s objective socio-cultural analysis that misses the unity of subjective feeling and objective reality in ―qing, or ch‘ing,‖ for this character describes a subject-object unity of the situation. His careful documentation of various uses of the character only deepens this impression. See Encyclopedia of Chinese Philosophy, ed., Antonio S. Cua, NY: Routledge, 2003, pp. 620-622. 120 We remember 快 can mean 快樂 (joy) and 快速 (speedy), and 適 can mean 舒適 (fit and comfortable) and 合適 (fit and appropriate). Thus many words show the unity of intimate subjectivity and situational objectivity.
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as ―painting‖ has painter and painted, as we ―feel‖ for something to feel good, and as we ―sense‖ in experience to sense the meaning. All this stretches oneself to reach the sky, and Socrates listening to Daimon beyond him follows his deep self. ―Heartfelt co-presence‖ depicts objective presence nestling and nourishing the hearty subjects. The reality of co-presence is an objective heartfelt intersubjectivity nurturing us all around. Such a subject-object unity is natural and powerful, expressed in the rhymed unity of sound and sight in etymology such as this. As calm water in the depth of a well, ching 井, is clean and blue, ch‘ing 清, so blue 青 is the depth of the sky, ch‘ing 晴, and emotion ch‘ing 情 is the material 質 of human nature jen-hsing 人性.121 Without coalescing, these three situations so co-resonate that ch‟ing 情 expresses human emotion in (human) situation. Another homograph, ―tao 道,‖ confirms the above point of the situation in subject122 objective unity. Tao since ancient means objective path, road, way, and then as verb to lead (principle, doctrine) and so on, and can also mean our subjective act to ―say, state, talk,‖ and the like. This double meanings united in ―tao‖ enables Lao Tzu to begin his Tao Te Ching 123 with a quip, ―Tao can tao, not Always Tao,‖ and Chuang Tzu to equate ―the Tao of no 124 Tao‖ with ―the talk of no talk.‖ Subjective words often express objective pervasive Way of things, and should express it. How the two meanings unite is anyone‘s guess. Perhaps Chuang Tzu‘s (2/33) ―Tao walks it and forms‖ means that we walk (走) out Tao (道) in the direction we face, eyeing forward 125 (首); ―facing‖ unites subjective facing-act with objective faced-direction. Tao expresses 126 this facing with the face that has a mouth that ―says and talks.‖ In sum, ―tao‖ expresses the dynamic situational unity of objective way and subjective talk and walk. The point is clear. We vitally need nature as our milieu of co-presence, for the objective co-presence of inter-subjectivity really heals, makes whole. This is because Nature is the 127 Milieu that enables our human milieus to thrive. Industrialists commit suicides by 121 I followed Akiyasu Tōdō, Etymological Dictionary of Chinese Characters, Tokyo: Gakutōsha, 1965, pp. 491, 493. 藤堂明保著, 漢字語源辭典, 東京學燈社, 昭和四十年, on ―情.‖ For its different interpretation, see
說文解字詁林, 臺北市鼎文書局, 民72, 8:1104-1107. 122 Tōdō, op. cit., pp. 191, 192-193. 123 Mencius (3A4) and Chuang Tzu (2/61, 24/68, 25/32, 33/9-11, cf. 12/85, 21/12, 25/32, 31/21) used ―tao‖ in the sense of ―say‖ or ―persuade.‖ The fact is, however, Mencius and Chuang Tzu lived in the 4th century BCE, and Tao Te Ching was supposedly compiled in the 6th. Thus the debate continues on if the second ―tao‖ here can mean ―say‖ or not. 124 ―Tao‖ appears as ―say, etc.‖ in Chuang Tzu 2/61 (=24/68), 25/32, 33/9-11, and Mencius 3A4, as cited above. On Chuang Tzu, see 赤塚忠著, 莊子, 東京集英社, I:107 (1974) and II:448, 908 (1977). 125 See 說文解字詁林, op. cit., 3:156-158. I explored the intersubjective dynamics of ―face‖ as ―facing‖ in the “Logic” of Togetherness, op. cit., pp. 109-127. 126 This speculation on the etymological connection of two meanings of ―Tao‖ awaits confirmation. 127 Volumes pour out on this theme. See all Gary Snyder‘s publications, e.g., The Practice of the Wild, Berkeley, CA: North Point Press, 1990, Craig Childs, Soul of Nowhere: Traversing Grace in a Rugged Land, Seattle, WA: Sasquatch Books, 2002, Edward Goldsmith, The Way: An Ecological World-View, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998, Frederick J. E. Woodbridge, An Essay on Nature, Columbia University Press, 1961, William T. Blackstone, ed., Philosophy & Environmental Crisis, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1974, Bryan G. Norton, Why Preserve Natural Variety?, Princeton University Press, 1987, M. J. Dunbar,
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despising ―useless wilderness with moose idly roaming,‖ for we need all the wilds with all their animals to inter-thrive free; in fact how many such unbridled middle-of-nowhere‘s do we have left to vacation and wander in wild health? Cut off from Nature, we all perish with our selfish ―profits.‖ Ecology is not a choice; it is 128 our life necessity, our existential imperative. Isn‘t all this an ecological ―pluralistic ethics‖ among various species with the Heaven creating all and the Earth nourishing all, concrete, all too concrete, and isn‘t it captured not by logical analysis but by concrete stories of our lifeexperiences? The backbone of the Chinese tradition, that Nature is a Triune Family of Heaven, Earth, and Humanity, that we must follow nature in our daily routine in feng-shui 129 pattern 風水and cosmological calendars, eloquently proclaims this ecological reverence. In contrast, it is instructive to cast a side glance at that famous ―Golden Rule‖ and consider whether it is concrete enough to be practicable, for the Rule has its own difficulty once we want to ―do‖ it. It is a bloodless principle. The so-called Copper Rule, ―Do unto 130 others as they would wish to be done by,‖ perhaps betters the Golden Rule, both of which yet remain empty ―principles.‖ ―What should we actually do?‖ is left open. Arguments since Plato contrive to fill the bare principles with actual situations they are for, all in vain. This is because an abstract principle is on this side of an ―ugly broad ditch‖ 131 (Lessing) that separates it from contingent actuality on the other, and the one cannot apply, flexibly, appropriately, to the other. Once we construct the ―ditch‖ separating reasoning from actuality, we can never jump over it, for we ourselves constructed it. Reasoning is ours; 132 separated from actuality; our principles remove us from actuality. Someone says the Golden Rule is shared by us all and cannot be lightly dismissed as an abstract principle. True, the Rule is an age-old concentrate of folk wisdom, of collective experiential prudence, and people all over the world have been intuitively adapting it to their daily occurrences. The problem is that thinkers treat this Rule of folk wisdom as an abstract
Environment and Good Sense, Montreal: McGill-Queen‘s University Press, 1971, Hwa Yol Jung, The Way of Ecopiety, NY: Global Scholarly Publications, 2009, etc. 128 Is nature really our necessity? Our ultra-modern buildings are full of flowerpots, aquariums, and nature-motif decorations; our ultra-modern life needs regular ―vacations‖ into bucolic nature. Nature lives in us; we live in nature. Taking out nature takes out us ourselves. See also Bryan G. Norton, Why Preserve Natural Diversity?, Princeton University Press, 1987. 129 Tragically and ironically, China (with nature-human unity) and Japan (with its nature-loving Shintoism) are the lands of vast ecological devastation. See an eloquent lamentation of extensive deforestation in China in C. A. S. Williams, Outlines of Chinese Symbolism and Art Motives (1941), NY: Dover, 1976, pp. 406-408, et passim. Ecological Akrasia is here. 130 See Huang Yong‘s ―A Copper Rule vs. the Golden Rule: A Daoist-Confucian Proposal for Global Ethics,‖ carefully argued in a Western manner (unpublished to my knowledge). Actually, all these problems and adjustments on the ―Rule‖ vanish once we realize that it is not meant to be identically mechanically applied to different situations. Kindness is gifting, person-sensitive; compassion and friendship know how to adjust kindness accordingly. 131 Gotthold E. Lessing said, ―That is: accidental truths of history can never become the proof of necessary truths of reason.‖ (―On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power‖ [Lessings Werke, ed. Lachmann-Muncker, xiii, pp. 1-8], in Lessing‟s Theological Writings, tr. Henry Chadwick, London: Adam and Charles Black, 1956, pp. 54-55) We wonder: With what genre of proof, contingent-historical or logical-necessary, can you prove the existence of the ditch itself? Max Black faces this challenge in ―The Inductive Support of Inductive Rules,‖ Philosophical Analysis, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1954, pp. 190-208. Once Black admits, however tacitly, to the induction-deduction ditch, he would never be able to jump across it. 132 Similarly, ―to do to others as I would wish done‖ separates others from me who now know not what they want.
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principle to argue about. Late John Rawls and early Robert Nozick quested for ethical principles in a pluralistic society, yet analysis choked up their insights. Is this another pain of logicizing not touching concrete pain?
PAIN, BUDDHISM, CHRISTIANITY Let us take stock of ―pain‖ from outside, before going to pain inside us. All Romans 8 with its glorious ending removes no pain, as the entire Bible leaves pain intact. Pain stays with Christian life, and praying for its removal may not be Christian. ―Romans 8‖ says negatively that no parent always gives ―sweets‖ to children and, positively, within pain (not despite it) we can trust in God-in-Christ who is ever in pain with us. We see three spin-offs. One, pain can cause death. Evil people‘s pain tells of their punishment, but God cherishes good righteous people‘s pain, even in the Holocaust. Two, people‘s pain may well be an encounter with God‘s holiness, as Moses saw fire and Job met whirlwind; both realized then to have met God in people‘s pain. Jesus‘ Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5) says pain is God‘s blessing. God is in pain meeting human sin; Christ died on the Cross to show God‘s infinite Compassion. People‘s pain touches the heart of God, severe, paternal, and holy.134 Three, thus in pain God and humanity meet. Our pain touches God‘s holiness, and our sin 135 breaks God‘s heart to cost his Son. In contrast, pain is unreal, teaches the Buddha, for our life is less than a puff of dream. We avoid no pain, for there is no pain to avoid. Pain thus divides Buddha, cool and wraithlike, pain-less and peaceful, from Christ, hot and calm fountain of life, pain-full, peaceful. Pain is then where Christ and Buddha meet in peace. In Christ, we are in peace in pain; in Buddha, we are in peace in pain with no pain. Two questions remain—What is pain? Why pain?—both due to the total goodness of God‘s initial creation. The Bible tells us nothing about these questions, only how pain operates, how we should take it to operate and channel, as above meditated on. Here Christ agrees with Buddha who came not to answer what or wherefrom of pain but how to take off the arrow of pain and heal us, now that we are shot at. We on our part are dissatisfied, wanting much to have answers by Buddha or Christ. They are silent, so we go our way. We see the what/why of pain connected to the how of stopping it. We could answer, our imperfection breeds pain, while perfect Christ pained for us. For Buddha pain is born of ignorance of our self as less than a puff of dream; enlightening us out of our ignorance dissipates pain as a puff of dream. Jesus wants to use pain to partake of divine pain of paternal holiness, by partaking of our pain in imperfection and sin. How is pain used? Lao Tzu said of the laughter of ―low people‖ on hearing Tao; their laugh qualifies Tao as Tao. Suppose the laugh gets violent, trampling the givers of pearl of 133 John Rawls, Political Liberalism, Columbia University Press, 1993; Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Harvard University Press, 1974. 134 Cf. Kitamori, Kazō‘s 北森嘉藏 Theology of God‟s Pain 神の痛みの神學, published in 1946 (see 古屋安雄, et al., 日本神學史, München: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1991, ヨルダン社, pp. 129-132). Extrapolating from Hebrews 12:10, Christians see pain touch the hem of paternal holiness. After all, to suffer injustice is not unjust. 135 Only Christ and Buddha are cited in connection with pain because Christianity and Buddhism are two extremes in the whole gamut of religions, one at the extreme of being, another at that of no-being, and all other religions are in the middle of these two extremes. Pain is thus treated as existing seriousness in Christianity alone, for in Buddhism everything is less than no-being, including pain.
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Tao, as Jesus warns us, then pain bites the Tao-givers to grate them into being concerned with the low people. The concern can intensify to Jesus‘ amazing extent, dying on the cross given by low people, and praying on the cross for forgiveness of them. This is wrong pain best used. One thing is clear. If pain is a God-we joint, we must accept it as we accept God. Since to join is love, our acceptance of it in love is faith that pleases God. Buddha on his part dissolves pain in cool calm. If our ignorance of existence as less than a puff of dream breeds pain, pain disappears in our realizing so, in the original Nirvanic puff of less than a puff of dream, where there is no pain. Let us now look squarely at pain as such, without appealing to religion or morality. We can painlessly do evil, do good in pain, and suffer ―unjustly,‖ that is, for no legitimate reason. Besides, every life, good and evil, suffers pain indifferently. Pain crushes creativity; it also occasions creativity. Pain itself is, then, not evil or good. It is not unjust to suffer pain, even of injustice; the Holocaust that visited ―God‘s people‖ was not injustice to good people or justice to bad people. Pain is not ―evil that enigmatically visits people to give headaches to good almighty God.‖ Pain everywhere has instead the unsuspected functions of disclosing life and cleansing it. Pain is not an evil to visit evil people ―justly‖ but exposes evil life as evil; pain here turns into punishment, thereby cleanses evil. Innocent people such as babies suffering from injustice are not themselves unjust; their unjust pain exposes the evil of injustice, thereby vindicates their innocence, showing how pure they are. Pain trumpets good people as good, as it shows babies and baby-pure. Pain here shows how noble, admirable, a good life is, how to become good, thereby cleanses other people. In all, pain exposes, judges, cleanses, and ennobles us all. We often call this phenomenon ―moral‖ cleansing—―catharsis‖ in tragedy—and uplifting of the world via pain, and call good people‘s pain, ―redemptive‖ of others. ―Redemption‖ is a religious term. Thus, our meditation on pain independent of morality and religion redounds, strangely, to open our eyes to deeply moral and religious facts about pain. Christ‘s life calmly incarnates these cosmic facts to ―redeem‖ the world. More, now that we realize how dependent on our suffering pain is to turn into judging or ennobling life, Christ pain-incarnate entreats us to turn pain to our account. ―Be good, so you can use pain to ennoble us all,‖ he seems to urge us in Luke 13:1-5 (negatively), John 9:1-3 (positively), and sends us out to actualize his parable of the Good Samaritans in Luke 10. If we dare to go out of our complaints and become the Samaritan to serve those unjustly beaten, whoever they are, then Christ calls us all ―who weep‖ and beaten ―blessed,‖ for he also ―weeps‖ and is ―beaten.‖ He is with us in our pain so that we are in his. As he conquers world pain, resurrected today with the cross-scars, pain now healed, so do we who are in pain. Christ and Christians thus take up pain everywhere into them, and pain vanishes in their unspeakable Joy Beyond this world. Such is ―the Gospel of Suffering‖ (Kierkegaard) offered by Christianity. All this is momentous indeed. Religion concerns matters of this world to bring them up to the Beyond. Of all religions, Christianity alone looks at pain straight in the eye. Here, God who ought not to suffer, as all ancient Greeks were certain, goes in his Son deep into pain everywhere, wherever it is. He bears it and turns it into Joy Unspeakable, still with pain but 136 Tao Te Ching 41. Matthew 7:6.
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now turned into scars. No wonder the Cross is at the center of Christianity. No other religion offers such joy through pain. How does Jesus do it? Well, pain just comes without rhyme or reason. We don‘t like it and pray for its removal. Paul did so three times, and was gently turned down; ―My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness.‖ How? God is in pain with us, and thereby conquers pain. If we die in pain with him, we rise in joy—with him. 137 ―Blessed are you who weep now. For you shall laugh.‖ Weeping does not end only at the end of our life and the world. Everyday ―dies‖ as the night comes. We die daily, so we laugh daily, for Jesus is weeping with us, to laugh with us. Prayer for removal of pain is not Christian, then, for joy comes through pain—with Christ Jesus.
137 Matthew 5:3-12, Luke 6:21, John 11:35, Luke 19:41, Mark 15:15, 19, John 16:33, Romans 8:37, John 20:27, 2Corinthians 12:9, Luke 6:21.
Chapter 7
AKRASIA, INTERPERSONAL AND PERSONAL We have been listening to stories of suffering from pain that simply comes. Now, we have to listen to pain that we mysteriously inflict on ourselves. Such a pain is ―mysterious‖ because we cannot understand how we could inflict on us what we detest. We call it ―akrasia.‖ Self-inflected pain is of two sorts, interpersonal pain that is often violence, and personal pain that is often depression. We now listen to stories of violence, then of depression, and we would be moved deeply.
VIOLENCE AS WEAKNESS—IN CHINA AND BEYOND Weapons of mass and suicidal destruction are busy at work today worldwide. It is our timely obligation to ponder on ―violence‖ and its significance after the Iraqi war and amidst intercultural bloodbaths in Palestine and Afghanistan. This Chapter describes how violence is weakness,1 in five subsections: (A) violence and our fascination with it; (B) two features of violence-weakness; (C) the mystery of akratic weakness; (D) akrasia today; and (E) a sad postscript, all in a concrete Chinese context and beyond.
A. Violence and Our Fascination with it 2
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Violence violates human selves, namely, human integrity of oneself and others. We 4 5 claim that violence manifests life‘s weakness in China and beyond. This claim seems 1 So, this Chapter assumes but does not argue why all violence is wrong/evil/immoral. Instead, it describes violence as weakness. We see how violence defeats itself, how unable/unwilling violence-perpetrators are to admit their weakness, and so on. Cf. the last Note of this Chapter. 2 The definition of violence as violation of personal integrity is tight, not circular, for ―violation‖ is not synonymous with ―violence‖ (e.g., non-violent violation of desire); no dictionary defines the one with the other. Violence as person-violation includes damaging personal property. For reasons listed in the first and last Notes of this Chapter, I omit considering discussions of violence by Hannah Arendt (On Violence, NY: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1970), Gregg Barak (Violence and Nonviolence: Pathways to Understanding, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2003), etc. Sadly, their descriptions of violence-varieties cover nothing on violence as self-other inter-violation. Arendt barely said, ―if either ‗wins‘ it is the end of both‖ (p. 8). Much less did they say violence originates in and demonstrates violence-perpetrator‘s weakness. Barak‘s ―reciprocity‖ (pp. 155-169) refers to factors interacting to cause violence. ―How much force should be applied
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fatuous, however, for violation often goes with force that seems no weakness, and yet this impression actually expresses its perpetrators‘ weakness hidden under cover of force; its objective display betrays subjective frailty of jittery fear. 6 7 How does violence-orgy show weakness? Violence is other-injury, impetuous, 8 impatient, reckless, and irascible, far from healthy, resilient, and calm. This is because, in contrast to patient and calm attraction that often obtains uncertain and diffuse results, if at all, and yet the result obtained is solid and last long, violence has four features; it is swift, specific, soon spent, and boomerangs disasters. Violence enables us to force the situation to immediately harvest the intended result, the result is what our original aim specifically specified, which is quite ephemeral and is soon wiped out, and unintended disasters come back on the violence-perpetrators. Fascination with violence is due to impatient myopia that irascibly misses its long-term horrendous consequences, and that on ourselves. Such myopia spells ―weakness.‖ The notion of ―weakness‖ itself must be carefully defined. We often admire those who are ―strong and brave,‖ the phrase not innocent. The strong-brave relation has four situations. One, we can be strong and not brave; we have much strength but dare not use it. Two, we can be brave though not strong; we are ever ready to dare the challenge without much strength to back the daring, as the terrorists and the Palestinians are. Three, we can be both strong and brave; we stubbornly push an initial course of action without deliberating on whether our course is correct or proper, ethically and situationally. This is ―small bravery,‖ ―weakness‖ truly so-called. Bush dramatically displays such weakness as he consistently disregards world opinions or the objective situation, only to doggedly push the world‘s greatest power to horrendous bloodshed worldwide. Four, we can be prudent, perceptive about when to dare to strike, when to retire, being sensitive to how proper our course of action is, and carefully measure how much strength to before it can be called ‗violence‘? What principle do we have to judge such application of force as ‗violence‘?‖ Questions such as these are couched in quantitative terms (―how much‖) and in outside criteria (―what principle by which‖), thereby miss ―violence‖ that is violation of personal integrity. ―Violation‖ violates, however slightly, and ―personal integrity‖ is we, not principles separate from us. We know it when we are violated, irrelevant to quantity or principle. Nonetheless, it helps to expose when/why violence is wrong, disguised or self-deceived as ―legitimate use of force,‖ to say/stipulate that violence is wrong because violence is person-violation. It is wrong to violate a person, however slight. This inner ―life-principle‖ is basic to our reflection/discussion, for without personal integrity nothing can be thought about or argued for/against. 3 Newton Garver says violence violates others (―What Violence Is‖ in James Rachels, ed., Moral Problems: A Collection of Philosophical Essays, NY: Harper and Row, 1971, pp. 241-249); I say violence violates oneself and others. To focus here on violence as weakness, violence as inflicting pain or suffering pain is only indirectly touched (Mencius, Sun Tzu, Taoists). 4 There is no violence in general. Violence is always some particular acts/incidents. We must tell stories of violence in China, where thinking and understanding proceed in stories of concrete events. 5 Complex violence-expressions in China often center on ―pao. 暴‖ such as 暴行, 暴舉, 暴虐, 強暴, 亂暴, as well as 兇行, 虐待, 迫害, 傷害 (综合英漢大辭典, A Comprehensive English-Chinese Dictionary, 商務印書館, Taipei: The Commercial Press, 1936, 1974, p. 1417). Mencius twice used 暴 alone (6A6, 6A7) to indicate violence. I omit all other references. 6 See Oxford English Dictionary (1989), 2001, on ―violence‖ as from ―violentia,‖ ―vehemence,‖ ―impetuosity,‖ meaning to ―cause damage, to persons‖; other meanings derive from this basic one (XIX: 654); cf. ―impetuous‖ as ―moving with violence‖ (VII: 718). I consider usage of words because our word-usage shows the way we think. 7 See Oxford Latin Dictionary (1996), 2002, on ―impetus‖ as impulse (p. 844), which is impulsive ―akrasia‖ in lack of foresight and lack in character, soon to be explained. 8 See ―D. Akrasia Today‖ below for its concrete example today.
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apply and how to apply it—at each moment. This is ―great bravery‖ we admire; it is as difficult to practice as it is to describe. Unaware of all above, we spectators are dazzled by a forceful display of violence. Our 9 Freudian Thanatos-fascination glorifies violence in the ―Arthurian romances ‖ in China such as ―三國志演義 Romance of the Three Kingdoms,‖ ―水滸傳 Water Margin‖ a banditry-novel 10 of abiding popularity that extol heroic violence under veneer of ―Robin Hood Justice.‖ Our violence-glorification blinds us to violence as weakness, and our inability to confront this truth also constitutes our weakness. The next subsection B picks up this point. Violence as an inter-violation of persons in all forms begins at self-violation to invite other-violation. ―People must insult themselves before others insult them; family must destroy themselves before others destroy them; states must invade themselves before others 11 invade them,‖ said Mencius. Then, he strongly implied that its reversal also holds, that doing violence to others does violence to oneself. Conversely, ―extending one‘s gracious bounty 恩 suffices to protect all in the Four Seas; failing it, one cannot protect one‘s own family,‖ said Mencius to passionately exhort tyrant Hsüan 齊宣王 to extend to others Hsüan‘s inborn ―unbearable heart‖ to end up enriching 12 himself with others. Mencius told the tyrant that it is not that he could not be benevolent ruler but that he did not (want to). But why did he not? Was it not because he could not, after all? Isn‘t it the unity of ―cannot‖ and ―does not (want),‖ and doesn‘t it show human akrasia, our trouble at the root? Thus violence to the self invites others to do violence to the self, and violence to others redounds to devastate the self. Existence is inter-existence; one who cuts a tree cuts oneself. No one is an island; as we are inter-human, an action makes an impact on one as it does on the other in both directions, from the self to others and back to the self. Violence is a mutual self-violation—oneself by oneself, oneself by other selves, and other selves by oneself, and then the direction of devastation reverses itself. 13 Inter-self-violation begins ominously at seemingly innocent ―education,‖ as it shapes 14 15 the pristine self, originally good (Mencius ) or bad (Hsün Tzu ), into something ―good‖ in the eyes of societal others. Finally, this ―shaping‖ kills the self to achieve ―humanity‖
9 The word ―romance‖ tells of our twin loves of sentimental love and love of ―heroic chivalry‖ or the ―just war‖ against social injustice, and explains the popularity of ―Romeo and Juliet‖ and ―三伯英台‖ that combine love with violent deaths. 10 In Chinese, ―violence‖ is 暴力 that implies 強暴, showing how instinctively we connect 暴 with 強 that we admire. See 英汉辞海 The English-Chinese Word-Ocean (1990), 北京: 國防工業出版社, 1991, on ―violence‖ (p. 5887). 11 Mencius 4A8. All English translations of Chinese statements are mine except where noted otherwise. 12 Mencius 1A7. Japan also has a saying, ―情けは人のためならず‖ (Compassion is not for others), as we say in the West, ―One who gives lends,‖ ―Charity is a good investment,‖ and ―One good turn deserves another.‖ We do not realize that this is no supererogation but sheer necessity; negating this inter-human mutuality harvests such dire devastation on us all that we simply must practice this positive mutuality. Empathy is an imperative, a duty to concord. 13 The Taoists, e.g., Chuang Tzu, Chapter Eight, tell us that ―education‖ maims for reasons described here. 14 ―Why, if human nature is originally good, do we need calamitously to ‗shape‘ it into goodness?‖ Chuang Tzu asks. 15 Clearly/famously, Hsün Tzu‘s 荀子 chapters that begin his book—―Encouraging Learning‖ 勸學篇, and ―Cultivating Oneself‖ 修身篇—insist on ―learning‖ as shaping the self by others, ―society‖ and ―teachers.‖
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(Analects 15/9 ), throwing away life for ―righteousness‖ (Mencius 6A10 ). All this may have seeded the Legalists‘ arbitrary royal shaping of people under cover of regal ―law and order.‖ It amounts to drawing such ominous implications from Confucius‘ ―Born alike, learned apart‖ (17/2) unintended by Confucius. Thus we see violence-kinship among ―humanity, righteousness, education, and dictatorial ‗law and order.‘‖ Their kinship describes how comprehensively violence captivates us in 18 China, pervading Confucian ―morality‖ and ―education,‖ and Legalist ―law and order‖! No wonder, Taoism arises to protest all this ―violence to human nature.‖ More concrete examples from China soon to be displayed describe violence, to mutually ―boomerang.‖ Such mutual violation of human integrity clearly violates the inner principle of human existence, that personal integrity, human nature, is inalienable/inviolable, never to be 19 imposed from outside. Violence is as immoral as it is imprudent/self-defeating, returning to destroy all violence-perpetrators. As givers lend, other-violators self-violate.
B. Two Features of Violence-Weakness Violence-fascination/glorification (as it exists in China and beyond) expresses horrid human weakness. Violence flares up in spectacular impetuosity to dazzle the beholder away from the reality of violence; its impetuosity wrecks all, victor and victim alike. (1) We do not know ―violence against violence‖ is still violence to destroy everyone, including the perpetrator (lacking foresight), (2) we are unable to resist striking back at ―offenders‖ for our immediate satisfaction (lacking resilience), and (3) both lacks show weakness succumbing to an easy violent way out. Violence is weakness so primitive under the veneer of civilization. This weakness has persistently been manifested in histories of China and beyond in two 20 mysterious ways: (1) myopic lack of foresight and (2) character-lack to do what we know is 21 right that we desire and can do. This twofold weakness is what ancient Greeks casually
16 Confucius praised ―killing [one]self to achieve human-integrity 殺身以成仁‖ (Analects 15/9). Similarly, Tzu Chang 子張, a disciple of Confucius‘, said, ―The scholar-apprentice is quite acceptable who on meeting [the state in] danger offers his life 士見危致命 . . . 其可已矣‖ (Analects 19/1). 17 For Mencius, the educated princely man (君子) would discard life for righteousness 舍生而取義 as we would throw away [common] fish to grab [rare delicious] bear‘s palm (6A10). D. C. Lau has ―dutifulness‖ to ominously facilitate Legalism. 18 Someone may object, ―Your claim here is too Taoistic, doing injustice to legitimate ‗education.‘‖ Yet actually ―moral education‖ results in ―admirable violence‖ this essay describes/objects to. My claim that all violence is also weakness seems radical; I risk it to shout for alternatives to violence for the results violence aims at but fails. Besides, my claim smacks of no weak quietism, for my alternatives-to-violence require more resilience and prudence than violence that exhibits rash weakness. Now, claiming all this may amount to ―education.‖ If so, this is a legitimate education, drawing-out ourselves away from illegitimate ―moral education‖ that brutally shapes us maimed, if not dead. 19 This is valid even when God created humans; God intends to give us dignity as inherently human. 20 We know because our sages, such as Mencius and Chuang Tzu, told us, as we are soon to see in [2]. 21 No Western philosopher takes ―akrasia‖ as a basic weakness of human nature. Paul‘s lamentation (Romans 7:2224) was a religious agony (―Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief!‖ [Mark 9:24]) that befits redemption (Romans 7:25), not a radical enigma deserving of sustained reflection. Worse, the Bible has no name for such radical persistence Paul described—unwillingness to choose what good we at heart desire. ―Akrasia‖ in the Bible (Matthew 23:25, 1 Corinthians 7:5) means mere lack of self-control, self-indulgence, or (sexual) incontinence. Sad.
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called ―akrasia,‖ ―no-strength (a-krasia),‖ weakness, ―the mind in which we act against our 23 24 better judgment.‖ (1) We lack foresight that violence never wins, and (2) violence persists even we know it, to show lack in character. Both lacks are beyond our understanding and control; they are our tragic mystery.
(1). Myopic Lack of Foresight People perpetrate violence both (a) as self-expression and (b) as a quick means to get what they desire. Both phenomena show myopia in foresight on how futile and self-defeating it is to appeal to violence for such purposes. A. Violence as Self-Expression Chuang Tzu‘s two stories tell us how myopic it is to appeal to violence for selfexpression. They are Brigand Chih‘s bluster for violence and the true sword of nature that defeats swords of violence, in two continuous Chapters 29 and 30. Story One: Brigand Chih 盗跖 (Chapter 29) declared a ―strong argument for violence‖: with violence one enjoys to express one‘s self-identity. With much pomp and circumstance he blasted, in essence, ―Life is short; I must bravely do whatever I want, even to kill off people 25 to live on happily ever after,‖ and haplessly, we add. However hideously hyperbolic the story and the claim may seem, they cut the familiar figure of dynastic rogue-rulers for whom Chuang Tzu reserved scathing attacks in his Chapter Ten, ―Rifling Coffers 胠篋.‖ In its proud display of violence, this story forcibly exhibits human weakness of myopia, on two counts. One, one is defective who must depend on killing people off, devastating others, to prop up self-identity, depending on others to prove oneself. Can‘t Chih and the tyrants stand alone full in themselves? Besides, two, Chih and tyrants need not resort to violence to prop themselves; it is sadly 26 restrictive in having to play only the brutal zero-sum game of ―you-die, so I-live‖; for them there was no win-win option. Killing others confirms oneself and no more, if at all, and even that is not guaranteed, for doing violence to others brings violence on oneself. That is why, to ward off violence that will boomerang back upon them, Chih and tyrants were so desperately eager, in fear perhaps, to project a macho image, to themselves and to others, of how invincibly tough and strong they were. Vulnerability-awareness breeds
22 I confess to an inability to find a Chinese equivalent to ―akrasia.‖ ―明知故犯‖ is narrowly legalistic, and Mencius‘ famous ―do not do, not cannot do 不為也, 非不能也‖ (1A7) does not judge ―do not do 不為‖ to be our root-inability 無能 or powerlessness 無力, that is, akrasia. 23 This is a convenient definition given in The New Oxford American Dictionary, 2005, p. 35. We will give a more careful description of ―akrasia‖ soon. 24 Note that I will use throughout this subsection B these same signs, [1] and [2], to show how the same two features variously appear as our basic weakness, akrasia, in violence, in these two features. 25 ―Thugs‖ the Indian Kali-devotees explicitly ritualize violence as such. ―Under covers of morality (Confucians) and law and order (Legalists), ‗sages‘ ritualize violence,‖ Brigand Chih said, and went to violence to express himself. Arthur Waley (Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China [1939], Stanford University Press, 1982, pp. 20-29) poignantly juxtaposes Chuang Tzu‘s story (ch. 29) of Brigand Chih‘s self-abandoned violence with Lieh Tzu‘s story (7/8) of self-abandoned hedonism of Kung-sun 公孫 brothers. Here are self-devastating ―sex and violence‖! ―On Swords (說劍 Shuo Chien)‖ is Chuang Tzu‘s story (ch. 30) of the greatest ―killing‖ that kills killing itself (with killers)—with a non-killing (storytelling). 26 We will see in ―D. Akrasia Today‖ that this ―only‖ is what makes Bush the world‘s riskiest fool.
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―preemptive assault‖ (Bush). We, much less they, do not know that such ―violence to stop violence‖ increases more mutual violence, more mutual cuttings down. We had better know, instead, that to ensure no-violence from them, ―we,‖ and all of us, must ensure them of no violence from us and assure them of prosperity with them together. This is the only way to prevent violence from boomeranging back to us. But those who brag about violence never know that, and do not want to know that. Hearing this story of Brigand Chih makes us wonder, ―How much more, countless times more, of guaranteed self-fulfillment/satisfaction/enhancement would they have enjoyed, were they to devote their prowess to promoting communal welfare, by helping people (Confucianism) and by facilitating letting each other be (Taoism)? Doesn‘t such activitiesfor-others decisively prove how genuinely mighty they are over everyone, even without 28 trying to be so?‖ Thus the Chih-story makes us realize how hazardously other-dependent and zero-sumrestrictive it is, actually, to exert in dread dreadful violence on the helpless. Enjoyment of self-identity need not depend on sadistic consumption of liver/kidney soups of the victims, whose relatives may at any moment return to tear Chih up; such possibility imprisons Chih in constant fear/violence. Chih could instead have devoted his pomposity to promoting enjoyment with millions, in whom his self-identity would have waxed a million-fold. 29
Story Two: Positively, the next story of Chuang Tzu‘s, ―On Swords 說劍 ‖ (Chapter 30), exposes the myopic lust for swords of violence that destroys others simply to end up destroying the swordsmen themselves. King Wen of Chao‘s 趙文王 craving for sword-fight brought to his state mass bloodshed and decline. Chuang Tzu, invited by the Crown Prince to stop the royal lust, came and merely told the story of ―three swords,‖ the Heaven‘s Sword nature-invincible, the Heaven-Son‘s Sword, nature-patterned politics pan-effective, and the Commoners‘ Sword inter-cutting to panperish. The sword is cutting efficacy, and this description itself sword-wields beyond sword; it is a stunning sword-stroke of genius. Is there a violent sword more non-violently allinvincible than this Heavenly one? The King was finally persuaded to stop his sword-lust. Thus Chuang Tzu‘s negative story and positive story above are the closest we can imagine on the extremity of violence-as-self-expression, which Chuang Tzu‘s invincible stories, sharper than the Sword of Commoners, help us to realize such violence as tragically myopic in foresight. Violence of self-expression is simple suicide, nothing else. 27 We must be clear. Preemption is prudential, but military assault is not. We must preemptively resolve the problem before it happens, but never use military assault to ―solve the problem‖ before carefully considering the problem and considering all alternatives. ―More important to stop mushroom clouds (by others) than to find a smoking gun‖ (C. Rice) is a backward logic, a blank check for attacking any one suspected of attacking us, a mad dog jumping the gun. 28 Similar stories go far back in time. Ssu-ma Ch‘ien in his magnum opus, History Records (史記, 卷二十五, 律書第三, 二段, 臺北: 建宏出版社, 1995, II.211) has a story of legendary despots, Chieh 桀 and Tschou 紂, on how strong they were to fight wild animals with bare hands and run alongside four horses. Sadly, their bottomless military greed made them enemies to people in every small-lane neighborhood. The strengths of both killed both. 29 To my knowledge, only James Legge renders ―說劍‖ as ―delight in the sword-fight‖ (taking 說 as 悅, as in the Analects 1/1) (The Texts of Taoism [1891], NY: Dover Publications, 1962, II: 186). Judging from the context, this is not a bad rendering, as I put it as ―craving for sword-fight‖ in the main text. All textual critical quibbles are just that, irrelevant quibbles that miss Chuang Tzu‘s stunning application of violence to cutting efficacy of non-violence.
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Violence as Means Tragically also, people and the nations habitually resort to violent warfare, mistaking it as a ―powerful means‖ to obtain what they desire, as a sure and secure ―quick fix.‖ Our common knowledge has it that in history sometimes violence does work to establish a dynasty, safe from outside invasion, to help common people to enjoy high standards of living, as Roman citizens did. A moment of reflection shows again, however, how myopic such usual romantic admiration of violence is, a ―quick fix‖ that spreads as wildfire to destroy everyone, as in the 30 sack of Rome. In a fit of angry frustration, people appeal to violence, blinded by their anger to see how eventually they lose what violence obtains, and lose themselves with their loss. Quick fix quickly fails. Self-defeating is violence as means, yet we often admire it as ―heroic.‖ Here are four stories of myopia on violence as means. Story 1: We extol an extreme intensity of devotion of an ancient loyal retainer Yü Ch‘üan 鬻 拳 who admonished with a sword his lord the viscount of Ch‘u 楚子, then cut off his own 31 feet to ―punish his crime.‖ In our admiration of him we do not realize, nor did he, that his ―loyalty‖ seriously maimed his lord‘s loyal retainer, himself; his violent ―loyal‖ act maimed his loyalty. Story 2: We traditionally eulogize our ―great national hero,‖ Yüeh Fei 岳飛, who tried single-handedly to restore his beloved crumbling Sung 宋 Dynasty, only to be done in by the 32 underhanded Ch‘in K‘ui 秦 檜 of his own dynasty. We do not realize, much less did he, that, had he been not as gung-ho in eagerly jumping out to attack the enemy, and instead waited calmly for a few more years, the situation would have righted itself, as Jullien said 33 with an historical hindsight. Yue Fei‘s admirable loyalty, impatient and violent, was an exercise in tragic futility that killed him. Story 3: We hail spontaneous popular revolt as an ―uprising (of) justice 起 義‖ in violent instinctive desperation to overthrow the tyrannical regime of, say, Ch‘in 秦. Such a revolution 30 See Edward Gibbon‘s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (6 volumes, 1776-1788). 31 Yü Ch‘üan 鬻拳 later committed suicide after burying the viscount of Ch‘u 楚子 who died of illness. The story is recorded in 春秋左傳 Annals of Spring and Autumn, 莊公十九年 (James Legge, The Ch‟un Ts‟ew, with the Tso chuen, Taipei reprint, 1972, pp. 98-99). For this and other similar stories, see my History, Thinking, and Literature in Chinese Philosophy, Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1991, pp. 235-259, where I collected/considered various ―memorable if not admirable‖ suicides under tragic dilemmas in ancient China. All these cases can be opposed and alternative solutions proposed in ways similar to that proposed here to Yü Ch‘üan‘s case. In other words, a collective indictment is launched here against all perpetrators/admirers of ―honorable violence‖; after all, honorable or no, violence is tragic violation of persons. 32 A similar story is the Forty-Seven Samurai in 忠臣藏 (Chūshingura: The Treasury of Loyal Retainers, tr. Donald Keene, NY: Columbia University Press, 1971). We can understand their rage if we see how folks in a North Carolina town felt—anger and pride—at the news that 9 or 10 of their boys died in the Iraqi war. Samurai also felt so, in anger and pride that we call vengeance and loyalty. Instead of killing their ―enemy‖ and committing suicides, however, they could have regarded their master as now living in them. They could have expressed true loyalty by so resolutely and persistently pursuing their enemy until the enemy realized his tragic mistake of unscrupulous disrespect to their lord that resulted in their lord‘s suicide and demolition of the entire household. This tragedy then would have resulted in the enemy‘s repentance, doing whose best to redeem his mistake by any means he could muster. Their persistence of this sort would have reduced the terrible tragedy of three-party deaths to just one, their lord‘s, and compensated for that death by their ―enemy.‖ Again, the fault of violence here lies in myopia in foresight, a lack of thinking through, what made them fall prey to a simple desperate ―honorable‖ way out in violence. 33 François Jullien, The Propensity of Things: Toward a History of Efficacy in China (1992), tr. Janet Lloyd, NY: Urzone, Inc., 1999, p. 201.
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was actually Ch‘in-violence boomeranged, to seed another round of violence in/against another dynasty. They thus shattered to pieces the nostalgic tradition of ―sagely throne-ceding 禪 讓.‖ They threw away Chuang Tzu‘s judicious advice (4/60-62) to deftly play with the tyrant‘s childish violence, as a skilled tiger tamer handles his killer tiger till it comes to fawn on him. They preferred instead to repeatedly fulfill Chuang Tzu‘s dire prediction (4/59-60), to play a praying mantis to violently bump into the oncoming cart of horrific situation. ―Right‖ or ―wrong,‖ violence builds nothing, in pan-destruction. Story 4: Horrors of the folly of fascination with violence continue to ―thrive‖ in today‘s greatest nation of democracy; emboldened by both chambers of Congress firmly in the 34 Republican grip, Bush was proudly displaying all his passion for violence. The folly lies in the stubborn refusal to consider all other alternatives to war, refusing to acknowledge that battle-violence solves nothing; it only festers/proliferates more problems. The Iraqi war was fought in defiance of the entire world opinions. Now its ―victory‖ is harvesting many lethal headaches: the Iraqis are shouting, ―Get out, Americans!‖ in less than a week after their children jubilantly threw flowers at the US soldiers; Iraq now is in a political turmoil while USA pulls out. Daily loss of human lives was compounded by loss of treasures of ancient civilization. Wholly inadequate hospitals were overwhelmed with the injured; security problems were everywhere. Business ―contracts for reconstruction‖ were clinched in secret, rejecting even 35 the British companies; the whole world was boiling with rage and frustration. Terrorism here and abroad is brewing. And the list goes on. Worst of all, Bush was not aware that these woes and his war belong together. Obama‘s ―taking on the Taliban‖ is now a replay of the Iraq debacle. Significantly, all four stories above are sociopolitical. As China‘s The Great Learning 大學 and Plato‘s The Republic show, society is individuality writ large, made visible. The Day of National Shame (國恥記念日) is May 9, 1915, when China signed the Twenty-One Demands, equal to The Day of Infamy, December 7, 1941, when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Yet ―shame‖ means for China and USA not all-attacks—including counterattacks—but only attacks by outsiders. No one takes counterattack as a moral ―shame,‖ violence that violates persons, a cardinal crime on humanity itself. Violence the impractical is ipso facto an immoral shame, however; it runs amuck all over, in history. It looks, however, as if we keep stressing violence less as ―violation of moral principles‖ than as pragmatic imprudence; this impression misses China‘s sentiment. In China, to be right 36 and proper (yi 義) is to be situation-appropriate (yi 宜); to be proper is to be appropriate. To be right is to be opportune, to act at the right time, to time rightly; rightness is timeliness that stays appropriate for all people. We understand such ―odd‖ ethics this way. When we do something right we expect to feel good. Surprisingly, we ―do good‖ and often feel no good. In fact, we all try to do right and often harvest disasters. Tyrants, 34 See ―D. Akrasia Today.‖ 35 ―Hostility to USA is worldwide now,‖ said Pue Research Center‘s global attitudes poll (June 3. 2003). 36 Archaic ―meet‖ means ―proper,‖ as in ―It was meet that we should make merry and be glad: for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found.‖ (Luke 15:32) ―It is a theater meet for great events.‖ China has sound-meaning homophonic resonance; sound-similarity ciphers sense-similarity. See ―Sound, Sight, Sense,‖ my History, Thinking, and Literature in Chinese Philosophy, Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1991, pp. 125-173.
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communists, and Hitlers abound, confidently doing ―good‖ to crank out pain all around. They neglect another side of the coin of actuality, the milieu. Thus China proposes yi 宜 as yi 義, i.e., being right-in-situ as being-right. Being right-in is to adjust-us to the milieu and adjustmilieu to us. 37 There are psychic adepts doing more of adjusting-us than adjusting-milieu; there are revolutionaries doing milieu-adjusting more. China‘s thesis remains that to adjust to fit 適 is the right. To fit is to inter-fit in the self and the situation to make the right-in-situ; all this makes the right. Chuang Tzu says, ―‗Shoes fitting‘ forgets the feet, belt fitting forgets the waist, and so forgetting right and wrong shows mind-heart fit in the world.‖ When all this 38 happens, it is the right ―forgotten.‖ Here we are so fit we feel nothing; we self-forget. It is joy of no joy. Here ethics is naturalistic, situational, and incorrigibly practical. The similarity between Fletcher‘s situation ethics and China‘s situationism is uncanny.39 The comparison deserves long and deep deliberation. Here is my preliminary thought. Fletcher, eager to oppose legalism, seems to connect love directly—without directives—to the situation. The ―situation‖ is protean and complex, so ―love‖ must be carefully set so as not to be sucked in situational whirlpool. Since ―love‖ is indefinable it must be clearly discerned. Failing to do so—so easy to fail—Fletcher falls in antinomianism he opposed. China in contrast has two anchors to its ethics—human nature and Nature as human family-milieu, history-certified. Inherent unbearable sensitivity to others Mencius crystallized in the concrete release of a bull in mortal jitters, and homecoming to Nature of all things in Chuang Tzu‘s so many concrete stories, anchor Chinese ―ethics‖ in nonsystematic actuality. Socrates died because he violated this situationism. For example, Chinese people could defend Crito against Socrates‘ refusal to flee from death-prison as follows. Socrates behaved ―appropriately‖ at the trial that was rigged, and predictably lost his defense. Now Socrates must behave ―appropriately‖ by fleeing the death penalty wrongly imposed on him. The ―Apology‖-appropriateness differs from the ―Crito‖-appropriateness because of the difference in both situations. What persists through the different sorts of appropriateness is his just living that enlightens young folks, as he eloquently explicated in his defense-apology. Thus, examining ―how ineffective violence is‖ is to consider how unethical it is, in China. Violent people often appeal to shortsighted calculations (―doing right‖) or abstract anti-situational reasoning (Socrates victimized); they are all blind to violence being shortlived, ruining everyone, victor-perpetrator and victim alike. They do not know that, in the end, violence destroys its intended effect and itself, i.e., violence violates ―right as right-insitu‖ to self-destroy. We must thus warn that ―legitimate use of force‖ is self-contradictory because it is selfdefeating, and therefore unethical. We must also warn against the other extreme of cheap pragmatism, that situation-appropriate is not opportunism of dry leaves in winds of shifting situation. To inter-fit heartfelt ideal and shifting situation betokens an abiding Situation of what there is, changing without changing. It is Nature alive in the Abiding Tao 常道.
37 Counseling is here. Cf. David D. Burns, Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy (1980), HarperCollins, 1999. 38 Chuang Tzu 19/62-63, abridged. This saying was quoted as spontaneity; here is another way to understand it. 39 Joseph Fletcher, Situation Ethics: The New Morality (1966). Cf. Harvey Cox, ed., The Situation Ethics Debate (1968), both by Philadelphia: Westminster Press.
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Thus, ―Tao tao-able is not the Abiding Tao,‖ says Lao Tzu. Tao is the Self-so 自然, Nature naturing itself. To dwell in this abiding Nature abides in our own self-so, our innate nature 性 that Taoists call natal virtue, te 德. The collection of Lao Tzu‘s sayings is called ―Tao Te Ching,‖ Classic of Tao and Te inter-fit, with good reason. Confucian humanity and righteousness 仁義 violate human nature by ―educating‖ it to death; the Taoist Tao and Te 道德 allow, accept, and accommodate human nature, nurturing it 養 性 to let it thrive of itself in Nature. A story of Chuang Tzu‘s describes how sinuously human nature thrives in Nature Milieu that keeps changing, how to go up and go down in it, now dragon-soaring, now snake40 slithering, with lively spontaneous harmony as our measure. It is Mother Nature flexibly nurturing in situation-sensitive friendship and kindness among all beings. All this differs from superficial opportunism.
(2). Radical Lack in Character, Akrasia We have considered how violence displays two myopic lacks of foresight in using violence as self-expression and as a quick fix that quickly fails. We would now see that our 41 myopic weakness manifests a radical weakness ; these tragic heroes of violence would not 42 have agreed, even if they were to be told the tragic defect of violence. That precisely demonstrates Akrasia, radical character-weakness. This sad ―stubborn weakness‖ ancient Greeks casually called ―akrasia,‖ namely, when we 43 have skills, capability, and desire to do something better, we still choose something worse. It is a radical human character-weakness beyond fathoming; we do not know why it is so or how to resolve it. 40 Chuang Tzu 20/1-8. See my meditation on this story in On Metaphoring: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 2001, pp. 146-160. 41 Perpetration of ―heroic violence‖ and its popular admiration result from moral education, so we can take this subsection as a Taoist indictment of moral education. As mentioned before, Taoism and sagely warnings are also an education, which educates us out of insidious ―moral education.‖ 42 ―If these heroes would not have listened, then they do not have ‗the desire to do something better,‘ hence they are not akratic, right?‖ Well, human psyche is larger than logic. Rejection may mean sour grapes; the more acrimoniously they reject something, the more intense attachment to it they may show. Of those who reject Confucianism and Taoism for pure tactics/strategies 術, Legalists/Realists 法家 are most systematic and articulate. The Legalists‘ behavior shows, despite themselves, that they may show more and know better than their overt rejection says. For example, can they resort to deceptive tactics without relying on Confucianism/Taoism? Han Fei Tzu‘s 韓非子 chapters, ―解老 (Understanding Lao Tzu)‖ and ―喻老 (Elucidating Lao Tzu),‖ explain Lao Tzu, whom he rejects; why? Then, the vehemence of their ―rebuttals‖ of Confucianism and Taoism may well betray their awareness of the two as something better. Thirdly, their ―instruction‖ can proceed (not in deceit they promote but) only on the basis of teacher-student trust, a Confucian virtue. Fourth, their government of cheating people had to appeal to Confucian ―ruler-ruled amity‖ for policies to work (Waley, Three Ways, op. cit., pp. 192-193). Fifth, negatively put, with brutal strategies in the royal court, all officials constantly risk their lives in service (Han Fei, Chapter 12, Waley, 183-188); most legalists lost their lives in state-violence after their great contributions to the state. These five pieces of circumstantial evidence show that Legalists‘ rejection of Confucianism and Taoism may well show sour grapes, knowing/desiring better and not doing it. They are more akratic than not. 43 On this notion of ―akrasia‖ and its bearing on Chinese philosophy, see my On Metaphoring: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2001, pp. 443-454. As I quoted the handy definition from The New Oxford American Dictionary, 2005, p. 35, I had to cut ―through weakness of will‖ at its end. Paul Edwards‘ massive 8 volumes of The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, NY: The Free Press, 1967, has no ―akrasia.‖ Terence Irwin (Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1985, pp. 410-111) casually takes ―akratēs‖ as ―incontinent.‖ Antony Flew, ed., A Dictionary of Philosophy, Revised Second Edition, NY:
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Chinese history manifests the mystery of akrasia; life goes on in violence while the sages keep warning us against it. Great Confucian and Taoist thinkers constantly admonished us against violence (―No self-violation 自暴 but self-possession 自得!‖) while Chinese history is awash in an unceasing series of violence, in thought (Hsün Tzu, Legalism) and in deeds 44 (tyrants, Yueh Fei). If all this were no abysmal akrasia on a cultural/historical/national scale, we would not know what it is. Here is the fact: Many thoughtful proposals against violence were irresistible and ignored. Sun Tzu‘s 孫子 subtle ―war of no war‖ strategy wanted us to destroy enmity, not enemy lives; it was a tactful bloodless maneuver to win enemies over entirely, with no loss of 45 lives/profits on either side. Yet, for all his admonition, all wars in Chinese history have been bloody destructive beyond measure. Sadly, all this while, no one listened to Sun Tzu, not 46 even Mao Tse-tung who claimed to have closely studied him. ―But weren‘t the violent World Wars I and II justified as appropriate responses in kind to decimate Hitler in brutal ethnic cleansing and aggressions?‖ Well, violence only spreads violence; violence can never remove violence, as post-WWII emergence of Neo-Nazis testifies. After all, destruction of destruction can never construct, only dissolution of destruction can initiate construction, and soft calm dissolution can never be achieved by violence that only destroys. Taking advantage of swift, pointed, yet short-lived efficacy of violence, the Allied Forces could have quickly stopped the spread of Nazism, never an all-out war, and then quickly appealed to other non-violent means to liquidate Nazism by and by. Better yet, non-Nazi nations should have taken measures to prevent Nazism from occurring in the first place.
St. Martin, 1979, p. 372, has it as ―weakness of will,‖ a subordinate problem in ―intention‖ and ―morality.‖ No philosopher took this notion with seriousness it deserves. Sad. 44 China does have rare exceptions. Poet 曹植 Ts‘ao Chih who, ordered by his brother-lord 曹操 to compose a poem in 7 steps on pain of death, beautifully responded with a poem ending with ―Stalks under pot burning, beans in pot crying; originally of the same root born, why mutual boiling so dire? 煮豆燃豆萁，萁在釜下燃，豆在釜中泣，本自同根生，相煎何太急‖ This line shamed Ts‘ao Ts‘ao into ceasing his violence. Having met unfair royal punishment, Ssu-ma Chi‘ien 司馬遷 vindicated the violent injustice by devoting the rest of his life to painstaking researches to produce the monumental 史記 (History Records). It has detailed descriptions and judicious judgments on Chinese history, covering 2500 years from the mythical Yellow Emperor (2696-2599 BCE) to Emperor Wu of the Han (140-87 BCE). Nothing is more thorough, justified, and lethal a vengeance than such a historical judgment; he executed an absolutely irrefutable world judgment with his thoroughgoing world history! 45 Lao Tzu said (9), ―Task done, retire oneself 功遂身退‖; ―retire 退‖ is a great tactical move, said Sun Tzu also. History Records has a moving story (卷四十四, 魏世家第十四, op. cit., III.259-260). Prince Shen on his way to battle against Ch‘i was offered an all-win strategy by Hsü Tzu, who said, ―If you win, you get only wealthier Wei and at most become emperor. If you do not win, there would be no more Wei.‖ Prince Shen wanted to retreat, but his subordinates said that to retreat after coming out for battle amounted to defeat. So they fought, were defeated, and the Prince was taken prisoner. In contrast, Fan Sui retreated at the right moment, after his achievement in the dynasty, and gain safety (ibid., 卷七十九, 范睢蔡澤列傳第十九, IV.240-243). Fan Li 范蠡 also cleverly retired (ibid., 卷一百二十九, 貨殖列傳第六十九, V.617-618). George Washington‘s popularity peaked precisely by withdrawing himself home to Mount Vernon after guiding the colonial armies to victory. See Stanley Weintraub, General Washington‟s Christmas Farewell: A Mount Vernon Homecoming, 1783, NY: The Free Press, 2003. Is George W. Bush here? Where is Barack Obama? 46 See Griffith‘s comments in Sun Tzu: The Art of War, tr. and intr. Samuel B. Griffith, Oxford University Press, 1963, 1971, pp. 45-62.
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Sadly, China had Legalism with strategy-proposals not above embracing violence. Five phenomena below demonstrate how foolish Han Fei Tzu‘s 韓非子 Legalist proposal was; it was rulers‘ covert manual to enrich the state with militarism and agriculture. First, he argued against all ―idle speculations,‖ Confucian and Taoist; he argued that arguments are pragmatically ineffective, blind to how nature-rooted Confucianism and Taoism are. Secondly, Han Fei‘s ―ruler supreme‖ policy had no rationale while Mencius‘ proposal was based on the Heaven so siding with the people as to take people as the Heaven‘s ears and mouths (5A5). Beyond these two theoretical myopias in brutal regal policy without base, three further points show the Legalist‘s stubborn pragmatic myopia. One, Han Fei obstinately refused to see the simple fact that royal selfishness is selflimiting, however far it militarily extends its territory, for it is just for the ruler, not for the people. Worse, selfishness is brutally self-destructive, for people would sooner than later rise up in revolt. Selfishness defeats itself, as history bears out Mencius‘ many ominous predictions against royal lives. Two, Han Fei proposed to the ruler a legal ―stick and carrot‖ 賞罰 system to force people to labors agricultural and military, and enriching the ruler; people were royal pawns. Han Fei stubbornly refused to listen to Mencius‘ warning (1B8, 4B3) that brutalized people would brutally revolt, or to Lao Tzu‘s warning (74, 75) that people would not fear to die with their ruler so brutal to them. Three, warfare backed by agriculture compose Han Fei‘s dual royal businesses. Here again he obdurately refused to look around to see how thoroughly warfare devastated every state that perpetrated it, as Mencius and Lao Tzu kept warning us all. Those who wield swords perish by swords; there has never in history been a single winner by the sword. Han Fei‘s Realpolitik was unrealistic, no, counter-realistic. What was so tragic was that Confucians, Taoists, and many others who saw through the situation have constantly been bewailing woes of wars around Han Fei, who steadfastly refused them, even opposed them. Han Fei Tzu was a blind proponent of violence, a genius of abysmal akrasia par excellence, in theory, in practice. Confucians, Taoists, and Sun Tzu themselves were no less tragic. Mencius warned people against mutual profit-grabbing among them and among the states (1A1), and against laying waste the Ox Mount of our nature originally lush (6A8), to argue for nurturing our innate, heartfelt, and unbearable sensitivity to people (1A7, 2A6, 6A6). These arguments against violence for our inborn compassionate sensitivity were stunning/compelling/invincible. No less brilliant were the Taoists‘ constant ―arguments‖ for patient self-cultivation in robust strategic nonviolence. For all this, however, insensitive violence has been going on, as if no one said anything at all about it. Sun Tzu 孫子 was spectacular. He wanted us to fight against fight itself with brilliant non 48 fight tactics. He proposed putting our soldiers in strategic positions, trailing/controlling the situation-dynamics, persistent reconnaissance, loving/unifying/galvanizing our forces/people,
47 Or brutal ―Realism‖ as Waley calls him. Our story here, criticizing Chinese Realpolitik, constantly side-glances at brutal Machiavellianism in the West today. This is a concrete execution of story-thinking, telling one story to wink at another. 48 Sun Tzu said that people need strong soldiers to enjoy security from oppression but did not say that soldiers must fight and kill. Soldiers must be strong as firemen are well prepared, to prevent terrors of fire and oppression.
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displaying our strength to overwhelm the enemy to cower, speedy surprises to melt away opposition without shedding a single drop of blood. These tactics would have adroitly dissolved enmity to take by surprise the whole enemy—their allegiance, soldiers, power, people, land, and assets. His was a psychological 49 50 warfare of no-violence to victory total and damage-less. Sun Tzu‘s tactics synthesized all Chinese wisdom. He took over Legalism in Chapter Eleven, ―Nine Varieties of Ground,‖ Taoism in opportune swiftness, things‘ propensity, and trailing the enemy, Confucianism in galvanizing soldiers and people and winning over the enemy‘s hearts, and the I Ching in trailing the trends of the times. Sadly, although Ch‘in Shih Huang 秦始皇 and Mao Tse-tung 毛澤東 loved and studied Sun Tzu and claimed to have followed him, neither really followed him. Both ended in bloody demise. In short, history in China exhibits this mysterious tragedy, that such irresistible, irrefutable, flawless, and brilliant advices of many sages of many schools were coupled with such terrible turning of all-deaf ears to them throughout devastating history!
C. The Mystery of Akratic Weakness Our tragedy is that no one pays attention to sagely advice so invincible/irresistible, and everyone, even today, continues instead the foolish way of violence to self-destroy. There has been offered, in China and elsewhere, many ―strategies‖ for victory such as ―war of no-war‖ (Sun Tzu), and dissolving enmity by skillful nonviolence (Chuang Tzu) in Gandhi style. Histories of China and beyond show that none has been followed. I am under no illusion, either, that my recent proposal to create a milieu combining all three Chinese schools of thought that have failed, ―Realism (Fajia 法家), Human Akrasia, and 51 the Milieu of Ultimate Virtue,‖ would work. Failure is sad; failure when knowing how to avoid it is sadly and dreadfully mysterious. It is the tragedy of akrasia, of inveterate human weakness in violence under the veneer of civilization. 49 ―No-violence‖ is the state of lack of violence; ―nonviolence‖ is a deft technique of struggle with the enemy. They are different though related. 50 Mark McNeilly succinctly depicted the futility of war-dreams (e.g., ―fight this war to end all wars‖) in Sun Tzu and the Art of Modern Warfare, Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 16-17, 19-21, 24-27, et passim. Sadly, McNeilly failed to see [a] how radical Sun Tzu‘s ideal of winning without fighting is (i.e., total opposition to violence), and [b] why many generals ―followed‖ Sun Tzu and still got defeated (i.e., no one really followed Sun Tzu‘s opposition to violence). Sun Tzu‘s ―six principles‖ (culled by McNeilly) are strategies of how to implement [a], to win without fighting; that is, how to stop fighting altogether, to literally win the war itself, not win in war. Sadly again, all generals and McNeilly take these principles as strategies of fighting. Sun Tzu never titled his book, ―the art of war‖; his book was called ―methods of soldiery (兵法 ping fa).‖ To ready firefighters schemes to render them idle; training soldiers schemes for their uselessness. Soldiers are instruments of peace, of war-deterrence. ―Doesn‘t (nuclear) deterrence simply worsen the threat of (nuclear) war? Isn‘t the ‗deterrence‘ of anti-missile defense program just another escalation of international hostility?‖ Indeed. We should then expand the meanings of deterrence, soldiery, attack, and weaponry. To attack enemy, we must dissolve its cause, their enmity, and to do so we must wield the ―sword‖ of humanitarian aids. On the first day of war in Afghanistan alone, USA dropped 40 bombs, each costing $1 million. We could have used these $40 millions to build hospitals, schools, roads, and markets there. That is the most powerful attack, for it is the most efficient dissolution of enmity, a radical deterrence. Vaguely sensing this point is an essay by Fotini Christia and Michael Semple‘s ―Flipping the Taliban,‖ Foreign Affairs, July/August 2009, pp. 34-45, arguing for persuasion of insurgents to defect. 51 Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, December 2002, Vol. II, No. 1, pp. 21-44.
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Vlastos has a tight rehearsal of Socrates‘ denial of Acrasia. The fact remains, however, that Akrasia stubbornly persists through all human history. Socrates and Vlastos would of course claim some faults in our understanding on facts, e.g., not knowing ―good,‖ or not ―heartily‖ knowing good, etc. Their splendid thesis of ―knowing good must act out good‖ thus splendidly stays up there separate, irrelevant and inapplicable to actuality. Again, there has been no dearth of explanations of the situation; we cite two here, both futile. One, we can say of this ubiquitous failure that a sick man‘s refusal of a cure says nothing against the cure itself if it is not adopted. It remains curious, however, that such an attractive cure has attracted no one. Besides, the refusal here is the sickness itself and so the cure, whatever it is, is powerless to ―cure‖ at all. Two, we can still say that past failures warrant no future ones. Still, several millennia of relentless trials against violence have all failed in China and worldwide, and such consistent, persistent, and ubiquitous failures have probably exhausted all alternative possibilities. All their failures in the devastated past hardly offer a great prospect for the future of no violence. Thus violence in China goes on to manifest all our mysterious ubiquitous weakness, our shared akrasia, all too sinister, helpless, and devastating. George Orwell‘s Animal Farm (1945) was finally premiered in mid-November 2002, in Chinese, in Peking, as the mighty People‘s Congress concluded with an announcement of the new leader. The play called our attention to China‘s bitter Orwellian irony, that Mao arose against dictatorship to become a dictator himself, and that the Communist Party arose against China‘s dictatorial tradition only to continue it, while all rebellions and dictatorships revel in violence. Mao and the Chinese history make an enormous ―Animal Farm‖ reenacted continually in bloodshed worldwide. Orwell joins the august roster of sages in China to tirelessly warn us against violence, and we gleefully carry on violence; our inability to stop it, despite repeated sagely warnings, clings on to history. So, touting Chinese thinking as a ―pragmatic philosophy‖ touts its failure. It has pragmatically failed to dissuade people from violence, and has failed to explain 53 why its dissuasion has failed. The pen is mightier than the sword, they say; the sages have been wielding their formidable brushes and pens against our self-defeating sword, and what stubbornness our weak sword is, defeating itself against the sagely ―mighty pen‖! Chronic akrasia of dire addiction to violence gnaws at the inner sanctum and outer of human nature, under the veneer of civilization. Violence is thus quite alive and well today. Jesus warned, ―All they that take the sword 54 shall perish with the sword,‖ before he, sword-less, perished by it. The situation persists convolutedly in Chinese and world histories—those with swords against others with swords make others perish, thereby perish themselves with swords, and violent life-scenes continue
52 Gregory Vlastos, Studies in Greek Philosophy II, Princeton University Press, 1995, pp. 43-59. 53 I bewailed this fact in ―World Inter-Learning: Global Agenda for the Teaching of Philosophy,‖ Teaching Philosophy on the Eve of the Twenty-First Century, eds. David Evans and Ioanna Kuçuradi, Ankara, Turkey: International Federation of Philosophical Societies, 1998, pp. 155-177, esp. pp. 170-174, and On Metaphoring: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2001, pp. 443-455. 54 Matthew 26:52 describes a poignant historic moment, as prophesied by Obadiah 15, among many others.
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to set and play on, ad nauseam. History reenacts itself for Collingwood. We add, it has been reenacting itself violently with a bloody vengeance. The miracle is that, despite centuries of continuous butcheries, China today still has the problem of curbing their population increase, and world population has also been growing. The world goes on growing, replete with clangs and booms of weaponry of mass destruction. Bush‘s clangs were today‘s variations of the abiding tunes of violence. Is Obama far behind?
D. A Sad Postscript We round up this violence-portrait with three sad points: (a) what violence means, (b) what sagely injunctions amount to in our violence-situation, and (c) our radical bewilderment. (a) In sum, violence is impatient violation of personal integrity, to dazzlingly display not strength—calm, deliberate, efficient, and long-lasting in its effect—but a lack of foresight that violence defeats itself, that violently hitting others boomerangs hitting the hitter back, to destroy all. Such curious myopia is unable to see the long-term efficacy of alternatives to violence. Most of us sold on violence would laugh off not-violent actions as simple inaction, an easy target of butchery, violence to us by others, and we should only hit it back with our violence to ―keep the rogues down.‖ We do not realize that no-violence is not inaction, and alternatives to violence are various, ingenious, powerful ―attacks‖—―attack‖ is no ―violence‖—on enmity the root of enemies, with such tactics, among others, as Sun Tzu proposed. We must ―bomb‖ enemies with constructive humanitarian aids. Constructive aids to enemies are, pace Bush, not a sequel to war-violence but its effective alternatives, powerful attacks in their own right. In fact, there is no other way of real ―attack.‖ We can bypass cynicism of taking any foreign aid as an economic tool of American imperialism, by anonymously—no label, ―made in USA‖—building schools, e.g., to induce beginning a spontaneous peace-revolution from inside the society. It can be an exciting 56 adventure, as shown by a New York Times bestseller story, Three Cups of Tea, telling of a failed and rescued mountaineer Mortenson who returned to the poverty-stricken village and helped build fifty-five schools for girls in ten years. The village was thus consolidated from the ground up, all by itself, in line with Mortenson‘s conviction that ―you can change a culture by giving its girls the tools to grow up educated so they can help themselves.‖ He then confessed, ―It was amazing to see the idea in action, working so well after only a generation, and it fired me up to fight for girls‘ education 57 in Pakistan.‖ He sowed silent seeds to the self-growth of a village. He was a catalyst invisible, exciting, invincible. Sadly, we stubbornly refuse to admit the above actual story as even feasible, and despise it as idle idealism of Pollyanna‘s pies in the sky, although we all know and desire all above in our heart of hearts—remember, Three Cups of Tea is a New York Times bestseller—and are 55 R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (1946, 1993), The Principles of History (1999), both from Oxford University Press. His ―re-enactment‖ as posterity reliving the ideas of historical individuals, is here widened to mean history reenacting itself among the historians and the people reenacting the past. 56 Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin, Three Cups of Tea: One Man‟s Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time, NY: Penguin, 2007. 57 Ibid., p. 234.
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always eminently capable of doing so, as Taoists and Confucians repeatedly insisted. Such our refusal itself, stubbornly clinging on to violence, constitutes a mysterious myopia that exhibits weakness of personal character, dubbed ―akrasia.‖ Violence is impetuous disastrous Akrasia, nothing else. (b) What do we say about various sagely injunctions in China under such an akratic circumstance? Reviewing what they were and how they transpired in history gives us three sad akratic points. One, Mencius‘ Parable of the Bull Mount (6A8) says that the originally lush mountain of human nature is now laid waste by constant wood-chopping and grass-grazing, and we must restore it to its lush original state. We ask, ―Whence the chopping/grazing? Why do you want to restore it to its ‗original goodness‘? How do you know goodness?,‖ and no one can answer our question. Nor can another extreme answer our query. Hsün Tzu (23/18-20) nudges us to see that the hungry young grab foods from parents, to testify to human nature being innately bad, and wants to teach/train/shape us into decent behaving persons. We ask, ―Whence the badness of human nature? How do you, being bad yourself, know ‗good‘? Why do you, being bad, desire to teach/shape ‗bad us‘ into good persons?,‖ and, again, no one can answer. Neither Mencius nor Hsün Tzu can answer our query, and so they propose cognitive akratic mystery. In usual Akrasia, we know, desire, and can do the better, and we do not do it; we display performative Akrasia. These sagely injunctions may themselves display cognitive Akrasia. Here they observe how we do, assume we all desire to be good, can attain it by cultivation (Mencius) or education (Hsün Tzu), and neither knows why they assume so. Two, based on original human goodness (Mencius) or badness (Hsün Tzu), however 58 mysterious, both agree to desire/struggle for humans to become ―good.‖ Is human nature ―good‖ after all, then, in that we all want to restore or shape ourselves (our human nature?) toward good? Is human nature ―meta-good‖? it does not matter, for both Mencius and Hsün Tzu have miserably failed in their projects, as history reports. What made them fail? Three, the situational cause is simple; they failed because we have constantly been perpetrating violence despite their persistent warnings. Why do we do ―violence‖? We do not know. We only characterize this strange situation—wanting/able to do good yet not doing it—as human weakness, Akrasia, which may mean we are not evil, for we all still want to 59 become good, and yet, for all our desire and abilities, we remain no good. Violence manifests such akratic weakness all around, human, all too sadly human. Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan (1651) famously declared, ―Man‘s natural state is a war of every man, against every man, (and our) life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.‖ We have unhappily shown that he was correct, and thereby shown that he did not realize that such ―natural state‖ of human violence is anything but natural. All this is a brutish mystery, for we have ascertained and demonstrated that our unrelenting fascination with violence and its 58 We may take the legalists such as Han Fei Tzu as the ―truncated Hsün Tzu‖ their teacher. 59 This subsection has some repetitions for emphasis. It assumes all along that violence is evil without qualification, for violence violates personal integrity that is basic and inviolable; yet it did no wholesale defense of its assumption, for its main thesis is not violence but violence as weakness. For the same reason, it only touched on nonviolence, assuming that nonviolence-as-inaction spells an easy butchery by marauding or systematic violence, while nonviolence-as-tactic is an active complex maneuver as Gandhi and Martin Luther King carried out. Such defense of violence as evil and careful reflections on nonviolence, invite another essay another time.
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persistent perpetration exhibit our weakness at the root; we call it akrasia. And we don‘t know its why. (c) All in all, persistent perpetration of violence sadly displays our akrasia on two levels. One, we actually, historically, display akrasia in being aware, desirous, and capable of noviolence yet not practicing it. Two, we display akrasia at a meta-level as well, as knowing why this is so and how to resolve it (sagely injunctions) yet stubbornly, proudly, refuse to implement our knowledge to follow through with sagely injunctions. We are akratic through and through. Worse, we are abysmally ignorant of its why and its way out. Socrates wants us to stop pretending to know, by relentless admission of ignorance in self-examination, perhaps assuming that self-examination would increase knowledge. He may not realize that precisely here in our stubborn perpetuation of violence, self-examination joins self-ignorance to inter-enhance, for the more we examine violence, the more ignorant of ourselves we grow in violence. We are utterly at a loss, not knowing what is such impetuous inability at the root, so often dazzlingly displayed as continual inter-violence, much less how to deal with it.60 Thus we humans remain a bestial mystery of violence-akrasia, under a veneer of human civilization that keeps producing more effective and more numerous weapons of mass destruction, ever more lethal, more ―specific, operative, and complete.‖ The mystery of akratic violence is our vast ―nasty‖ wickedness beyond straight ―brutish‖ wickedness, beyond our grasp. Finally, an important though subordinate, caveat must be entered to this wholesale objection to violence. Pan-destructive violence serves as instrument to species preservation. Violence is used to ward off outside intrusion, and preserve a species by keeping spaces, selecting the stronger, and protecting the weak via ranking order. Violence pushes evolution in history natural and human. For all its crude scientism, Lorenz61 reminds us of this point. Still, violence as instrument does not change our major pan-opposition to violence.
DEVOTION AND FANATICISM Our consideration on violence leads us to ask: Can we be justifiably committed to violence, as, e.g., protest by the oppressed (and species preservation mentioned above)? Cox without hesitation says Yes! to such violence, adding that he is tired of giving rationale 62 without gut feelings, as he endorses Joseph Fletcher‘s ―situation ethics.‖ Cox is a firecracker without base. Cox firecracker provokes us to ask, radically, ―Can commitment itself be good or evil?‖ Hitler gave his life to his racial and national dream, however selfish; Socrates gave his life to his philosophic mission. Both equally and genuinely committed themselves to their ideals to their death, yet one is judged fanatic and the other, devoted. We ask, ―Why? How does fanaticism differ from devotion?‖ This is a fascinatingly important question we cannot help but explore; story-thinking could help us here.
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Is this our akrasia at the third level? We had better stop here, though, lest we are sucked into Akrasia-quagmire. Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression, NY: Bantam, 1967. 62 Harvey Cox, ed., The Situation Ethics Debate, Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1968, pp. 19-20. 61
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One could say that both fanaticism and devotion are genuine, and yet using violence as means to solidifying the integrity of the oppressed may or may not be a good proposal, depending on the goal‘s range; Hitler‘s was narrowly exclusive, while Socrates‘ (passively violent) was invitingly comprehensive. The protest of the oppressed must not violate (with violence) oppressor‘s integrity to violate the goal of the oppressed, i.e., universal spread of integrity. Violence for species in nature observes this general rule, in that lions do not wipe out zebras, nor do zebras completely dodge lions. This view is all right as far as it goes, but we feel a bit uneasy. Can life-commitment itself be value-neutral, whose value depends on something external such as its goal? Can‘t ―authenticity‖ itself be intrinsically valuable? What does ―range of goal‖ mean? Perhaps responding to the last question shall illumine the first two. This is because goal and commitment are mutually internal, that each is an essential element of the other, so much so that goal without commitment is as empty as commitment without goal is blind, that neither is complete without the other. And so an authentic commitment to a narrow exclusive ideal is self-violating fanaticism as that to an inclusive mission is self-fulfilling devotion, and this answer answers the other question on whether violence can justifiably be done, for violence would violate in the end all persons, and so violence can never be justified even if done to defend one‘s integrity against being brutally oppressed. The key in the oppressed protesting is the range of their humanitarian goal, a narrow one vs. a comprehensive one. We must look into what this ―range‖ means here. Narrow vs. comprehensive ranges at their logical minimum mean ―A only, not not-A‖ vs. ―A and not-A.‖ Now, let us put some concrete contents into this bare logical structure, in five points. (1) The fanatic would insist, e.g., Saddam is evil, so we have no alternative but to militarily attack Iraq. The devoted would caution themselves, Saddam is evil, therefore we must try as many ways as possible to restrain or, better, reform him, and war is the worst possible way and should be avoided; after all, it is easy to destroy and very difficult to reform. (2) It is relatively easy to describe the fanatic-devoted distinction under monarchy, where ―loyalty‖ is its hallmark. The fanatic subjects blindly follow the ruler while the devoted usually apply loyal remonstration, risking an accusation of betrayal or sedition. Democracy, in contrast, upholds a pluralism of people‘s opinions, where any opinion is respected. It is difficult to see what the fanatic-devoted distinction would mean in democracy. We venture to say, in democracy fanatic people are identified by a fixated obsession with a specific position, while the devoted steadfastly keep many options open. Today many equally plausible yet mutually incompatible positions vie for loyalty. The right to life opposes the right of choice on the abortion dilemma. National security is pitted against civil rights to individual privacy in times of national insecurity. The right to bear arms meets community safety on the issue of possessing lethal weapons, and the list goes on. We would say that fanatic people rally to one position and reject all others; the devoted watch vigilantly over the situation to determine what specific position is appropriate in one situation, while keeping an eye on other alternatives, always ready to adopt another position when the situation changes. Thus in democracy, devotion that keeps options open is a much harder position to take than fanaticism that comfortably settles on one position and no other. (3) Upholding people‘s opinions, democracy risks blindly following a specific popular opinion no matter what, falling into smug mob-fanaticism. Comfort lies in number. Democracy thus deteriorates to crowd-rule under demagoguery; it is ―the worst form of
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government‖ (Plato, Churchill). Antidote to such public deterioration lies in public warnings, perhaps in the form of journalism and multimedia. We remember it was the journalists who exposed and provoked Nixon‘s Watergate scandal that brought him down. Many crises—non-existence of Saddam‘s weapons of mass destruction, negligence in face of clear intelligence signs of 911 before 911, American soldiers‘ mistreatments of Iraqi prisoners—were brought out to the public only by the journalists. They clamor for Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld to resign on pain of impeachment, yet no impeachment of 63 64 Commander in Chief George W. Bush was proposed, though John Kerry came close. Alarmingly, journalism and multimedia are easily swayed or ―bought‖ by financial/political powers into their mouthpieces. An antidote to selling out the soul of journalistic integrity is adherence to its independent integrity—by being steadfastly skeptical, ―outrageous‖ to public common sense, being ―voices in the wilderness‖ and ―wooden bells 木鐸‖ to sound public warnings and to call for public attention. Multimedia journalism should be outrageous but not out of line; journalists do not act on what they signal, but call attention to keep options resolutely open. (4) Such journalistic warnings are many and diverse; one journalist says one thing, another, another thing. They are also time-sensitive, now saying this point, now that. Democracy is so confusing and disturbing, and devotion to it is not easy. Here, comparison with medieval Japanese samurai is instructive. Good samurai have three traits: they are fiercely loyal to the lord to their deaths, highly cultured (in poetry, Zen meditation, flower arrangement), and good swordsmen. We today could be ―good samurai‖ as well, if we fulfill the above three traits adjusted appropriately. First, we should be devoted to the principle of democracy; ―I defend to the death your right to express an opinion I despise‖ (Voltaire). Second, we must be as highly cultured as we can, for democracy cannot work without educated people (Jefferson); ―Upon the education of 65 the people of this country the fate of this country depends‖ (Disraeli). Finally, such cultivation of honor and high culture gives us ―good sense,‖ the ―sword‖ to keep options open, helped by skeptical journalism to keep journalists skeptical, to open to may options and to choose one for the ―situation now.‖ (5) We have focused on devotion by considering a concrete question, ―What should we do to be a good samurai today?‖ Let us continue it by zeroing in on the final requirement of a good samurai, good swordsmanship, for we do have to fight a good fight. Samurai swordsmanship today amounts to describing how to fight a clean, aboveboard, and beautiful fight today as good samurai did. Three descriptions can be raised. One: Samurai had many ―schools‖ of swordsmanship; today‘s ―swordsmanship‖ has as many styles as we have cultures, mores, conventions, and morals that crystallize into laws and regulations. This is the style of justice and standard of behavior, the ―frame‖ of a specific
63 Bush is impeachable for three reasons. He is impeachable for dereliction of duty as commander in chief if he knew of no prisoner abuse, for failure to stop it if he knew. Thirdly, unique to him, his violence-tendency, expressed in his self-righteous tone in war on terrorism and ―legal‖ brutal treatments of ―enemy combatants‖ must have seeped throughout the military establishment to create a climate that bred such routine abuse. 64 John Kerry said on May 9, 2004 that the chain of command goes all the way up to the Commander in Chief who must be responsible. This is the direct result of unilateralism of force. Our force may have no rival anywhere, but our moral authority is the lowest in the world. 65 Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) said so in the House of Commons, 15 June 1874.
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cultural district we must conform to and wield as sword when we live there to fight for ―justice,‖ unless the socio-cultural frame itself is ―out of line.‖ China has such a socio-ethical frame, the codes of honor, in Four/Eight Cardinal Virtues 66 of Confucianism, and Chuang Tzu extends them into honor among thieves, as Plato did for 67 ancient Greece. When in Rome, we should do as the Romans do; so should we as the 68 Japanese when in Japan. Medieval samurai were loyal to such ―codes of honor‖ that cost them dearly, as The Tale of the Heike tragically depicts, and laments them on a higher 69 plane/frame, Buddhism. Two: The Tale of the Heike depicts how those samurai died with their not-so-good lords of the Taira clan, to leave us with a nagging doubt if the tragedy was a noble/correct one, or not. The story supposedly illustrates the Buddhist doctrine of impermanence. We suspect instead the tragedy is of ―fanaticism.‖ The samurai may have rushed to perish under the narrowly defined ―loyalty,‖ blindly following their codes of honor, blind to what they were 70 really up to. Failure to self-examine here leads to fanaticism. Their failure leads us to tarry for a while in ―evanescence.‖ Evanescence has at least four physiognomies, four facial types so fascinating, Japanese, Buddhistic, Western, and Chinese. Mind you, only stories can cover them, not logic-rationality that is quite powerless here. Here are these four stories on four types of evanescence; there may well be more. Japan‟s adoration of evanescence as beauty does not adore the loss of things, so much as the moving of beauty appearing and then vanishing, over and over, inexorably. This sure repeated move is what is beautiful. Beauty is dynamics alive, joyous or tragic. Japan wallows in this dynamics, even purposely jumps into it, often to punctuate the vanishing with selfdestruction, i.e., suicide. This may be one rationale for Japan‘s love of suicide. In contrast, Buddhism embraces evanescence as bliss. The bliss is no elation in evanescence at all but in the clean clarity of my awakening to it, where ―I‖ vanishes. I cannot wallow in vanishing; instead I am in joy of the vanishing of my very awakening. Since all vanishes, my joy also vanishes, and chanting such ―vanity of vanity, all is vanity‖ is bliss—of bliss vanished. The whole process is quite self-contradictory in its consistency. In the West, evanescence is impermanence, disdained (im-) by permanence. The West struggles out of the cave of flickering impermanence toward serene logic of the ―law of nature,‖ to control impermanence, to cut decay and contingency with continual supply of manufactured goods, of health ―insurance‖ against illness, of life insurance against death. The West fights against brutal impermanence surrounding it as it used to fight against gods; it used to always lose, but now it is winning inside and out. The West the Sisyphus happily pushes his assured rock of impermanence.
66 E.g., Chuang Tzu, 10/11-13, 17/62-64. 67 The Republic, I.351. 68 Cf. M. Y. Aoki and M. B. Dardess, eds., As the Japanese See It, Hawaii University Press, 1981. 69 Two English translations of Heike Monogatari 平家物語 I know of are both titled The Tale of the Heike. One is a translation by H. Kitagawa and B. T. Tsuchida, Two Volumes, University of Tokyo Press, 1975, 1989, etc. Another is a translation by H. C. McCullough, Stanford University Press, 1988, 1999, etc., who mentioned A. L. Sadler‘s translation (Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, 1918, 1921). 70 Similar suspicion of fanaticism can be shown in the Forty-Seven Samurai in 忠臣藏 (Chūshingura: The Treasury of Loyal Retainers, tr. Donald Keene, NY: Columbia University Press, 1971), 47 samurai‘s ―success‖ of revenge over their lord‘s ―enemy,‖ ending in mass hara-kiri, disembowelments. We mentioned this sad story before.
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China‟s evanescence is impermanence as correlate of permanence. In the child‘s wonder, China romps and roams in nature‘s seasonal rhythm unpredictable, chant-able yet unexpected, in joy and in sorrow. This inescapable adventure is part and parcel of history that we are. China meticulously jots down in amazement all such ongoing of life. So fascinated, China composes nature‘s mathematical poetry to partake of it to envisage what comes to be. Nature‘s poetry is heaven‘s web blossoming in literature as history, telling its stories, one at a time, of a biography of nature inside us and out. Life‘s impermanence is nature‘s rhythm ever surprising, composing the tapestry of literature-history. Here harmony is achieved as a task in our living of impermanence, to live out life‘s poetry. Where does ―devotion‖ fit in all this? It must doggedly be for the entire humanity. ―I will 71 defend to the death your right to express your opinion that I despise.‖ This biting statement jolts us into realizing a principle, conscientious, democratic, to which we should be devoted. Here is the warrior spirit fighting to death on two fronts. Today‘s samurai would battle against social lethargy, whose mores/customs tend to cultural bigotry, to fight for ―your right to self-expression,‖ whatever it is, while fighting against ―your‖ opinion that I see is reprehensible and unforgivably incorrect. This twofold samurai battle is a radical protest toward extensive reform, at once comprehensive in overall framework and conscientiously individual on each idea. Here is no room for fanaticism, a narrow-minded loyalty in exclusive nepotism (as samurai) or ―my country, right or wrong‖ (as patriotism). 72 Three: Thus justice is conflict (Hampshire). Such battle of perceptive conscience is clean, above board, and beautiful. Justice is gutsy samurai fight. This fight for pan-justice in every corner and every aspect of life is no boneless jellyfish, it is not easy; it requires sharp good-sense and observant sensitivity, cultivated for long in patient character training in all high cultures. Here our ―sword‖ is the daring mouth and the careful pen, literally vastly mightier than the usual sword. An ancient example in China comes to mind. On being granted an audience to Liu Pang 劉邦 the new military victor, scholar Lu Chia 陸賈 urged Liu to study the Classics. Liu disdained, saying that he had conquered the world on horseback, what else did he need? Lu replied, ―You have captured the world on horseback; can you govern it on horseback?‖ Stunned, Liu begged for instruction on government. Lu then wrote A New Discourse 新書 for 73 Liu. Lu‘s brave mouth and brush vanquished Liu‘s sword. Lu‘s timely quip initiated Confucian governance in China. Today, several cartoonists brought down several unsavory presidents; civil rights movements, persistently civil, changed public perception on racial equality through decades of varied nonviolent campaigns; the mighty tobacco industry was toppled within a decade by assiduous public education by multimedia dissemination of sober medical knowledge. Journalists and the conscientious populace have been today‘s genuine samurai who battle with mouths and pens that are mightier and sharper than the sword, cleanly, justly, daringly, 71 This is what I remember as Voltaire‘s saying. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (1953), 1966, p. 557, records it otherwise: ―I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,‖ attrib. in S. G. Tallentyre, The Friends of Voltaire, 1907, p. 199. Since the saying is an attribution we can take either one as Voltaire‘s, though I like better what I remember; it is punchier and more like him. 72 Stuart Hampshire, Justice is Conflict, Princeton University Press, 2001. 73 See ―The biography of Lu Chia,‖ History Records (史記, 酈生陸賈傳, 第九段, 臺北: 建宏出版社, 1995, IV.600); 100 years later, Wu Ti 步帝 canonized Confucianism as the official State Scholarship.
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persistently, and beautifully, and they have been steadily winning the world through countless bloody failures. That is unrelenting devotion to perceptive principles for us all. Devotion is all-powerful when yoked to ―for us all.‖ In sum, the devoted-fanatic distinction is difficult to perceive and practice, yet quite clear and essential to democracy. Devotion to us all is pitted against fanaticism to pet private ideals, and devotion to us all implies respect of privacy of others who radically differ from me, while I tirelessly debate with them against their ―wrongs‖ as I see them, yet ever keeping my mind open to whatever told me as my wrong. As a result, a zero-sum fight, powerful vs. powerless, must be fought to be replaced with ―everyone the winner,‖ for the powerful is in need of the powerless. In a pluralistic society of democracy today, it is difficult to be ―devoted‖ to anything specific, and so quite easy to retreat to fanatic loyalty to one‘s private judgment, yet such fanaticism destroys democracy whose essence is to respect others who differ from us, even oppose us. Our struggle is to describe with our life by telling our story of life of democratic devotion, and this difficult and important theme is itself the directive to our devoted struggle to keep our faith in the democratic principles. In the end, our storytelling struggles amount to pursuing an ethics that is global and pluralistic, utterly opposed to fanaticism of violence. Violence shows our craving for power, as we all want power. Joseph S. Nye proposed soft power and hard power, the power that draws/attracts and the power that crushes/destroys. We find the power true, real, and incorruptible in the power that compels, induces, disarms, and makes whole. The one power 74 that does all this is, incredibly, the smile (if not laugh ) of a baby. This power is the dawn that begins all things and all lives. Let us see how baby smiles to conquer us. Nothing is more powerful, more promising, and more irresistible, than baby smile. Smile shows and portends victory; baby smile wins us all, without even challenging us. The world‘s greatest power is here, beyond all nuclear threats with all Pentagon strategies. Here in baby smile is tender pervasion, weakness that wins, and simplicity so strong; it is an ultimate smiling union of all extremes. Smile that amuses, ridicules, or affects is poor adult smile, not baby smile that disarms, silences, and heals such adult smile that dissimulates to trap us, no true smile at all. Baby smile, with that intimate baby smell so fragrant and unforgettable, need not fight us; it just puts us at ease, pulls us home, and turns us self-forgotten. We nod and we smile with the baby smiling. Baby smile smiles us all, and we do not know what it is that smiles us; we are just pleased that the baby is this baby and no other, in whom we are as we are. The whole baby is pure pleasure so contagious because it is simple so unassuming, so disarming, just there as it is, called ―cute.‖ ―Not all babies are cute; I saw some ugly babies whose smiles are dull,‖ you say. There are always a few exceptions that do not demolish a general rule. Among the exceptionally unattractive babies, I can imagine only two sorts, hyperactive ones and misshapen ones. Hyperactive babies are still not ―violent‖; misshapen babies arouse pity. We see no repulsive baby-Hitlers, simply because they are too weak for atrocity. There is no exception to the general rule that babies are weak and immature, for that is what ―baby‖ 74 ―Smile‖ is yoked to laugh (Merriam-Webster‟s Collegiate Dictionary, 2008, p. 1177) as ―laugh‖ is yoked to victory (Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, 1972, I: 658-662). Isaac the Smile turned his mother Sarah‘s chuckle in unbelief into smile of joy at the unimagined gift from God, Isaac her baby smiling! Everyone wins here!
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means. ―Strong and mature baby‖ is contradictory as ―married bachelor.‖ Weakness and 75 immaturity are some ingredients of being ―cute,‖ explainable by elucidating weakness and immaturity, as we do here. In short, we have fewer ugly babies than we have ugly music. Sadly, some babies turned out later to be a Herod so insane as to kill babies. We naturally ask, ―What happened?‖, but one thing we cannot do is to say that their early babyhood caused their atrocities. Time relation is no causal relation; we cannot say, ―After this, therefore 76 because of this,‖ e.g., Herod‘s killing of babies occurred after his babyhood, therefore he killed babies because of his babyhood. His babyhood remains innocent of his baby-killing later in his adulthood. In all, baby smile thus expresses our best, our joyous Kingdom. That is why baby smile is mighty beyond all violence; baby is the Kingdom‘s greatest the Devil so hates. ―Out of the mouth of babes and nursing infants you have ordained strength (into a bulwark built), because of your enemies, that you may silence the enemy and the avenger. . . . I will give children to be their princes, and babes shall rule over them,‖ intone the Psalmist (8:2) and Isaiah (3:4, NKJV). No one can ever win these babies, and we do not even want to win; we want to be won over, embraced there. ―But babies are so fragile, immature, and useless, smiling or crying. They will be laughed off if not crushed among the powerful Pentagon personnel.‖ That is precisely the point. The very weakness of the baby is the litmus test that divides the genuinely human from subhuman boor. Baby‘s immaturity is the dawn of humanity. Seniors soon vanish; never must we mature. In fact, those unmoved by baby‘s smiling power are sub-bestial, for so many animals just love and care for human babies. Babies‘ simple smiles warm to ennoble the whole lifeworld. ―How so?‖ Look! Baby immaturity continues in girls and boys yelling, shouting, fighting, and spinning their tops, as they twirl themselves to turn into tops, for nothing. Later, Uncle Fort the immature just trails what comes, mumbling, ―How can this not make its opposite?‖ Even later, Sisyphus underground just pushes that stupid boulder uphill, only to see it rolling down, to push it up again, for nothing, and Albert Camus caught it as ―Sisyphus happy.‖ All this composes our other stories on other pages, in baby smile growing in immaturity that is ―absurd‖ and fun, for nothing. Such baby smile never overwhelms, ever releases us into the baby into ourselves. We are one with the baby in that baby smile in joy unspeakable, gaining nothing, and thereby gaining everything as it is, at the dawn of immature ―everything.‖ Many composers can be tender, exquisite, and ethereal, but not smiling innocent as Haydn.
75 Naturally, ―cute‖ is quite a complex notion as beholders‘ reaction to someone with three ingredients: weak as uncertain, immature as not-yet, and novel-as-forward-ing. They make ―cute‖ that is part of a baby. When weak is not uncertain and immature is not not-yet but both are set, no one is cute anymore. Imperfect humans are all weak-immature; to pretend not is to be orthodox, a dictator, to violate the self and others, to be really defective. They are no babies. In contrast, novelty must include weak and immature, and the mix makes baby; poets, scientists, and geniuses weak and immature, e.g., Van Gogh, John Nash, Freud, Frost, etc., are ―babies.‖ Are they ―cute‖? It depends on the beholder‘s reaction. 76 Peter Richardson, Herod: King of the Jews and Friend of the Romans, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996, is not of much help on our problem. Remember the famous fallacy of ―post hoc, ergo propter hoc‖? Natural science is eager to avoid it.
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No wonder, the music of Haydn that smiles baby simplicity pleases me unspeakably. I cannot help but live in it, while surrounded by pictures of babies smiling no contrived smile, as I write on baby smile, and on everything else in baby smile so immature, so irresistible. Even writing all this gives me smile, for nothing. ―You make no sense. The baby is obviously weak yet you say it is invincible. Violence is macho-tough yet you say it is Akrasia-weak.‖ It is time to clarify. Baby smiles, and wins tenderly, while violence self-hurts. Baby smiles so full to flow over to others; violence‘s machismo is hollow, hiding worry/fear of others. Baby draws others to fulfill them as it is full; violence crushes other to self-crush. Baby is calm, silent; violence is noisy, impetuous for quick fix to quickly fail. Weak baby is self-full contagious, smiling; strong violence harbors demise-soon it loathes to see. You see, we have two powers, hard power to crush and soft power that buds, one to end and one to begin, one strong and one weak. Strong power crushes to end others to crush to end itself so soon. It is power to kill; we cannot live by power to let die to die itself. Besides, such deadly power cannot operate unless it begins at soft power in the bud so weak. Such weak power is baby smile that embraces us to draw us into us, in irresistible smile simply unassuming, ever at the dawn of today ever promising tomorrow. No wonder, Christianity begins at Christmas in a helpless baby Jesus who is our savior. 78 Incredibly, weakness in baby-immaturity saves us—from brittle violence of strong Herod. We with King Herod despise the weak baby to crush those babies in adult selfishness. We, all sick at heart, need baby smile ever at faint dawn, to begin afresh. Violent adult death on the Cross, ending all, needs be saved by baby-rebirth so weak, the Resurrection soft and discreet at the silent waterfront; it is Christmas dawn rebounded. Here, the Christ-baby ever smile-alive draws us alive at life‘s dawn in baby-silence. Nothing is softer power more beautifully powerful. We say all this is just our wishful phantom, a myth of miracle supposedly to begin life again. It is simply incredulous. We forget the reminder of baby smiling ever at our side, drawing us to pull us ahead of us into tomorrow, and tomorrow, and more tomorrows, gathering us huddled together at this baby. Here is no violent ―sound and fury‖ but just smiling silence of a simple baby drawing us into caring for her, who in our caring cares for us to nourish us, ever nurturing us in baby-immaturity so fresh. ―Doesn‘t all this ‗signify nothing‘?‖ Yes, but this time the ―nothing‖ is the silent smile of a helpless baby, that irresistible weakness that embraces us softly, ever beginning us afresh in all baby-immaturity so budding fragile. Again, nothing is more beautiful. Nothing is more invincible. Miracle is here in embryonic omnipotence of a baby nothing.
77 Just listen to Brahms the gnarled tree; his ―Variations‖ manage to twist Haydn dark and uncomfortable. Oddly, Brahms‘ piano sonatas are a clear sky where we can breathe, though not quite smiling as Haydn. Paganini sharply goes up and down to stir up excitement, no calm excitement of Haydn‘s smiling daily walk. Etc. 78 Cf. Peter Richardson, Herod: King of the Jews and Friend of the Romans, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996, pp. 18-20, 294, and Raymond E. Brown, The Birth of the Messiah, NY: Doubleday, 1993, p. 747, index on ―Herod.‖ Herod was reportedly so insane and unpredictable as to have even his own children executed. He died of a painful disease, perhaps syphilis, and his ending was not pretty but dramatic. All this reminds us of violent deaths of legalists such as Han Fei 韓非 (6:2801), Li Ssu 李斯 (6:3615), and others (e.g., Shen Pu-hai 申不害 6:2796) in China. See 司馬遷‘s History Records 史記, Vols. 63 and 87, 臺北市三民書局, 2008. Cf. 商君書, 臺北市三民書局, 民85. Political Akrasia is so brutal and sad; here is no child, and that is the whole problem; Herod the baby-killer is insane beyond repair.
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My silence is everywhere. While I let sun-warmth, birds singing, and tree shades sink into me, I am silent. My silence is so full beyond words, with cool breeze waving with me as I walk on, and my pain in my stomach and my foot dissolves of itself. I walk very slowly, in silence so full so slow as kids on bikes go slow. My silence soaks up the sun with roadside grass and the birds singing invisibly. They say flowers are leaves, but leaves last longer in silence than flowers shouting their beauty. Leaves are as beautiful, just less noticed. Silence is full, slow.79 It is my baby. Flowers alone are not as pretty; birds alone are not as enthralling. They must gather because birds are sky-flowers so chirping, and flowers are roadside-birds so chirping; they must resound to make beauty so casual, so silent. ―Dad, it‘s quieter when birdies sing, isn‘t it?‖ my boy Mark whispered. I would have responded, ―and it‘s quieter when flowers chirp, too, isn‘t it?‖ In all, it‘s prettier when flowers and birds hug, so deep, so silent. Such is the silence of nature telling stories orderly chaotic as it is a chaotic order, all this in silence, full and alive beyond word. If, within all this nature-silence, we still persist in the brittle noises of mortal violence, as we have been persisting for millennia, we are in bottomless mystery of radical weakness, Akrasia. If we know, can, and want to choose life, and we still choose death, pursue deathly power of violence, then we must bewail over our mysterious Akrasia-weakness, refusing to 80 be comforted, with those mothers who lost their babies to mighty King Herod short-lived. We must meditate in sorrow the dark mystery of Akrasia so disastrous, so abysmal. Let us repeat. If we sadly miss this greatest power in baby smile, as your objection shows, then violence would manifest its weakness in jitters to grab power, in vain. And then, as violence-weakness the adult Akrasia pits against baby-weakness the dawn of full human power, violence is exposed as a typical manifestation of adult‘s mysterious weakness, ―Akrasia,‖ to which we turn.
TWO STORIES OF AKRASIA Rationally unintelligible is our inveterate ―akrasia,‖ knowing what is better, desiring it, and capable of performing it, and yet preferring the worse. Socrates did not understand it at all, and so he declared that we can never knowingly harm ourselves, and perpetration of evil 81 is due to simple straight ignorance. 82 Dahl ingeniously said that Aristotle had two claims on akrasia. One, akrasia expresses our conflict of motives (218) and desires (223). Two, practical reason can infer an end and give us a motivation to act on it, but the end may not be integrated enough into our character to warrant us actually to act on it (219). These two claims are interrelated at the inner constitution of a person, our ―character.‖ 79
Silence talking will soon be considered. 80 Matthew 2:13-19. This is a sad tragic story so incredible. 81 Gregory Vlastos has its tight straight rehearsal, ―Socrates on Acrasia,‖ in his Studies in Greek Philosophy, Volume II, Princeton University Press, 1995, pp. 43-59. He never noticed this critical crack in Socrates‘ ―argument.‖ Sad. 82 Norman O. Dahl, Practical Reason, Aristotle, and Weakness of the Will, Minneapolis, MN: The University of Minnesota Press, 1984, pp. 218-223. Dahl tried to show how Aristotle can explain akrasia, not how akrasia can make sense with Aristotle‘s help. Thus Dahl came to hold little water. Sad.
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And of course the two claims raise a question of how interpenetrated reason and character are. We may ask (a) how rational is our personal character, (b) how influential our reasoning is on actual personal living, and (c) how they interrelate.83 In short, the mystery of akrasia remains—however we twist and turn. Incredibly, while akrasia cannot be explained, akrasia describes human situation through history. Intellectual parsing is powerless here; we try another route—storytelling. Religious scriptures are mostly stories for a good reason: Life‘s problems are matter-offactly dissolved in storytelling. Or rather, as Jung said, problems do not dissolve but become a part in a wider context for us to deal with,84 and religious storytelling puts life‘s problems in a wider higher context. Here is an example. My sister‘s husband was suddenly hit by stroke, entirely immobilized, and the sale of their company fell through; my sister Michi herself was riddled with all sorts of health problems. My agnostic brother Êng-bêng naturally raised crucial insoluble queries. Here is my open letter to him, appealing all the way to religious stories, not to solve them but to deal with them in composure. Dear Êng-bêng: You raised two important questions on religion. One is why God or Buddha allows all this to happen. Another is who we are to choose—Christ or Buddha. I now try to respond— not answer—in three points. ONE, we are human; we forget this trite but crucial truth. Our forgetting it breeds two questions. (a) ―Who is more powerful, Christian God or Buddha?‖ as if we were above gods to judge between them. (b) ―Why me? Why Michi?‖ These questions are beyond us humans to answer. Why? TWO, we complain with (b), ―Why me? Why Michi?‖ for we expect God to ―bless‖ us with ―wealth, health, and professional success‖; we apply such our standard to God, as if we could throw a stone up at the sky. The stone just comes down to hit us, to expose us as human. 83 Let‘s go slower. ONE, a ―conflict of desires‖ indicates at least two desires in us—a rational one follows reason and an irrational one opposes it. But such conflict should not have happened to begin with, if Socrates were right in saying that we would naturally follow what benefits us as reason tells us. Thus this point repeats Socrates‘ enigma, not solve it. TWO, ―akrasia may be due to the fact that reason does not sufficiently suffuse character‖ merely says we are still in the stage of ignorance, and does not answer why we choose what we patently know is evil. Aristotle‘s ―character‖ is héxis, what we have come to ―have‖ by ―habit‖ (―have‖ is etymologically related to ―habit‖), by habituation; habituation constitutes our constitution. Aristotle‘s, if not Socrates‘, claim that reason habituates character assumes that reason is naturally congenial to our constitution. But why need habituation in the first place, if character is rational to begin with? ―Not sufficiently suffuse‖ sounds as if reason and character do not initially (if not easily) harmonize; would not character take to reason as fish takes to water? This raises a further question. THREE, how rational is character by nature? How much, how far, is reason part of character? Socrates in Meno said, ―Very much indeed,‖ but the entire human history demonstrates otherwise, and this ―otherwise‖ is akrasia. Quite many thugs contrive and perpetrate atrocities with highly educated intelligence; Nazi atrocities were not accepted by the uneducated alone. ―Can virtue be taught?‖ opens a Pandora‘s Box called ―akrasia.‖ All these considerations show that Aristotle simply repeated—in fact complicated—the enigma of akrasia, not explained it, much less solved it. 84 See The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life, translated and explained by Richard Wilhelm with a Commentary by C. G. Jung, translated by Cary F. Baynes, NY: A Harvest/HIJ Book, 1962, pp. 91-92 (Jung‘s words). This book is so famous that it has been translated into Japanese (湯淺泰雄，定方昭夫譯:
黃金の華の秘密, 京都人文書院, 1980, 1981). A version of their Chinese original is 呂祖著, 王魁溥編譯, 太乙金華宗旨今譯, 臺北市丹道文化出版社, 民92.
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Buddha discarded these ―blessings,‖ and Jesus said we‘d have troubles in the world that he had conquered. ―Don‘t gods care? Don‘t they do something for us? How is god‘s power (fate) related to our struggles (freedom)?‖ Again, I don‘t know, but I‘ve found two clues. First, in Gilgamesh and Odyssey, people accepted unexpected events as ―god-sent fate,‖ and offered big thank-offerings (100 cattle!) when things went as expected. At the same time, they ―freely‖ did as they wished! The Judeo-Christian tradition has Job protesting God on why good people suffer, and God answered with a whirlwind affirmation of his absolute sovereignty. People all this while continued to freely ―sin‖ against God or freely ―obey‖ him. Second, deeply moved by the refreshing vitality of polytheism without monotheism‘s dead-end,85 I realized that ―things just happen‖ to unite fate with freedom. If ―things just happen,‖ then they are fated, as natural science explains how a storm came from low atmospheric pressure that in turn came from the earth‘s tilt as it turns. If we ask ―why so?‖ scientists would answer, ―it just happens that way.‖ And if ―it just happens,‖ we can do something about it, as the scientist shows us how to manage nature. Here is our freedom and responsibility. This is why I admire Michi. She is gloriously managing her storms of life! THREE, so I see two points to question (a), ―Who is stronger, Christ or Buddha?‖ First, both men offered us no wealth, health, or professional success. The strength or validity of a religion is not here. Second, instead, Buddha wants us to graduate from our wearisome round of rebirth; we‘d graduate from stressful college-of-life by accumulating good ―karma‖-grades. And Christ assures us, ―You will have difficulties. But take heart. I‘ve conquered the world.‖ Paul said, ―In all these things we are more than conquerors‖ no matter what. Michi has difficulties and is more than a conqueror! Why? Desmond Tutu said, ―Only wounded doctors heal.‖86 With Christ, Michi in difficulties is healing us in difficulties. She is more than a conqueror! 85 Polytheism has no such problem as, ―If the One God is all-mighty and all-loving, why evil in the world that opposes God?‖ People in polytheism freely appeal to one god/goddess when another seems to oppose and torment them, for no reason whatever. Such matter just happens; we breathe freely here. Shimazaki Tōson (1872-1943) wondered aloud whether Western systematic tendency did not enable monotheism to spread like wild fire in the West, not in the Orient. (島崎藤村著, 藤村文明論集, 東京岩波文庫, 1988, 1996, pp. 130, 149) Shimazaki‘s casual journalistic style, with scattered bits shimmering with insights, echo many others (e.g., pp. 97, 175, 176, 180, etc.) to mirror the random and deeply significant way in which things happen. Is this polytheism on earth? 86 ―All Things Considered‖ reported 1/15/04 that the US medical facilities in Iraq were woefully ill-equipped. Overwhelmed everyday, a handful of overworked crew had to cope with a continuous influx of the gravely wounded. No one who came in was refused, Iraqi civilians, enemy combatants, enemy POWs, and even wounded Iraqis having attempted to blow up a US facility came with US soldiers wounded in the blowup. Soldiers on seeing Iraqis often picked fights with them while both parties were treated. Thoroughly exhausted
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So, our initial question, ―Who is stronger, Christ or Buddha?‖ is now changed into ―Whom would I choose, Christ or Buddha?‖ I‘d pick Christ‘s ―conquest,‖ not Buddha‘s ―graduation,‖ Nirvana. Thanks for your two important questions, Êng-bêng, that provoked me to think. I do wish that we‘d all support Michi with positive words, never negatives. With much prayer, Yours as ever, Kong-bêng
And here is my second letter. Dear Êng-bêng: I‘ve shared with you my thoughts on our attitude to religion under life‘s stress. ―But then what should we do when deceived and suffer loss in business?‖ Two points here beckon us to a calm enjoyment of loss and injustice. ONE, I met in Florida a lady of 82 who took a bus out every month to put $20 into a slot machine. She always lost, had a dinner of +$10, and then took another bus home. So every month she wasted +$50 (=bus+20+10). I asked why she wanted to lose money. She laughed, ―Well, I enjoy listening to jingles of coins go into the machine.‖ Hermann Hesse‘s (Nobel laureate, 1946) hero in Siddhartha (1922) went to a merchant and practiced business. He welcomed people, including cheaters taking things/money away. He smiled at them all, for business was just a game. His warm attitude to everyone made him huge profits. TWO, both people above enjoy life, win or lose, for they are inwardly separate from life‘s win and loss. Jesus told the rich young ruler, ―Give all you have to the poor and follow me.‖ Both Buddha and Jesus softly said, ―Be in but not of the world.‖ So we have two points. (a) Detachment makes (b) a game out of life; we can now play life with children. Simply keep yourself straight and enjoy. Kong-bêng
Now, here is another concrete story, this time quite incorrigible.87 I have a friend of mine, a very promising young man of brilliant mind and achievements, both cultural and academic. He lives in a superb environment—wrapped in parental love, at home in an expensive residence in the middle of bucolic nature. While everything is going balmy, smiling at him, he has been in pain for over a decade, and lived on in pain for as long as anyone can guess.
crew treating the wounded is a scene humanly closest to ―wounded doctors healing the wounded,‖ closest to God healing God‘s enemies who wound Him. 87 We previously considered akrasia in interpersonal violence. Now we consider akrasia in inner, personal, and inexplicable pain.
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His pain is entirely inexplicable. He is young, healthy, quite intelligent, and he locks himself in pain. He in pain stretches hands for advice to parents, to his friends, to his admiring professor, and even psychological counseling. He has, however, rejected all assistance, parental, friendly, pedagogical, psychiatric, with a polite and sophisticated smile, proudly calling them ―unconvincing,‖ ―not much help.‖ Here is a classical case of akrasia, powerful powerlessness. What is going on here? A friend of his discovered that he does not really want to move out of himself. He just sits in the high judgment seat, with his high intelligence judging each offer as ―unsatisfactory.‖ His judgment is yet tinged with autumn shades of sorrow; he silently writhes in pain while pronouncing judgments wry, noble, smiling, and consistently painfully negative. This strange stubborn stay in pain shows a self-imprisonment, quite complex because his high health and high intelligence work in him against him; he locks himself in a prison of sullen defiance. This prison is himself, the defiance is against outside help, and the prison is sullen pain. He uses his high IQ to refuse help, and locks himself in pain, stay in pain. Since this pain-prison is self-made and self-locked from inside, only he can open the prison and get out, and absolutely no one can unlock it from outside. Dragging out by force heals headache by chopping the head off. This is a concrete story of mental akrasia. No. This is a medical case; this ―pain-prison‖ deserves to be broken into and broken apart with an outside ―violence‖ of psychotropic medicines—with his consent. We are happy that he recently consented to taking psychotropic medicines; he can now use the medical sledgehammer to break out of his self-made prison, and the ―violence‖ is now no longer violence. How did it happen? By telling this story to him, we can now enter inside him and look around to see with him what is going on. Although we remain deeply puzzled on why such situation can obtain at all, storytelling helps us to enter this puzzling situation to usher in the possibility of resolution in the future. In fact, description already works healing wonders,88 in a fivefold way as follows. One, description produces a mirror that reflects and ex-presses the self‘s situation, both inside and out. Then, two, this descriptive mirror reacts on the self‘s situation, by projecting the self‘s inner events back onto the self, to ―cast a spell on the self.‖ Three, the spell unifies the self‘s consciousness with its life. Four, this process of self-unification is the Way things go, and the Unity is the Way itself. Five, here action goes into non-action. The self turns concentrated in itself, all contrary forces unifying. Here occurs healing, a ―solution‖ to all problems, ―liberation‖ from all ―entanglements,‖ akratic or environmental. Carl Jung said that all this happens spontaneously,89 (T)he process is spontaneous, coming and going on its own initiative. . . .The conscious will cannot attain such a symbolic unity because the conscious is partisan in this case. Its opponent is the collective unconscious which does not understand the language of the 88 This fact explains the huge healing significance of any popular spontaneous collection of stories about illnesses. E.g., Speaking out on Health: An Anthology, Literary Volunteers of New York City, Inc., 1989. 89 This is quoted from ―Commentary by C. G. Jung‖ to The Secret of the Golden Flower: Translated and explained by Richard Wilhelm (1932), NY: A Harvest/HBJ Book, 1962, p. 107. My fivefold way of healing by storytelling is extrapolated from Jung‘s authoritative story of how the self heals (pp. 97-107). I agree that selfdescription—in dance, in mandalas—powerfully heals, but a trusted other‘s faithful description can also be effective, for after all the symbolic language in dances and mandalas are part of storytelling that is honestly and faithfully performed.
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Kuang-ming Wu conscious. Therefore it is necessary to have the magic of the symbol which contains those primitive analogies that speak to the unconscious. The unconscious can be reached and expressed only by symbols, which is the reason why the process of individuation can never do without the symbol. The symbol is the primitive expression of the unconscious, but at the same time it is also an idea corresponding to the highest intuition produced by consciousness.
―Symbols,‖ ―language‖ and ―analogies‖ are our ―stories.‖ Jung says that these symbols well up, spontaneously grow, from the depths of the unconscious among primitive people. This spontaneous growth from our psyche can today be enfleshed by the significant other‘s gutsy honest description; it is this storytelling that heals the self. To know how the healing happens, we must see that, the ―pain‖ of our young man is the pain of the inner split. The conscious will wants to go one way, and life in unconscious psyche stays elsewhere. The inner split is unified only by symbols of the situation that spontaneously well up as a primal scream to call attention, thereby to unify the split self. These symbolic expressions are the self90 telling its own story to the self.
ON SUFFERING PAIN CREATIVELY There is another aspect to inner pain that is surprising. Pain has its creative power in life, repeatedly borne out by history. All sensitive thinkers have often noted the positive significance of suffering. Fitzgerald91 carefully documented ―peristasis catalogues,‖ the catalogues of adverse life-vicissitudes that build us up into the sage. Quite popular in Greco-Roman world was the ―suffering sage.‖ Adversity is the badge of character; suffering is a virtuous guide to sagely living. One often touts a catalogue of hardships over which one triumphed. Suffering shows sagely exploits and certifies one as a virtuous sage. Now, if to suffer pain certifies sagely virtue, then things negative can positively help to turn one free anywhere any-when. So suffering pain blesses life to rejoice in pain. This point enables us to understand Jesus‘ strange blessing on us who weep and suffer injustice, and Paul‘s exaltations in suffering. Confucius in quiet understatement praised as ―princely‖ those not recognized and are not vexed. The Taoists fed on pain, danced it, abided in it; it is Chuang Tzu‘s ―Lordly Principle of Life-Cultivation 養生主.‖92 Pain is a poison that can be a tonic. It can strengthen or kill, and personal strength is measured by how much pain a person can manage to feed on it. Pascal‘s stomach cancer enabled him to attain mathematical and philosophical heights. Being deaf, blind, and dumb made Helen Keller the great person. Freud‘s mental imbalance and painful mouth cancer produced volumes of insights into the mysteries of human psyche. Going in and out of sanatoriums, Kurt Gödel revolutionized mathematical proofs. Marcel confessed to an inordinate pain that created what he was today.93 And the list goes on 90 Or someone else discerning enough to see through the self and tells the self‘s story to the self. 91 John T. Fitzgerald, Cracks in an Earthen Vessel: An Examination of the Catalogues of Hardships in the Corinthian Correspondence, Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1988. Slightly wordy, this is his scrupulous Ph.D. Dissertation in Yale University, 1984. 92 I devoted a whole chapter on this Third Chapter of Chuang Tzu‘s to this theme (Butterfly, op. cit., pp. 279-359). 93 See his ―An Autobiographical Essay‖ in The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel, eds. P. A. Schilpp and L. E. Hahn, La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1983, pp. 1-68. Ruth Benedict devotes her last chapter to insanity in religion in her
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endlessly, so much so that one wonders whether pain is not an ingredient of achievement. Pain is not enough or needed to compose a genius, to be sure, but it is surely one common powerful spine that runs through a genius. In fact, Socrates‘ astounding ―mission accomplished‖ owes much to his constant demonic haunting; we would not be surprised if someone claims he was insane. Jesus was accused of being haunted by the devil, and Paul was suspected of being demented,94 for both were unusually brilliant and passionate in their strange undertaking. We could generalize and hazard a guess, that pain of physical indisposition and mental imbalance pervades life to carve out genius. Pain relates to genius in virtue and achievement, and the most intimate pain is demonically inside, insanity. The phrase, ―devilishly smart,‖ surely derives from the word ―genius‖ as of ―genie,‖ a tutelary spirit allotted to every person to govern her fortune and character to conduct her out of the world, a demon or spiritual being, a prevailing character, and the like.95 Genius is demonic, and it suffers demonically; genius is haunted, possessed; it suffers the mortal pain of Cupid‘s arrow shooting through its heart of love of wisdom. We shudder at the intimacies among pain, insanity, genius, virtue, and achievement. This is the ―sickness unto death‖ that does not die, for this deathly pain guides the person into her personal integrity. So, here is a paradox. Much as insanity is my own affair no one can meddle with, it is my suffering beyond me, for I am possessed with my own genius that guides me into being myself. I am beside myself, not myself, so as to come home to myself.96 This is my intimate paradox, a crack in this earthen vessel enfleshed with immortal devilish genius. What redeems me out of pain is that my suffering often makes me a genius. To be smart is to be-beside-myself, my pain, so I rejoice in my pain.97 To ex-ist as myself is to stand-out of myself and be beside myself, to be amazed at my genius—of existing at all. Existence is wonderment. It is my story of this primal word, existēmi, to exist, stand out of me, being beside myself. This strange joy has a point in my life. If my negative thinking has pervaded my life so much that I would not care to notice it, nor would I want to count how many negatives I have famous Patterns of Culture (1934), Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989. M. O‘C. Drury also devotes the last chapter to the theme, ―Madness and Religion,‖ in The Danger of Words, NY: Humanities Press, 1973. We suspect that psychotic manifestations may be alike, but what people do with them differ, and it is this difference that divides the insane from the sages. 94 Mark 3:21-22. Acts 26:24 (cf. 23:9, 25:19). We must remember that ―insanity‖ is a label attached to us by others from outside. We are always normal; it is they who are abnormal. 95 See Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, 1989, VI: 442 (genie), 444 (genius). 96 The sane Bible has this insane paradox. Severe famine drove the prodigal son out of him-in-prodigality, to ―come back to himself‖ (Luke 15:17) to come home. His homecoming in turn drove his father out of the house, beside himself with joy (15:20, 28)! Luke 2:47 has people who ―went out of themselves‖ in amazement at Boy Jesus. On grammatical niceties of these passages, see Max Zerwick and Mary Grosvenor, A Grammatical Analysis of the Greek New Testament, Roma: Editrice Pontificio Istituto Biblico, 1988, pp. 181, 244, 245. On existēmē in Luke 2:47, see William F. Arndt and F. Wilbur Gingrich, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, etc. (1952), The University of Chicago Press, 1957, pp. 275-276, Joseph H Thayer, Thayer‟s Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament (1896), Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1997, p. 224, and H. G. Liddell and R. Scott, Greek-English Lexicon (1843), Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996, p. 595. 97 We remember the strange circumstances surrounding Oxford English Dictionary (OED), about which its history in OED itself (pp. xxxv-lxi) is silent. Biography (July 2003, p. 22) magazine has a story of a Dr. Minor, doctor, scholar, and murderer, who contributed much to OED from inside a lunatic asylum. (See also Simon Winchester, The Meaning of Everything: The Story of Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford, 2003, and The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, Perennial, 1999.) I used to wonder how strange it is that a great achievement sometimes has an eerie origin, and what it means. Now we know; pain accomplishes!
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in what I write, or even care to write about it—then I would let it be, and my inherent pain is part of me. I would live with it as we manage our diabetes. My depression is my mental diabetes, my chronic dis-ease that drains me into myself. A cynic may retort, ―Your pain has been with you, anyway. What‘s the big deal, now that you realize that it is yours?‖ Well, before my realization, my pain was my difficulty as an unwelcome parasite I have tried in vain to evict. Now, my pain is neither welcome nor unwelcome, for I see it as part of me, and I can neither welcome me nor evict myself. Pain remains I myself, who now know about it to consciously incorporate it into my life. My living is now pain; pain is my constitution, showing me as such. It is my way of being what I am, how I live. I don‘t have pain; I am pain. I now understand why I did not want to move out of my ―prison of sullen defiance‖ with help from outside, for the ―prison‖ is myself. I hate outside help as much as the Iraqis hate USA. ―Liberated‖ from their much hated tyrant Saddam, Iraqis now demonstrate with shouts and shotguns against USA their liberator, for Saddam is theirs. Now that I am pain I have got rid of that extra-baggage, ―pain as parasite,‖ and can sinuously, strenuously, and shrewdly use my-pain to my advantage as I use my-hand to manage daily affairs. My throbbing instability of pain is now my throbbing dynamo to press ahead. It would be ―fun‖ to describe my unique eerie pain and create my unique eerie world, as Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) my favorite film director did his. I will, as he did, prove my virtuosity and make my life a suspenseful thriller—with my pain. I will use my depression and let it, yes, let it98 contribute to my overall creative life, as Freud let his pain do through life. Freud‘s enormous output of unique insights is powered by his depression, his insanity. Likewise, my unique depression is now my unique strength. There is a catch to this odd elation on creativity of mental pain. He the agonized genius must ―describe‖ his unique eerie pain to have ―fun‖ in pain. Self-description is one key he has, no one else does, to open the door of his self-prison, without BEING forced out from outside. An odd ―key‖ question here is, ―He already has the key but how can he become willing to use it?‖ The only ―key‖ we have outside for his ―becoming willing‖ is simple persuasion to write. I wrote to him, You can combine/compare miso with Zen, Zen with Dali, Dali with Hitchcock, Hitchcock with Picasso, Picasso with Dali, and all these with Zen, and so on. It will be fun and exhilarating. . . . You can also write things no one else can write, never. Here you are truly creative and truly proud of yourself. You can write on yourself, and just for yourself. No one else can read what you write unless you allow it. You can write things inside you, perhaps similar to Hitchcock in sentiment. They may well be things violent, socially unmentionable, Hitchcock-esque, and personally significant. Remember, writing cools, heals, and lifts. It never hurts; it is fun always. If you disagree, your disagreement will evaporate once you write your disagreement, one page, even half a page, now.
Back came his answer. I do so long to be creative, as I was when I was a child. Now I‘m overwhelmed by so many inhibitions, so many thoughts swirling around in my mind, and so many ways to express 98
This ―letting be‖ is Taoism at work at the core of my life, an existential client-centered ―therapy‖ (Beware Socrates! No self-meddling!) that extends to enrich everyone and everything.
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them, fiction or nonfiction, verse or prose. Then when I sit down and try to create I feel completely paralyzed. I produce nothing, or maybe a couple of lines at best. I heard on NPR this morning about this year‘s winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. He works with people suffering mental illness and has suffered it himself. I was envious of his poetry and wished I could express my inner world as eloquently.
This sounded slightly hopeful. So, I pressed on, The world of your favorite ab-normals, Dali, Hitchcock, Picasso, is beyond all dreams to offend commoners. The more eerie, the better. Not boring commoners, only the extra-normal ushers in the world so ―bizarre,‖ so ―offensive.‖ You owe it to yourself to write it out before losing it, depicting ―inhibitions,‖ ―so many thoughts swirling around in my mind,‖ ―so many ways to express them,‖ in a couple of lines, one at a time. Just do it, as your email just did it. Sartre (No Exit, Vintage, 1955) and your Pulitzer poet did it; Oliver Sacks helped ―weird‖ worlds out in An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales (Knopf, 1995). Help yourself. Be your own Sartre, Pulitzer, and Sacks. It is fun.
Back came an answer: ―OK, I‘ll try, as long as I don‘t have to share it with anyone. Maybe Dr. G (my counselor).‖ I said, ―Good.‖ This round of persuasion seemed a success so far. We will see what happens next. Let us now push this pain-description to extremity; the worst of pain is death. The ultimate of a person‘s strength is her sheer capability to complete and crown the person via the ultimate of pain, death. This is precisely what Jesus consummated on the cross, shouting, ―It is accomplished!‖99 Paul did it via execution, Stoics said, ―To live is to prepare for death.‖ Japanese samurai love to commit suicide for their causes, as in Confucian ideal, ―killing oneself to consummate the human 殺身以成仁‖ in suicides in classical China.100 Confucius‘ confession (4/8), ―Morning, hear Tao, evening, can die, 朝 聞 道, 夕 死 可 矣,‖ is echoed by Kierkegaard‘s passionate integrity of his efforts to find ―a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live or die.‖ We may take such deaths as ―weak‖ or ―insane,‖101 but weak/insane or not, to fulfill a cause with death somehow fulfills ―personal integrity.‖ Death can show the deathly strength of a person and ultimate fulfillment of a person. Perhaps we should go further on death. No religion has said death terminates life. Death is the end of life that ends life, and thereby death is life‘s end to which life aspires, as ―commencement‖ graduates us to life‘s new beginning and retirement ―re-tires‖ life to renovate and restart its career. Thus Christ‘s death on the cross has to continue in his resurrection, Buddha‘s death is his Great Nirvana, and even thoroughly pragmatic China looks to ―life‖ as family, as history, and as Three Incorruptibles of personal virtue, great exploits, and gnomic sayings, birthing, birthing, without ceasing. In sum, we have told stories of how pain relates to virtue and achievement; we do not know its why or what, but we can now learn how these extraordinary people managed to 99 John 19:30 (Revised English Bible, 1989). 100 My History, Thinking, and Literature in Chinese Philosophy, Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1991, pp. 235-259 cited some classic cases of suicide in ancient China. 101 We did so in the previous section, ―Violence as Weakness,‖ and then worried about its possibility of ―fanaticism‖ in the ensuing section; devotion does tend to insane fanaticism.
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accomplish themselves via their pain, each in their own ways. We can learn by reading their biographies, then learn to manage our own pain, each in our own way. The Way of ours we walk out (Chuang Tzu 2/33); the long journey of our life begins at our own feet in pain, right here and now (Lao Tzu 64). Now, all this is realized by stories told of people who went ahead before us, the great dead. Storytelling of others‘ lives leads us on—to lead our own life; and life-storytelling is selfless in silence, never showy but silently confessed. The Bible in parsimony expresses this silence. Examples abound, as Genesis 22. Mere 19 short verses pack unbearable pathos that moved Søren Kierkegaard to expand into a volume, Fear and Trembling (1843), itself quite compact. E. A. Speiser, usually quite compressed, devoted three packed pages to feelingly point to it. He said,102 The episode (describes) the profoundest personal experience in all the recorded history of the patriarchs; and the telling of it soars to comparable literary heights. . . . Each successive moment in that seemingly interminable interval of time is charged with drama that is all the more intense for not being spelled out . . . (T)he unwary victim asks but a single question. The father‘s answer is tender but evasive, and the boy must have sensed the truth. The short and simple sentence, ―And the two of them walked on together‖ (8), covers what is perhaps the most poignant and eloquent silence in all literature. . . . At the appointed site, Abraham goes about his task with abnormal attention to each detail (von Rad), with the speechless concentration of a sleepwalker, as if thus to hold off by every possible means the fate that he has no hope of averting. . . . What is the meaning of this shattering ordeal? In this infinitely sensitive account the author has left so much unsaid that there is now the danger of one‘s reading into it too much—or too little.
The poignant silence is all the more pregnant for its being carried out in the NT period by God‘s only Son himself on the Cross, and this time no stopping hand came from his Father God, as he mumbled in mortal pain, ―Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?‖103 This is the darkest divine-human moment in the history of mankind. No silence is more eloquent.
102 Genesis: A New Translation etc., E. A. Speiser, The Anchor Bible, 1964, pp. 164-165. 103 ―My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?‖ in Matthew 27:46, Mark 15:34.
Chapter 8
SELFLESSNESS, SILENCE In storytelling we lose ourselves, become silence. Stories lead us into silence. Then we see ―silence‖ is a powerful ―nothing,‖ to double negate to connect to storytelling, telling without telling to hear without hearing, to connect to ―mystery,‖ closing our eyes and lips in awe of the ineffable Beyond.1 We are in the milieu of mysterious silence eloquent, an open secret to our open eyes and lips, the mystery of musical silence of nature in us and around us. We must explore this fascinating mystery of silence in ourselves, and then of our Nature.
SELF-LESS STORYTELLING Self-less storytelling fascinates us; following our own storytelling, we self-forget, and self-forgetting captivates. Children play, to be children is to play, and to play is to live in one‘s storytelling to act it out, often shared with others. I have just got this ―poem‖ from my son, John. It tells the story of our life in counting our age. We actually play out this story. George Carlin‘s View on Aging Do you realize that the only time in our lives when we like to get old is when we‘re kids? If you‘re less than 10 years old, you‘re so excited about aging that you think in fractions. ―How old are you?‖ ―I‘m four and a half!‖ You‘re never thirty-six and a half. You‘re four and a half, going on five! That‘s the key. You get into your teens, now they can‘t hold you back. 1
The relation among secrecy, silence, and awesome initiation is succinctly described in ―mystery,‖ OED, X: 173.
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You jump to the next number, or even a few ahead. ―How old are you?‖ ―I‘m gonna be 16!‖ You could be 13, but hey, you‘re gonna be 16! And then the greatest day of your life . . You become 21. Even the words sound like a ceremony . . . YOU BECOME 21 YESSSS! But then you turn 30. Oooohh, what happened there? Makes you sound like bad milk. He TURNED; we had to throw him out! There‘s no fun now, you‘re just a sour-dumpling. What‘s wrong? What‘s changed? You BECOME 21, you TURN 30, then you‘re PUSHING 40. Whoa! Put on the brakes, it‘s all slipping away. Before you know it, you REACH 50 . . . and your dreams are gone. But wait! You MAKE it to 60. You didn‘t think you would! So you BECOME 21, TURN 30, PUSH 40, REACH 50 and MAKE it to 60. You‘ve built up so much speed that you HIT 70! After that it‘s a day-by-day thing; you HIT Wednesday! You get into your 80s and every day is a complete cycle; you HIT lunch; you TURN 4:30 ; you REACH bedtime. And it doesn‘t end there. Into the 90s, you start going backwards; ―I was JUST 92.‖ Then a strange thing happens. If you make it over 100, you become a little kid again. ―I‘m 100 and a half! ‖May you all make it to a healthy 100 and a half!
We grownup children often smile and knit our brows when alone, as we replay our past stories. We boldly tell stories to ourselves in hypotheses and theories and then play them out in experimentation, and call all such story-playing ―objective science,‖ objective because we forget ourselves in it. We live our dreams, our storytelling, called ―natural science.‖ Sadly, such storytelling-living of science chases away storytelling-living of respect, mystery, and excitement of the young. Our science-story-living has killed ―tooth fairy,‖ ―the monster under Tommy‘s bed,‖ ―the snow ghost‖ in the blizzard, the foxes that outfox us, and tigers and wolves that roam to eat us, and we killed our mystery, fear, and respect of nature.
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We stop our life-stories. We are now obsessed with storytelling of ―ethnic cleansing‖ of Hitlers and Milosevics. We have to decimate such storytelling with another, the ―inalienable rights of individuals.‖ The child parents the adult; as kids play their own storytelling so do we the adults, with the difference that we know—or rather, we had better know—how to prefer the storytelling-living-playing of respect and of mystery and of excitement. How? By consciously rehearsing and retelling to ourselves our habitual storytellingliving, we should bring it to our awareness. Only more storytelling can cure false storytelling, and we should replay it on the screen of awareness. Beware George W. Bush! Repeatedly play to yourself and live the story you have advertised to us, ―compassionate conservatism,‖ never be obsessed with ―war on terrorism‖ and ―on Saddam Hussein.‖ By the same token, we ourselves must relive and re-play in the storytelling of respect of the mysteries around us, ecological ethics, etiquette of nature, to treasure ―endangered species,‖ to recycle, and the list goes on to tread our way of living lightly, circumspectly, respectfully. Our life with verve of the child will then come back. The child has parented us adults into the fresh dawn of life ecological. Now, tooth fairies of the child are a ―nothing‖ among adults. ―Nothing‖ has its own stories to tell us.
THE STORY OF “NOTHING” Incredibly, ―nothing‖ ciphers differences in life-attitude, and our diverse cultural attitudes to it compose an exciting story. We see at least two broad approaches to ―nothing.‖ One is logical consistency in the West, saying, being is, nothing is not, so we deal with ―being‖ alone. We will see that this approach ends up in denying change, in world-transcendence. Another is fidelity in China to actuality, accepting wholeheartedly changes in/of the world. This approach deals with how two logical contraries of being and nothing intertwine to make the world come alive, to intimate how best to live and behave. It is thus that we see how crucial our approaches to ―nothing‖ are in living.
1. Logical Approach to “Nothing” to World Transcendence To begin, the West thinks ―nothing‖ is nothing, only being is, so change from being to no-being (moving from this to not-this, here to not-here) are impossible (Parmenides) or unreal (Plato). Plato advised us to rise above and beyond this actual ―unreal‖ world of becoming into the ―real‖ unchanging Forms, to realize a sort of intellectual salvation into the Really Real. Aristotle has a clever device of ―potentiality‖ for things‘ changes, yet potentiality is mere preparation to stipulated ―actuality,‖ leaving changing actually that includes ―nothing.‖ Rejecting ―nothing and change‖ rejects actuality. Is it any wonder, then, that natural science in Aristotelian logic that despises ―nothing‖ later exploits/devastates nature the allactual? Plato‘s admonition to go beyond this world of illusory becoming, and enter the eternal logical realm of Forms, gave birth to nature-devastation. Interestingly, Buddhism is here also, saying, since our actual life-world is in constant change, it is a constant nothing; we must ―nothing‖ such a nothing, blow off our desire that
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pursues such no-things. ―Nirvana‖ is this positive nothing-act that stamps out of us this ―illusory world‖ of no-things. Buddhist discarding of this world, however, has oddly not resulted in exploitative destruction of nature. Sartre on his part has his own twist to this nothing-act. We are consciousness that is nothing, for ―it is what it is not, and is not what it is‖ and its ―not‖-infused self-contradiction ciphers a nothing. This consciousness-nothing confronts an undifferentiated stuff of gooey glue, ―it is what it is and is not what it is not,‖ which is carved out by ―nothing‖ into this ―thing‖ and that. This creative drama of ―being and nothingness‖ makes up his ―phenomenological ontology.‖ It remarkably assigns an active shaping role to ―nothing‖ as China does, and yet it consigns the whole project to Platonic contempt, gloom-doomed, for consciousness is hunger hungry to fill, yet upon filled ceases to be hunger, and consciousness ceases to exist. So edgy after filling, yet no longer hunger once filled, ―hunger‖ is damned, both as ―nothing‖ hungering after filling, and losing ―hunger‖-identity upon filling, to vanish into ―nothing.‖ Thus, being ―hunger,‖ our life is an unrelenting series of nauseous gloom; life grinds to an uncomfortable halt that does not halt; it is a sickness unto death that does not die. Such a disastrous predicament comes about because, with Parmenides and Plato, ―nothing‖ is at bottom nothing positive for Sartre. In short, all these nothing-as-nothing dramas of Plato, Aristotle, Buddhism, and Sartre originate in a logical judgment, ―Being is, no-being is not,‖ that rejects ―nothing.‖
2. Actual Approach to “Nothing” toward Life Rejuvenation Now here is an alternative to the above logical approach, a second approach to ―nothing.‖ China begins with a concrete observation of actuality, and thereby accepts ―nothing,‖ naively observing that ―nothing‖ does actually exist as a power with being, as it is opposed to being. Here, contraries—nothing contrary to being, yet with being—bespeaks inter-rejection in interaction, despite its ring of logical oddity; in fact, contrariety facilitates reciprocity, as standing mutually opposite makes a handshake. Lao Tzu (2) describes it graphically: ―Being and nothing inter-birth.‖ This cosmic fact has a direct poignant relevance to our life. Lao Tzu sighed (58), ―O Woe! Weal leans here. O Weal! Woe lurks here.‖ Chuang Tzu (25/71) said simply, ―Woe and weal inter-birth.‖ The Yin of woe and nothing, the Yang of weal and being, they intertwine, interweave, and inter-birth to make for the lively inter-changes of our actual world. Opposites co-arise, whose co-incidence forms a polar unity; medieval thinkers in the West noted it and attributed it to the Christian God. Buddhists noted it and discerned its origin in the No-thing beyond contraries of things and nothing, life and death. Chinese people simply accepted it and swim in its tides, coming and going, coming and going, without ceasing. To ―simply accept it‖ indicates an inner ―hollow,‖ becoming a nothing, to follow along, trailing what comes and goes. More, China notes that ―nothing‖ stays with being in actuality, to make things come alive. This ―making‖ is the so-called ―change‖ in location (motion) and in being (transformation). ―Nothing‖ infuses itself into being, in-forms it from inside, to en-able things to be as they are, making—moving, birthing—our world actual, fresh, and alive. ―Nothing‖ is
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then the dynamo that explains how things come alive as they actually are, growing, dying, and growing again to die again, without ceasing. We would not push this world-river of change; we simply accept it open-handedly, follow along empty-mindedly, swimming in its waves, dwelling in emptiness (虛), acting noacting (wu-wei 旡為), come what may, woe and/or weal. We note here that the West says ―weal or woe‖ siding positive weal, while China says ―woe and/or weal,‖ accepting both with cautious optimism. Such is how ―nothing‖ fares in actual world. Let us see how this interbirthing drama of woe and weal operates in principle, ontologically, socio-ethically, in our language, and in our deed. First, does our understanding need a law or principle of motion/change? Yes, but such a principle is anything but the unmoved Logos (Heraclitus) or Form (Plato). Instead, this principle literally ―begins‖ things2 and so it keeps beginning itself, ―birthing, birthing, without ceasing 生生不息.‖ It is the Tao (道), facing (首) forward, walking forward (走). It is the river that cuts its own course naturally, flowing unhurriedly, meandering freely. The river is always on its way. The River is its Way, Tao in its ever-shifting beauty, always on the move. Unlike the West‘s immovable noun, law (Logos), principle (Form), Tao is a verb of Nature forever naturing itself (natura naturans) birthing things (natura naturata). We cannot push the river of life of ―nature,‖ things ceaselessly becoming ―self-so 自然.‖ Such is the ―Way‖ things ―go to form 道行之而成‖ (Chuang Tzu 2/33), and so ―Tao can-tao, is-not (the) always-Tao 道可道, 非常道,‖ Tao settled as ―Tao‖ is no Tao truly so, says Lao Tzu to begin Tao Te Ching. This is how the nothing-being interaction—ever beginning, moving—acts out the principle of Tao-verb. Then, ontologically, Zen enlightens us on the dynamic being-nothing drama. (a) First we naively see a mountain over there as a mountain, (b) but then we think that a mountain is really not a mountain (for it levels off, changes, into a not-mountain), (c) and then we realize that a mountain is a mountain after all, for the mountain is ―mountain,‖ whether we like it or not. This explanation is not too good. Let us try something else. ―Mountain‖ can be music. The music heard is that music; the music practiced on is not quite that music; the music well-performed, naturally, is now that music. Going through it attains enlightenment; we are now truly we in the true world, the world-river of life‘s ups in downs and our swimming in it, thereby to interact, intertwine, and inter-birth the world and ourselves, ourselves as the world. This is because of the simple though mysterious fact that ―nothing‖ is an essential requirement to being. Cutting off all spaces not used by our soles renders impossible all our standing and walking; cutting uselessness (nothing) cuts use (being). Touting its talent of jumping (being), the polecat jumps into death in a trap (nothing); ridding being of ―nothing‖ destroys being.3 ―Useless, undeveloped‖ wilderness (nothing) is essential to the cities; it is the mother of civilization (being). Drilling Alaska for oil (being) impoverishes if not ruins the entire USA
2 Both ―archē, άρτή‖ and ―princeps, principium‖ have two meanings, beginning and sovereignty. Unfortunately, the Greek and Roman thinking silently slid from the first meaning into the second, where the West has stayed ever since. ―Principle‖ is now what logically regulates/explains things and events, not what actually initiates/follows them, as the Chinese thinking takes it to be. 3 Chuang Tzu, 26/31-33, 1/42-47.
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and, in the end, the entire world (nothing). Thus, whatever we do, and however things happen, always exhibit the intertwining of being and nothing, nothing and being. Therefore, thirdly, socio-ethically, in the concrete ―world among people 人間世,‖4 Taoism says we must serve as roomy ―nothing‖ to accept and enable others. Lao Tzu‘s Tao Te Ching says, we must be as the valley to make the mountain high, as the female ―nothing‖ to bring forth beings, as the supple infant to grow and inspire, and as the water to softly suffuse things to moisten and enliven them. All cultures enjoin ―hospitality‖5 to strangers, nobodies, and social ―wretched refuse.‖ Emma Lazarus‘ (1849-1887) ―The New Colossus,‖ engraved (1883) on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, says6 (Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. ―Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!‖ cried she With silent lips.) ―Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!‖
Embracing the tired poor and wretched homeless (nothing) is the New Colossus softly more powerful than the Greek giants astride the lands (being). Fourth, as no-being enables beings in nature to change, move things, and make them come alive, so in language negations strengthen affirmations. ―Not bad at all!‖ praises how 7 excellent something is. Meta-phor actually ferries the audience from ―this‖ to ―not-this‖; metaphoring is a linguistic act of ―nothing,‖ in itself neither this nor not-this, that transfers us from this to not-this. Intimation and irony do so likewise. Metaphor goes ―as this familiar, so that unfamiliar‖ to extend knowledge, and ―as that new, so this old‖ to renovate knowledge. To warm up the old to open up new knowledge is a good teacher; raising one old to provoke three new returns is education. As ancient poetry, so today‘s new world; as beauty of poetry, so socio-ethical norms. In short, ―as old, so new‖ is teaching; education is metaphorical. Such is Confucius. Mencius and Hsün Tzu who persuade
4 This is the title of Chapter Four in the Chuang Tzu. Cf. 人間の學としての倫理學 (ethics as the science of the inter-human), 和辻哲郎著 (by Watsuji, Tetsurō), 岩波全書 (Tokyo: Iwanami Zensho), 1934, 1966. 5 Later, we see how ―hospitality‖ is our ―life and death‖ issue in Hebrews 13:2 and Homer‘s Odyssey. 6 Cf. Bartlett‟s Familiar Quotations (1855), eds., John Bartlett and Justin Kaplan, Sixteenth Edition, Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1992, p. 558. 7 See my On Metaphoring: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 2001.
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by extensive metaphoring. All Chinese thinkers do pan-metaphor. This volume also does metaphor. 9 Thus ―nothing‖ in these expressive modes renders them poignantly effective. ―Nothing‖ in such linguistic sensibility then overflows to our deed of wu-wei 旡為, doing no-do. Gandhi‘s nonviolence and deconstructionism show how softly powerful doing of no-do is. Let‘s repeat our favorite story. ―I don‘ wanna‘ sleep!‖ Tommy shouts. ―Ok, don‘t; Mom reads you your favorite story; just sit here beside your pillow, ok?‖ Tommy nods. ―Once upon a time . . . ,‖ and Tommy hits his pillow. Not ―do‖ (push him into bed) or ―do not‖ (let him go), Mom did no-do of her love. By the same token, we judiciously refrain from much ado toward worse than nothing. No 10 pediatrician would advise parents to ―help‖ babies to get up and walk! To ―help grow 助長‖ kills growth. The verb ―help‖ has a pair of mutually opposed senses, ―cannot help it‖ vs. ―help one another.‖ Here in actuality they join; often we must help it to really help. Refraining from pulling and helping seedlings grow allows, helps, them to grow on their own; 11 no-do (wu-wei) lets live. Lao Tzu‘s three sayings present our final example: ―Work completed, then dwell not 功成而弗居 (2), work done, withdraw oneself 功遂身退 (9),‖ and so ―Work completed, matters done, (and) common folks all call (it, ‗Done) so (on) our (own)‘ 功成事遂, 百姓皆謂我自然 (17).‖ As the ―Great Tao declares not 大道不稱,‖12 so the Mother, nature or ruler, is unobtrusive, thereby creative, for she lets things self-create.13 Mom cares so naturally, softly, and silently, that her child proudly proclaims, ―I did it all by myself, Mom!‖ Doesn‘t all this hit ―democracy‖ precisely? Democracy is people-rule; no ruler is here.14 Lao Tzu seemed to accuse ―love people, govern the state 愛民治國 (10)‖ and mentioned no ―serving people‖ as Mencius stressed much. Democracy is no obtrusive service but to do what needs be done and withdraw.15 That‘s all. ―Democracy‖ here, letting people rule, just popularly extends democracy-in-nature, letting things rule to ride on life‘s ups and downs. Huai Nan Tzu, the third Taoist after Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu, tells two stories of how we can/should follow along equally, democratically, empty-mindedly, the Yin-Yang inter-birthing of woe and weal in Lao Tzu. 8 Analects 2/11, 7/8, 1/15, 3/8. On Mencius see Wu, Togetherness, op. cit., pp. 329-334; on Mencius and Hsün Tzu, see Wu, Chinese Body Thinking, op. cit., pp. 51-53. On the problem of pan-metaphor and its solution, see Wu, Chinese Wisdom Alive, NY: Nova Science Publishers, 2010, pp. 35-36. 9 We need not here detail on this point that the section below on double negatives elaborates. I also detailed on the affirming power of negation in On Chinese Body Thinking: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 1997, pp. 38-79, and in On the “Logic” of Togetherness: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 1998, pp. 326-328. 10 Mencius (2A2) thus poignantly tells us not to ―help growth.‖ Mencius is a Confucian infused with Taoism. 11 Disturbingly, natural science simply observes to generate the tremendous power of technology, to ruin nature; ―we conquer nature on our knees,‖ says Francis Bacon. Perhaps technology has misused natural science. 12 Chuang Tzu, 2/59. 13 Tao Te Ching, ch. 6. 14 In Kurosawa Akira 黑澤明 (1910-1998)‘s justly renowned ―Seven Samurai 七人の侍‖ (1954), seven rōnin 浪人 the roaming master-less samurai (literally, ―servants‖), were hired by a farming village for protection against marauding bandits. When they finally succeeded (with deaths of some fellow samurai), survived samurai mumbled, ―The farmers are the winners,‖ and moved on silently, master-less as before. It is Taoism pure, simple, soft, and sublime. Do we see Victor Hugo‘s Les Miserables here? 15 Beware post-victory ―victor‖ Bush! Don‘t proudly ―serve the Iraqi people for their democracy.‖ Withdraw yourself—it alone can redeem your ―big mess‖ in Iraq today. He did not withdraw and harvests bitter bloodshed of Iraqis and Americans.
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The story, ―Uncle Fort Lost Horse 塞翁失馬,‖16 tells how Uncle Fort underwent unexpected turns of events one after another. He unexpectedly lost his precious stallion, which came back with another one, followed by an equally unexpected loss of his son‘s leg on horseback ride, only to ―end‖ with an unexpected battle where most young men lost their lives while his crippled son survived. This is a story of an Uncle Fort at the city-limit, lifeborder, who kept asking, ―How could this-woe not make weal?‖ and ―How could this-weal not make woe?‖ at every turn of event, woe or weal. The fort is at the city frontier. Uncle Fort at the city frontier of life, in the ―limit situation‖ of existence (Jaspers), looks toward the uncharted future days. Here one thing is certain: an event happens to change into its opposite. Lao Tzu sighed, ―O, woe, where weal leans! O, weal, where woe lurks!‖17 Whatever comes will breed its opposite because opposites coexist in ovo, ever ready to appear as a coincidence of one pole or the other; a co-incidence of one event is really a co-happening of both, with one pole hidden under the other.18 So we should follow Uncle Fort to expect the unexpected, come what may. Here we are poised and prepared for woe, to let it breed weal. When weal comes, we prepare ourselves for woe again, to step into the next auspicious stage of birthing weal. This is how we partake of Nature naturing, birthing unceasing. Shakespeare made a conventional phrase, ―all is well that ends well,‖ into a comedy. The Chinese agree, and add, the end-well is endless, as long as we end it well, whatever ―it‖ is, woe or weal. The West says ―weal or woe‖ to stress weal against woe; China says, ―woe and/or weal 禍福,‖ stressing the negative the Yin that produces the Yang. We thus partake of the interchange of things, to be on the crests of waves of Yin and Yang, internecine inter-nascent, inter-birthing unceasing.19 The I Ching poetically charts the way, and entire Chinese history shows how life fared in struggles. Buddha softly advises us to graduate from the college of life, the wearisome rebirth-rounds, by accumulating good ―karma‖-grades. It is Nirvana, blowing off for good the incessant fires of life and death. 16 See Chapter 18, ―人間訓,‖ in the 淮南子. I meditated on the story in On Metaphoring: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 2001, pp. 192-194, et passim. Huai Nan Tzu has another story before this, that despite auspicious signs of white calves born to a black cow, both a good father and a good son turned blind. Soon the brutal battle broke out and all the townsfolk were brutally murdered. Both father and son, being blind, were spared. Soon after, they were able to see again. Perhaps Huai Nan Tzu implies that we must discipline ourselves to silently look forward to the good future, come what may, before we can have Uncle Fort‘s balanced state of mind, come what may. 17 ―禍兮福之所倚, 福兮禍之所伏.‖ (Tao Te Ching, ch. 58). 18 Jung entertained at dinner Einstein who ―was developing his first theory of relativity, [and] it was he who first started me off thinking about a possible relativity of time as well as space, and their psychic conditionality. More than thirty years later, this stimulus led to my relation with the physicist Professor W. Pauli and to my thesis of psychic synchronicity‖ (C. G. Jung, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, translation by R. F. C. Hull, Princeton University Press, 1960, 1973, pp. vi-vii). Yet Einstein was too mathematicalphysicalistic to understand the overall philosophical significance of ―relativity‖ in his replies to commentators (Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, ed., Paul Arthur Schilpp, La Salle, IL: Open Court Publishing Co., 1949, 1970, pp. 665-688). Nor did he think much of Jung, and was blind to psychological implications of ―relativity,‖ much less its deep life significance (Thomas Levenson, Einstein in Berlin, NY: Bantam Books, 2003, pp. 97, 322). The Einstein-others asymmetry is all too staggering. Einstein the supposedly open-minded theoretical scientist learns nothing from other scholars in other fields who are much stimulated by Einstein to learn much. Psychologist Jung learns much from Einstein and medicine while medical scientists learn nothing from Jung‘s synchronicity. What does it mean? Could it be that physicists‘ ―relativity,‖ for all its formidable mathematical expressions, is a simplified version of the Yin-Yang and the I Ching, for ―relativity‖ covers only the physical aspect of the Yin-Yang? Sadly, as the quotation from Jung above shows, in the name of being a ―scientist,‖ Jung seemed to be enamored with physical theorists! 19 陰陽相剋相生, 生生不息.
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In contrast, Taoists tirelessly harp on various powers of no-doing, not to try without even trying, but just wait and be ready to trail along, just to do what is needed, not-do what is not. We act without interfering. We just become ―nothing‖ to things ceaselessly happening, woe and weal, unexpected and expected. Such an admission of ―nothing‖ into our word and action allows us to partake of the pervasive presence of ―nothing‖ to enrich us. Silently, our common phrase, ―letting oneself go,‖ shows us the way.20 It tells how, deeply dissatisfied with all the world could offer— Brahmin‘s royal wealth of wisdom, Asanas‘ rigorous self-denial, and Gautama Buddha‘s balanced serenity—Siddhartha had to stop his eager search. Too much doing, striving, and seeking grows the nauseous self; ―What could I say to you that would be of value, except that perhaps you seek too much, that as a result of your seeking you cannot find?‖ ―That was why he had . . . to lose himself.‖21 He let himself go and listened only to his own soft inner voice, to soon follow an irresistible Kamala who sent him to a wealthy merchant Kamaswami. He practiced a ―Kama Sutra‖ of love and trade, and ended up making tremendous love with tremendous profit.22 To become a nothing is to let oneself go, which lets go of oneself, and one is no longer in hot pursuit of a goal. Meanwhile, losing oneself lets oneself be truly oneself. Thus letting oneself go loses oneself and thereby gains it.23 This is what becoming a ―nothing‖ accomplishes. ―Nothing‖ now pervades our human world, suffuses our linguistic expression and overflows into our daily activities; it is a fascinating theme celebrated in storytelling. We must carefully look into its modus operandi, this time, as befits nothing, without obtrusively mentioning ―nothing.‖
DOUBLE NEGATIVES, DOUBLE AFFIRMATIVES, STORYTELLING One woe of logic is that it separates us from actual facts, as illustrated above in the first logical approach to ―nothing.‖ This is to say, not that we need no logic, but that logic must not lead our observation of the concrete (as Aristotle did), but follow it. This is because logic is too inflexible a coarse metal sieve that leaks actuality, in contrast to a natural flexible ―net‖ of storytelling that may be logically sparse-meshed but leaks nothing, to quote Lao Tzu (73) our way. Let us just take an example, ―double negatives.‖ We often hear that double negatives equal an affirmative, but double affirmatives remain an affirmative. Two words, ―equal‖ and ―remain,‖ raise the eyebrows of actuality. Four points can be raised. First, it is false in fact that double negatives are simply equal to an affirmation; things in actual situations are much more complex. ―It is A‖ is much weaker and uninteresting than ―it 20 As Hermann Hesse‘s Siddhartha, tr. Hilda Rosner, NY: Bantam Books, 1971, says. 21 Ibid., pp. 35, 99, 140. 22 I must admit to quoting Hesse backward. Actually, Siddhartha began with learning from himself, was on his way to himself (ibid., p. 39), to end up realizing that that was the way to lose himself in worldly power, women, and money (p. 99), sinking in an utter world-nausea to the brink of suicide. That opened the way to realizing and self-dissolving in the River that wiped out time in the Unity of things, all present at once. This is a strangely full version of Buddhism; there is no real Emptiness, and ―Nirvana‖ is casually mentioned only once (p. 146). The story is more Taoist than Buddhist. This is why I could pilfer from the story as I wished. 23 This is a naturalistic version of ―For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it.‖ (Luke 9:24)
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is no not-A,‖ ―it is never heard that A is not the case,‖ ―he would be a fool to refuse A to knowingly hurt himself,‖ and so on. These double negations twist themselves, negating their original negation, to emphasize an affirmation to the contrary (―no less than‖), or to walk around both sides of negation to make an ironic affirmation to enrich it (―not without‖). Double negations give rise to scathing attacks, sarcasm to drive home a point, and effective promotion of something controversial. Logicians often say all this is about rhetorical devices, not about logic. Isn‘t saying so, so much the worse for logic? Isn‘t logic a part of rhetoric, after all? Isn‘t logic divorced from the actual force of a statement divorced from logic‘s true mission, to chart the way statements are made? Isn‘t a simple equivalence of double negatives to straight affirmation simply a false assertion of logic in fact? Then, logic takes it as axiomatic that double affirmations simply affirm. Once a thinker lamented that double negatives affirm but double affirmatives make no difference, whereupon a fellow thinker said, ―Ya (in rising tone)! Ya (in falling tone)!‖ Everyone laughed. The case was wryly/performatively made that double affirmatives can negate, and people‘s laughter assents to this fact. Moreover, ―Ya! Ya!‖ and laughter are full of their respective twists, similar to double negatives, for doesn‘t this very statement act out a double negative; isn‘t the act-out a rhetorical performance? ―Why‖ in double negations performs double affirmations. Thirdly, we note, the crucial point here is ―twist.‖ It is an asymmetrical counterpart of ―irony,‖ saying A to insinuate not-A. Besides, aren‘t both twist and irony two subtle forms of double negatives? In other words, we could take double affirmations in actual situation (with tones and facial expressions) to be an ironic expression of double negations. This point alerts us to the complex power of negation, especially double negatives. Double negatives can have various functions, depending on actual situations. ―Not without A‖ is stronger than ―A,‖ ―I don‘t know nothing‖ emphasizes my ignorance, and philosophical Taoists, Zen masters, Hegel, Nishida, and Heidegger say that double negatives lead us into higher levels of truth unattainable otherwise. Many thrive on double negatives, Socrates, Mencius, Chuang Tzu, Nagarjuna, Shakespeare, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Churchill, Mark Twain, and poets so many. Finally, ―depending on actual situation‖ above is crucial; logic is irrelevant/powerless without specifying the actual situation, yet cannot specify/stipulate it. Bringing out the situation tells stories, as we cited examples and explained them. Double negatives, double positives, and ironies compactly tell stories that twist and turn to enrich life. Thus, storytelling, not logic, effects logical understanding of actuality. Now, here are two sorts of logical understanding of untoward situations, with story-thrust persuasive, poetic. The first sort is stories straightly born of untoward circumstance. Andersen‘s stories are mostly sad if not brutal, with few morals. They are snapshots of actual worlds without rhyme 24 or reason. Andersen is a snapshot-maker. My letter to J here has ―sour grapes‖ and a ―lady on a wheelchair, with a seeing-eye dog,‖ nothing special yet quite powerful. Here it is. Bach is celebrating my sour grapes, J., for I‘m grateful I‘m leaving here soon. I‘m so old as to be free as a bird to choose wherever I go and enlighten young folks. I suddenly realized today I cannot remove the stench; the sooner I leave here the healthier I‘ll be breathing in fresh air. 24 See The Complete Hans Christian Andersen Fairy Tales (1984), ed. Lily Owens, NY: Gramercy Books, 2006.
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I express my sour grapes; we all need sour grapes to live on. The same grapes are sweet to someone, sour to some others, and revolting to more others. I cannot stand being bossed around and pressed into a preset mechanical mold. That idiotic chair person has no gratitude, no appreciation. She is a machine of routine, set rules and management. To wipe off the stench, I went to an old bookstore and picked seven volumes for $30.63, tax included; all my favorites—Heidegger, Jaspers, Kierkegaard (two volumes), Kolakowski, Mark Twain, and Voltaire—for 30 bucks! This is no town of Acorn the old bookstore where I used to pay at least twelve bucks each for beat-up volumes. Sour grapes clean me of stench! Then I was walking down a lane in a campus, when I met a young lady on her way to class—on a wheelchair, with a seeing-eye dog. Stunned, I stared at her. She did not notice me but just went by. That was the moment. Bach is still playing, and I hate to switch to the radio for ―All Things Considered,‖ not the best but our most comprehensive for news. I‘m disappointed; it‘s so boringly long on the big fires in California, somewhat expected. Now it‘s on Texas overrun by Republicans and evangelicals. Here I have another boring bunch of sour grapes. Now, why did I write you all this? I felt better. Why did I write how I felt better? I want you to likewise tell a story. Storytelling is talk-therapy moving everywhere to confess your sour grapes to breathe freely, look and listen to Canada geese honking so loud, flying so high in the chilly sky! To look at their enormous wonders is to hear your honking, so carefree, so high and soaring free! No more authoritarianism, no more bossing around! I can now put on transparency protection to my favorite books. You tell me your own stories, too, ok? I guarantee you‘ll feel good as I do, right now. Yours,
This is one sort of understanding to expand the healing circle and different circles, for different readers, beyond myself who initiates storytelling as in the letter above so mundane. Another sort is provocation by senseless incoherence that arouses hearers; it starts telling of a circle-center to expand the circle into more circles. Take the notorious statement that begins the whole Tao Te Ching, ―Tao can tao, not always-Tao.‖ However we parses it, we meet a logical dead-end, yet we cannot give it up as nonsense, for it seems to hide things deep that later 81 chapters seem to unpack. The explication itself deepens the paradox, however, for what follows to explicate is ―Tao can tao‖ that is ―not always-Tao.‖ The book is an exercise in self-defeating futility. Provoked, one initiates one‘s own exploration of what the statement could possibly mean; and perhaps this ―initiation‖ is what it intends. Perhaps the book of Tao Te Ching and its beginning statement are meant to ―let others begin‖ telling stories, whatever they are, about the sentiment, whatever it is, expressed in the book. Is Confucius‘ ―raise one [for] three returns‖ (7/8) to raise one to let three to return? Is this classroom alive? The ―other‖ can be a friend I wrote to, ―I‘m so happy you are reading at least my stuff. Now you would write in response. Criticize me. Complement what I missed as you see it. It is joy you cannot get over. I promise.‖25 My soul breathes in the classroom and the writing, then each breathes into the other and both come alive.
25
The ―other‖ can also be me the writer.
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What I cannot stand is however much soul I breathe into the class, some students simply do not come alive; I used to also be bothered by not publishing, however much excellence I breathed into writing. I have got over the latter; I now enjoy writing for writing‘s sake. I have to learn how to get over the former ―unmoved students.‖ Let us gaze at the nonsense in Tao Te Ching. Is all this Tao un-tao-able, about a road— Tao—not taken? Bashō‘s verse, ―This road—/ no one goes down it,/ autumn evening,‖ may echo Robert Frost‘s ―The Road Not Taken‖ confessing, ―I took the road less traveled by,/ 26 And that has made all the difference.‖ Bashō left the autumn road alone, Frost took one and left the other alone, and both were touched by the road not taken. ―Yet to begin to exist‖ is the ―Ultimate‖ of ―things,‖ as the ―music Mr. Chao‖ the great 27 28 musician ―does not perform (yet?)‖ is the perfect music. The bird out there is prettier than the one in my hand; the ideal highway is in the civil engineer‘s mind, before drafted; it is Plato‘s Form, the Really Real. ―Tao can tao, not always-Tao,‖ indeed. Or else, closer to home, does all this point to ―where there‘s a will, there‘s a way,‖ that is, 29 ―there begins a way‖? Is it to say, a ―way walks it, and forms,‖ the Way, the Tao, is the one the walker about to walk out? The way is the walk to be walked; isn‘t the ―essence‖ of the walk/way/Tao, yet to begin to begin walking out? If ―well begun, half done‖ is true, then ―yet to begin, all done‖ is also? ―Beginning to begin‖ must begin, all the same. Doesn‘t an individual initial step initiate self-creation, itself making the self whole, self-empowered? ―Thousand-mile walk begins 30 underfoot.‖ The elusive Tao of self-creation cannot be objectively tao-ed in an armchair, but must laboriously/silently walk out. Again, ―Tao can tao (is) not always-Tao,‖ indeed. Tao Te Ching is such poetry of actual walking the way. Finally, looking over storytelling provoked by untoward situation and intolerable stress, we realize how inevitable it is that historic epic stories turn poetic—Gilgamesh, the Odyssey, 31 Bhagavad-Gita, Chinese histories. Poetry comes inescapable and spontaneous as we express our unbearable agonies and exaltation; poetry is what enthralls, seeps in, and naturally suffuses the reader‘s heart and mind. What is poetry? It is verbally indefinable, for it gives life to words, defines expressions, and what defines cannot itself be defined. We only admiringly note two of its irresistible traits. Poetry is compact and open; it barely mentions a few crucial words to open us out into diverse vast horizons; we are fascinated to elaborate on details as pointed to by those few dots of words. Poetry is ―a foretaste of truth.‖32 Stories compact actuals and open to more; they are poetic. So, great novels are poetic (pointed, open) in style, sentiment, structure, and substance. So, every profound essay— 26 See Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, & Plays, NY: The Library of America, 1995, , op. cit., p. 103, and Robert Hass, ed., The Essential Haiku: Versions of Bashō, Buson, and Issa, Hopewell, NJ: The Ecco Press, 1994, p. 11. Cf. ―All along this road/ not a single soul—only/ autumn evening comes‖ in The Little Book of Haiku, tr., Sam Hamill, NY: Barnes and Noble Books, 2002, p. 12. Sadly, I have so far failed to locate the Japanese original in the vast 芭蕉俳句集 (中村俊定校注), 東京岩波文庫, 1970, 2000. 27 Chuang Tzu said so in 2/40 and 43. 28 Modern music, say, Edward Elgar‘s String Quartet (Op. 83), is all dissonance, but these ugly sounds form one pattern after another that makes sense, and the ―pattern of change‖ of patterns makes music. 29 Chuang Tzu said so in 2/33. 30 Lao Tzu said so in Tao Te Ching, ch. 64. 31 E.g., 春秋左傳, 史記, etc. 32 Poetry, June 2010, p. 246.
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musical, philosophical—is poetic; persuasive is the poetic, dotted and open in Plato, Bach, 33 Beethoven, Nietzsche, Frost, Emerson, Buber, Marcel, Heidegger, and even Jaspers. Thinkers of poetic sensibility today deconstruct—melt down—cognitive ―system.‖ Philosophy is a part of literature, literature is a collection of stories, and story is music of words as music is story wordless, melody-dotted, persuasive, in a word, poetic. All in all, we have thus surveyed two possible expansions—provoked by untoward circumstances outside, by intolerable incoherence inside, and irresistibly expressed in a poetic way—of the circle of life, with its center everywhere, its boundary nowhere; it ever expands beyond itself into diverse circles beyond belief. Alive and self-creative, it is storytelling. What we must note here, however, is that story-thinking as storytelling and hearing, when pushed far enough, opens out to a vast horizon where telling is no telling, hearing without hearing, everything turns silent. How could telling stories turn silent? Here people nod at each other, story is effected, and people smile and leave. We must go into this ultimate of storythinking, in silence.
TELLING WITHOUT TELLING, HEARING WITHOUT HEARING— SILENCE AT WORK Storytelling-reading has textual, exegetical, expository, and hermeneutical levels. Having 34 gone through all four levels of storytelling-reading up to the fourth, we must kick with 35 Wittgenstein the ladder we have climbed up on, but with a difference. Wittgenstein ends Tractatus by saying that the world cannot be expressed. To make sense of his ―inexpressible world,‖ we should climb up on his ladder of propositions and kick them away. The kicking after building/climbing is a dramatic collapse; the kick lets us clap hands at the fall of a house of cards, i.e., our propositional thinking. We stand amazed; we either ridicule Wittgenstein as logically incoherent or defend him as profound, yet not knowing why. 36 In contrast, Chuang Tzu just winked and smiled the soft way, in no-do wu-wei of storytelling; here is a soft kick. Lao Tzu‘s strange quip, ―Tao can tao, not Always-Tao‖ selfrhymes to self-efface, and then spells out ambiguous aphorisms, tao-ing the can-tao, selfeffacing nonchalantly, again and again. Lao Tzu begins with a self-effacing theme to continue its refrain; now, how can self-effacing be continued? It is climbing and kicking in one, inter-woven and under-woven subtly to spread impossibly, with a wink. Those who are sensitive are fascinated; those not, bypass the entire 33 Note how poetic Karl Jaspers waxes in his marvelous gem on our situational self-transcendence, Reason and Existenz, tr. William Earle, NY: The Noonday Press, 1957. It admirably sums up his later massive volumes. 34 Tillich objects to describing life with ―level‖ because the term connotes an irreversible hierarchy, while in life things intermingle inter-reversibly, in mutual immanence, so ―dimension‖ is a more fitting term. (Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume Three, The University of Chicago Press, 1963, pp. 12-30, 114, etc.) I don‘t see how ―level‖ connotes such hierarchical rigidity, so I keep the term ―level‖ until something comes out to change my mind. 35 Tractatus, 6.54. We have just been through this point in ―Relativism and Storytelling.‖ In fact, Wittgenstein is thus a thinker of performative silence in the West; later Heidegger also used the word ―Being‖-crossed. This is also why both thinkers are controversial and unintelligible in the West but quite popular in Japan and now in China. 36 § Sleep, the Tao of Self-ing is a wonderful way of story-presenting Tao, in sleep!
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show as a bore. Most of us all too easily ignore how he does it, and all too eagerly rush in to parse ―what‖ he says and to translate it, as if we knew the whole show. After all, there is nothing in the announcement and in the subsequent sayings announcing that all efface themselves. His kicking is subtle ―nothing‖ (wu) doing nothing (wu wei); it is silence enacted. Such performative silence makes us realize that the ultimate of story-thinking consists in telling without telling, hearing without hearing, in silence at work.37 Why is silence the ultimate of story-thinking? How do we ―silence‖ in storytelling?38 We consider the why, then the how. Why is silence-telling the ultimate of stories? Three points are here. One, objective historical chronicle,39 mathematics, legal statutes, logical canons, and Western philosophy can be put down in propositions, but what are behind them, i.e., subjective mood, attitude, approach, worldview, and horizon to match the shifting flow of actuality and milieu, and so on, cannot be put down in propositions; they are a silent push behind the saying. The silent push behind is the ultimate that tells itself through stories pushed; story-thinking ultimately silence-telling. Two, we need to record everything, and all we have are words. We must then use words to hit non-word silence of things, by saying A and kicking/wiping A at once, to say non-A. Wittgenstein climbs up on the logic-ladder to kick it away to silent-tell of non-logic that does not tell; Lao Tzu first tells us to wipe tao-able Tao, and then tells tao-able Tao. Western ladder kicking is Chinese word wiping. Such act of self-kicking/wiping inconsistency presents silence. Such sound-silence presentation is storytelling. Thus Chuang Tzu purposely scatters words, and Zen masters say, ―If you say Yes, you receive 30 beatings; if you say No, you receive 30 beatings,‖ for it is un-say-able. What is ―it‖ here? ―It‖ is what is meant by words to be there but has been obstructed by the words from being there. In words self-wiped by their self-contradiction, words cease to describe, get out of our way in our forgetting them, and there emerges what is there as meant by self-erasedforgotten words. Words now say by negating their saying. ―Stories getting out of the way of what‘s behind‖ is the ultimate storytelling. Here is a story, gentler than 30 beatings, which conveys ―it.‖ A new preacher walked with an older one, who went up to a rose bush, handed the young preacher a rosebud, and told him to open it without tearing the petals. The young preacher looked in disbelief at the older. But, out of great respect for the elder, he proceeded to try. . .Soon he realized how impossible this was. Noticing it, the elder began to recite a poem: It is only a tiny rosebud A flower of God‘s design; But I cannot unfold the petals With these clumsy hands of mine. The secret of unfolding flowers 37
Cf. my meditations on ―silence‖ in Butterfly, op. cit., p. 505 (index on ―silence‖), and the conclusion of ―§ Chinese Philosophy and Story-Thinking‖ below. 38 We will soon consider story-reading-and-hearing as silence. Now we must first consider storytelling in silence. 39 Our oldest historical story was ―engraved on a stone‖ (pp. 61, 117), to show the world our life is ―decreed‖ (72). The Epic of Gilgamesh, tr. N. K. Sandars, London: Penguin Books, 1960, 1972. This was the case in ancient China, too.
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Is not known to such as I. GOD opens this flower so sweetly, Then, in my hands, they die. If I cannot unfold a rosebud, The flower of God‘s design, Then how can I have the wisdom To unfold this life of mine? So, I‘ll trust in Him for leading Each moment of my day. I will look to Him for His guidance Each step of the Pilgrim‘s way. The pathway that lies before me Only my Heavenly Father knows. I‘ll trust him to unfold the moments, Just as He unfolds the rose.
What an elegant engaging enigma! What sonorous silence this story has made! We need no Zen violence of 30 beatings; we just need the fragrant silence of a rosebud of our life and a lotus flower in Buddha‘s smiling hand. We see Buddha here shaking hand with Christian God. Handshake takes place between two friends standing opposite. That is, both are friendly and apart at once—in their handshake, in silence. Such silent handshake of storytelling is the ultimate silence-telling. Three, to capture/say ―it‖ by de-scribing the situation as above is storytelling, which has two aspects—description here sets things down coherently, yet it is for those with ears to hear to freely hear their sense behind words, not to listen to the explicit words; all this is open. Description is coherent, textual-exegetical, levels (a) and (b); hearing its sense is open, expository-hermeneutic, on levels (c) and (d). Here I self-lessly tell a story; you self-lessly hear it. Silence happens in this story-exchange in which the story comes alive, unfolds spontaneously, and vanishes in silence. Now have you noted that in elucidating what silence-telling is as ultimate, the elucidation is on how silence-telling happens via storytelling? Why and how are entwined here. We must ask, ―How do we climax our storytelling in silence?‖ Well, what did our Chinese storytellers do to manage to silence-tell, and how do sensitive thinkers today hear its sense in silence? They all show us at least seven related ways of telling silence, silence-telling in silence40 hearing, to show how silence tells. Way One: Silence-storytelling is self-effacing. It tells something and denies it, or denies something and then tells it anyway; this ―anyway‖ powerfully tells silence. As mentioned above, Tao Te Ching is a telling execution of this ―anyway‖-ploy. Claiming, ―Tao tao-able— tell-able—is no Tao,‖ it went on to tell about Tao. It ―tells‖ by denying it before telling it, as Wittgenstein ―tells‖ it and then throws away what was told.
40 Max Picard‘s The World of Silence (South Bend, IN: Regnery/Gateway, 1952), talks too much; he is too noisy about silence. Amazingly Gabriel Marcel in his Preface to it managed to get out of this trap. My paragraphs also try to maneuver out of Picard‘s trap. Readers would judge how far I succeeded.
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They ―tell,‖ not in the telling but in their wiping. Denying the efficacy of words, Zen Buddhism is the world‘s wordiest religion; it kicks words with words, as Wittgenstein kicks the logic-ladder logically. All that is said is now ―a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing‖ and, in nothing-signifying, all tale says it all—silence. Here the telling silence tells. How? Let us listen to Shakespeare. On hearing his wife‘s 41 death that silently declared his end, Macbeth mumbled to himself, She should have died hereafter./ There would have been a time for such a word./ Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow/ Creeps in this petty pace from day to day/ To this last syllable of recorded time,/And all our yesterdays have lighted fools/ The way to dusty death./ Life‘s but a walking shadow, a poor player/ That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,/ And then is heard no more. It is a tale/ Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/ Signifying nothing.
In letting Macbeth announce his end as ―signifying nothing‖ just before he ends his life, Shakespeare announces that this play of his signifies nothing. It is ―full of sound and fury‖ to make no sense, thereby to ex-press the sense that life makes no sense. It signifies nothing to murder one‘s lord who favors the murderer; it is sad sound and fury. Shakespeare makes a shivering music out of such noises, suffused with sad silence. Japan repeats the tragic tune of all-futility in the all-time popular Tale of the Heike, a story of rapid rise and fall of the no-good Heike hegemony in the twelfth century; it is an apt parable on the evanescence of struggles to death in loyalty to the lords far from sagely, the lesson tolled by the bells of the Buddhist temple to the bloody fights among clashes of vain 42 loyalties. The Tale begins with a note resonating with uncanny similarity to Macbeth‘s mumble: The bell of the Gion Temple tolls into every man‘s heart to warn him that all is vanity and evanescence. The faded flowers of the sala trees by the Buddha‘s deathbed bear witness to the truth that all who flourish are destined to decay. Yes, pride must have its fall, for it is as unsubstantial as a dream on a spring night. The brave and violent man—he too must die away in the end, like a whirl of dust in the wind.
It is so tragic and ironic that the sound and fury of ―dusty‖ (Macbeth) ―dust‖ (Heike), vapor-like transience signifying nothing, has been immensely popular, continually through the ages in England and in Japan, and in China, where silence no less noisily resounds in all histories and literatures of life.. All tragedies, then, are sad senseless ―sound and fury,‖ to tell of life that ―should have died hereafter,‖ for ―life‘s but a walking shadow‖ on its strutting fretting ―way to dusty death.‖ Life is a walk to death senseless; only an idiot can tell such a noisy life-tale, senselessly idiotic. To calmly make such a sad noise makes tragic silence. Aristotle said tragedy is an art of imitation cathartic. Macbeth and Heike kick life away in bloody tears; Lao
41 Macbeth, 5.5.18-27. This is in the version of William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, general editors, Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, Oxford Compact Edition, 1988, 1991, pp. 997-998. 42 Hiroshi Kitagawa, Bruce T. Tsuchida, trs., The Tale of the Heike: Heike Monogatari (1975), University of Tokyo Press, 1989, p. 5. Cf. Helen Craig McCullough, tr., The Tale of the Heike, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988.
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Tzu wipes out Tao Te Ching with a wink. All tales of sound and fury, signifying nothing, are idiots‘ stories to cleanse our idiocy in silence. Way Two: Such silent storytelling just tells of what is so here now. ―What is Buddha? This shit-wiping stick.‖ We may say that Buddha is this stick that wipes us clean. But No, the stick is just there, and the Master just sees it and tells of it as it is here now; he is silence as Buddha is, here now. ―Why fish has no umbrella? ‗Cause fish has no hands.‖ Of course, fish have no umbrellas, and they have no hands. Ecstatic Mom said, Tessie is ―logical,‖ for she says a plain fact, and what else is new? And yet all this made Mom ecstatic, and made me ―Wow!‖ Silence impresses us. Chuang Tzu has tons of stories so provocative because so plainly common, such as ―morning three,‖ but what do they provoke? Nothing, Chuang Tzu just said nothing, for 3+4 is 4+3; everyone knows that! Saying-nothing tells—silence. No wonder we did not get it, for there is nothing to get. No wonder we thought we‘ve got it, for nothing is there that we did not know. For all that, in all this commonness, his silence of saying-nothing impresses us— compellingly, mysteriously. Way Three: Storytelling says nothing but acts, and in acting says ―silence.‖ It beats, beating the drum as Chuang Tzu did on his wife‘s death (18/15) and Zen-giving the hearer 30 Zen-beatings. It is a performative utterance that does not utter, and this not-uttering utters ―silence.‖ A baby babbles, mumbles, shouts, beats things, and swings them around—for nothing. That is how the baby grows. Heraclitus says the world is a river, and we cannot step into ―it‖ twice; for Mencius the rivers teach us how to be a sage. Confucius simply stands there at the stream and exclaims, ―Water! O, Water!‖ He sighs, in silence so loud. His sigh brings us back to the beginning of Analects; here his joy of learning from the teacher waxed in the joy of learning from many friends, to climax in joy, ―O, ignored by 43 people and not offended (silent), isn‘t it rather princely of a person?‖ Silence was his 44 ultimate joy of learning all alone, as his happy disciple Hui lived in obscurity with little 45 46 food and water. Having gone through many teachers, learning is an ultimate living-alone without-offense silent, following the world river ignoring him, his maturing life-flow, in the flow of history, time-silence, that nurtures myriad all, in silence. How? Everyday dawns, shines, and surveys where we are situated, and a map of our true situation appears to show us the way to live on. The light enlightens us to show us the truthmap of our situation in us and around us. The light is our way, our map, and we come to live in the truth mapped out about us and around us. Here the light, the way, the truth and the life are one, and we live this unity if we let the light enlighten us, that is, if we believe in the light, silent, sagacious, and natural. We must allow the light, believe in it, to map us and lead our way as we walk in silence. Jesus said so also (John 14:6) just before leaving us left confounded, to let us be free to let him the light-map-truth live in us. After his death, if we let him at all, he is now our lighted map inside to silently show us the way, to go on living in the hostile world. The true teacher is a dead one, alive and silent. 43 Mencius 4B18, Analects 9/17, 1/1. To ―ignore‖ is literally to ―not-know 不知‖ as in Analects 1/1. 44 Not being lonely (孤), being alone (獨) can ―envision unique-aloneness 見獨‖ to ―break through into the dawn 朝徹‖; it comes only by going through learning beyond learning (Chuang Tzu 6/36-41). 45 Analects 6/11, Mencius 4B29. 46 ―Among three persons going, there must be my teachers.‖ (Analects 7/22). Mr. Christian, my friend, and Jesus are my three teachers, as they will soon appear in Way Four.
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Way Four: My former teacher at Yale, Professor William A. Christian, now gone on, spoke sparingly and always softly. My friend, who publishes much and is in a responsible position at a respectable institution, never argues but routinely retires to reticence after making a point or two. Jesus stood out alone silent through dings of accusations, interrogations, and cruel treatments by inhumane accusers, judges, and soldiers. Simple silence of Mr. Christian, my friend, and Jesus, makes a powerful impact for long in the end, if not at once. Way Five: Jesus stared at Peter just as Peter finished denying knowing him. His silent stare overpowered Peter into bitter tears. How could a silent stare be so powerful? Jesus just trailed Peter, that‘s all, and trailing can overpower. Jesus advised Nicodemus to be reborn in water and wind, two common things, nature all too silent around us here now for us to follow 47 along, and we will be reborn as Nature. ―It‘s quieter when birdies sing, isn‘t it, Dad?‖ my Mark whispers. Similarly, babies just stare at an adult. We can smile at them, and they could not care less, but simply stare back at us. That is so moving. Similarly, Zen paintings are not photocopies but caricatures misshapen here and there. Miyamoto Musashi‘s ―Daruma‖ (Bodhidharma) has stern eyes, mouth, and unkempt face. Hakuin‘s ―Daruma‖ has huge 48 eyes. These faces, unattractive, of the same Daruma differ in thrust (ch‘i), as if the portraits mirror their respective painters who yet share an unspeakably poignant acuteness. Besides, those Zen paintings often accompany poems, written quite often in ―sauntering 行書‖ or ―grassy 草書‖ style. Those Zen poems are on themes common and plain. One 49 Hundred Zen Poems has no word, ―Zen.‖ Zen ―artists‖ paint and poetize on things absolutely bland and blank to set off something else Ineffable. ―Zen‖ is meditation, ―Tao‖ is how things go, and ―Buddha‖ is the awakened, but meditation on what? What is Tao‘s how? Awakened to what? Nothing is told, for it cannot be, any more than can God, ―YHWH,‖ be pronounced. E. e. cummings so spelt, ―Nothing surpasses the mystery of stillness,‖ that this sentence cannot be read or uttered. It writes, 50 ―n/OthI/n/g can/s/urPas/s/the m/y/SteR/y/of/s/tilLnes/s.‖ He stilled ―stillness‖ itself. All poetics in the end paints a bland blank in blistering wintry chill to sober us in the wind of Nature the Self-So. We call it chi‘i 氣, the stirring natural breath of life. K‘ai shu 楷書 (orthodox) style of 51 calligraphy can be copied but not hsing shu 行書 (sauntering) or ts‘ao shu 草書 (grassy) style, any more than Lao Tzu can. I am myself here, as I watch their ch‘i breathing in their vigorous brush-execution, barely to catch/cultivate ch‘i, the thrust of breathing life. Copying breathing kills life; copying orthodoxy style is easy, yet its breathing is hard to feel and
47 Luke 22: 61-62. John 3: 8. 48 Miyamoto Musashi (1584-1645) was a painter-swordsman who invented two-sword fight. Hakuin (1685-1768) was the father of the Rinzai Reformation, famed for his vigor (ch‘i) in Zen paintings. Their portraits of Daruma are collected as Plates 41 and 41 in Daisetz T. Suzuki‘s Zen and Japanese Culture, Princeton University Press, 1959. 49 王志遠, 吳相洲著, 禪詩今譯百首, 高雄縣大樹鄉: 佛光, 民85. 50 This is ―Poem 42‖ in e. e. cummings‘ posthumous 73 Poems (1963). Cf. my History, Thinking, and Literature in Chinese Philosophy, Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1991, p. 140. 51 Actually orthodox style is quite hard to copy; no one has copied its master Ou-yang Hsün 歐陽詢 to satisfaction.
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copy. Conversely, it is much easier to feel the ch‘i of sauntering and grassy styles but hard to copy them. In grassy style of calligraphy, we pay less attention to each character than to the whole sweep of brush-moving, alive as the breath of life itself of that person, as Huai Ssu‘s differs 53 from Sun Kuo-t‘ing. We learn from a master of breathing on how best to breathe—for a specific cultural breathing—by watching/tracing the master‘s breathing pattern, in sauntering and grassy styles. Breathing is quite a serious business of living, and as such it casually moves us, while we do breathe casually. 54 Yehudi Menuhin‘s performance of Sibelius‘ Violin Concerto ushers us into the sauntering breathing of his ―thick violin‖; everything is off tune, hewing forth the rough melody thrust and its patterns, there to powerfully compel and convince us, saying, ―That‘s Sibelius‘ severe Nature of Finland!‖ Perhaps the point of ―enjoying grassy style‖ is less to decipher its meaning than to feel the breathing thrust (ch‘i) of the whole execution. Music comes to mind when we try to 55 explain its ―meaning.‖ Musician-philosopher Marcel said, No, it is inconceivable that by words I could give an idea of something of a musical order in its qualitative singularity. I could try to do this only by playing it or by presenting a significant melody—in other words, by participating actively in this music—in the hope that it will evoke (or, perhaps more exactly, that it will release) in the listeners a kind of inner movement by which they will move toward an encounter with what I am trying to have them hear.
As we listen to Fischer-Dieskau singing Schubert‘s Lieder, we enjoy more of his singing than attending to the meaning of his words in the background. I feel Menuhin‘s distinct grassy style impacts in his performance of Sibelius‘ Violin Concerto. Menuhin is less technically accurate than powerfully alive to the sentiment, and so more accurate than ―literally accurate‖ performance. He is my grassy Muse! I cannot explain it; I can only 56 undergo the experience in awe with you. Chuang Tzu‘s praise of common simple wind (2/3-9) was praised by great literary writer Ssu Tung-p‘o as the ultimate of poetic beauty, yet Chuang Tzu was just ―piping,‖ shooting the breeze, as the wordless wind was. His human piping blended in with earthly piping, the wind, the nothing blowing all over, for nothing. His superb description—story-poem—of wind the nothing-flow is itself the nothing-flow. That is what sweeps us into the wind. His description itself is a nothing that blows to clean us, enliven, and refresh us with its wordless blowing beauty of life-breath. He was doing silence, talking wind-silence, by 52 Watch the vigorous inimitable 歐陽詢‘s (554-641) 皇甫誕碑 and 九成宮醴泉銘, both issued by 東京二玄社. 53 唐懷素 自敘帖 (1960)，東京二玄社, 1988. 孫過庭/書譜，香港翰墨軒, 1997. 54 EMI CDM 7639872. 55 The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel, eds. P. A. Schilpp and L. E. Hahn, La Salle, IL: Open court, 1984, p. 273. This is a part of his reply to Gene Reeves‘ stodgy exposition of ―mystery‖; the entire reply (pp. 272-274) deserves close reading and meditation. 56 Mendelssohn wrote on his ―Songs without Words,‖ ―Unlike ambiguous words, music goes directly from heart to heart,‖ to Marc A. Souchay (10/15/1812). Mrs. Nixon said of President Richard Nixon that his words from heart go straight to the hearts of the nation. Words must be used (as both did) to be denied, to give way to songs without words. The Preface to the Shih Ching (Classic of Poetry) says also, ―Feelings come shaped in words. Words are not enough, and overflow in groans that in turn overflow to songs chanted out in dancing hands and feet.‖
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trailing Nature, and silent trailing comes out beautifully compelling. This is how silence shoots breeze in nature to blow/flow into us. 57 Way Six: We hear Chuang Tzu saying (22/39), ―Humans born between heaven and earth are as a white colt passing a wall-crack; suddenly it is gone.‖ This saying vividly stays with us today, and continues to awe us, 2,400 years after his life ended. Thus this saying is both momentary as our life it described is, and perpetual, outliving us all. We stand in awe at this ―and,‖ which is silent. 58 Of course, our life is but dreams of drunkards and footprints on sands of time, but saying so strangely, mysteriously, immortalizes this fleeting fact. Human life with human sayings is all such unity of eternity and transience, united in history-as-sayings (文史). 59 Anyone who explains and exploits this ―such unity‖ captures ―silence‖ that is actuality. They can exploit this unity, but not express it; it is beyond their grasp. How could it be grasped? What does this unity mean? It is silence. What is this silence? Well, a kaleidoscope is a tube; it contains pieces that are not a tube. The pieces move to make myriad shapes that flicker, change, and sparkle, to make up the tube, while the tube itself does not sparkle. Now, how are the tube and the pieces related? The tube contains the pieces. The ―containing‖ situation does not flicker, change, sparkle, or not-flicker, not-change, notsparkle, for it is not the pieces or the tube. The ―containing‖ is beyond all these descriptions of the tube and the pieces. The ―containing‖ is not tube or pieces but beyond them. Still, without ―containing‖ they cannot make up a ―kaleidoscope‖ that is a tube that has so many flickers, changes, and sparkles. Life and its description make a kaleidoscope. Life and its activities change and do not say; their description does not change but says about changes. How are life and its description related? Their relation is not ―saying‖ or ―not-saying,‖ not change or not-change. It is beyond expression, silence, as Chuang Tzu says, ―not word, not silence‖ (25/81); it is silence beyond 60 silence that words forth no word. All Taoism dwells here, ―saying no-saying‖ (27/6), as Lao Tzu begins with ―Tao can tao, not Always Tao,‖ and then goes on to tao the not-tao-ables. Both perform silence. Way Seven: Silence preserves Thou as no verbal expressions can, Marcel says, for words objectify their referent into an It, which Thou is not. Thou can never be captured in a 61 discourse, but mutual responses in silence leave Thou free as he is, without reducing him to It. To see what silence means here, we can weave, in our way, the point Marcel made.
57 ―Man‘s life between heaven and earth is like the passing of a white colt glimpsed through a crack in the wall— whoosh!—and that‘s the end.‖ (Burton Watson, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, NY: Columbia University Press, 1968, p. 240). The whole Chapter 22 is beautiful absolutely, poignantly! 58 ―Life in the World is but a big dream;/ I will not spoil it by any labour or care.‖ (Li Po, ―Waking from Drunkenness on a Spring Day,‖ Arthur Waley, Translations from the Chinese, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1919, 1941, p. 122) 59 In contrast, the West since Plato seizes this time-timeless ―cleavage‖ to produce an opposition between the flow of events in time/history and timeless values, i.e., Ideas and logic. 60 Cf. Chuang Tzu 2/59=24/68, 2/65=18/12, 13/65, 72, 14/27, 17/24, 21/26, 22/7, 84, 24/66, the end of 25, etc. 61 Marcel, ―I and Thou,‖ in The Philosophy of Martin Buber, eds. Paul Arthur Schilpp and Maurice Friedman, La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1967, pp. 46-48. Buber objects, saying that when I say ―I,‖ I do not denature myself into It. Likewise, I do not denature Thou into It when I say ―Thou.‖ (p. 705) I think Buber takes I-saying-―I‖ as same as I-saying-―Thou,‖ but they are not; saying-I self-identifies, saying-Thou does not, though both identify without objectifying.
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―In the beginning was the relation,‖ Buber said, but actually in the beginning was ―a 62 certain felt unity‖ that is then articulated to make room for relation, says Marcel. We say, the ―certain felt‖ unity here is then itself unarticulated, a silence. The relation is the meeting between mutual Thous of presence. Such mutual presence then composes a community of ―co-belonging to‖ the same history and destiny, the same past and the same prospect. At an unexpected stop of our train, we become Thou to each other, to touch the heart of our common vital existential interests. All of these take place in silence—a certain unity, meeting, the between, presence, co-belonging, touching the heart of our existence. This is the 63 ―spirit‖ that silently hovers on the It-waters. Is this ―spirit‖ called ―ch‘i‖ the life-breath? Thus silence here sums up all these happenings, as a tacit milieu for them to take place as they are, without reducing them to It. ―Milieu‖ has much to do with the ineffable relation between what contains and what is contained of the world-kaleidoscope, and with the midpoint of our fleeting life and the eternity of saying so. To dwell here, in this silence of all silence, is to become free, eloquent, and powerful everywhere.64 This is where Lao Tzu denies the Tao being say-able, and then goes on freely to say about the Tao. This is where Wittgenstein says all sorts of things before wiping them away as nonsense, as kicking the ladder climbed up on, and where Chuang Tzu continues to talk about no-talk, to do no-do, and to word with word-forgotten ones. They all freely talk in contradictions, being eloquent in their silence. It is a silent stare of the baby. It is doing-insaying simply what it is as it is, as the newsman reporting horrors of the events, silently. 65 (C) In all these seven ways the Tao goes along, forever silent. ―The Tao is silent‖ as things in the world are. Here telling and hearing join, and heart goes to heart, core straight to core. Straightness is silence; it is the core of things, as the silent majority is the core of democracy the people-rule, for the true ruler silently-straightly goes to people, as Lao Tzu keeps harping on. All this follows nature. The psalmist intones, ―The heavens proclaim God‘s splendour,/ the sky speaks of his handiwork;/ day after day takes up the tale,/ night after night makes him known;/ their speech has never a word,/ not a sound for the ear,/ and yet their message 66 spreads the wide world over,/ their meaning carries to earth‘s end.‖ Nature speaks the loudest of all its silence—as both the poets and the scientists know too well; all their stories, poetic and scientific, are mere faint echoes of nature‘s powerful silence. In the end, all our stories are no-stories. Non-sense in nature provokes, in silence, sense that is ours, our living. Here we return to nature, reborn in it, by echoing it, trailing it. 62 Marcel prefers meeting to relation; Buber takes ―relation‖ in a primordial sense, forever pregnant with continuing latency of ―meeting‖ that comes and goes (ibid., p. 706). All this is a verbal quibble on something both men agree on, for ―meeting‖ can be universal as relation, as ―relation‖ can be concrete as meeting. 63 Marcel then goes into the eternal Thou who by nature can never become It, for ―he‖ admits of no measure, no limit. He is not a sum of properties at all but we constantly tend to make this eternal Thou into a Quid (ibid., p. 48). The eternal Thou with animal Thou and nature-Thou are Buber‘s problems; he tries to solve them in pp. 707-709. All this came from sticking to the I-Thou frame, and can be resolved by ―I-Milieu‖; nature, trees, animals, and God are silent ―milieus‖ for I-Thou to take place. See my ―Realism (Fajia), Human Akrasia, and the Milieu for Ultimate Virtue,‖ Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, December 2002, pp. 21-44, and ―The I-Milieu: Its Implications for Culture and Thinking (I),‖ (pp. 1-59, December, 2007), ―The I-Milieu: Its Implications for Culture and Thinking (II),‖ (pp. 1-68, June 2008), in Journal of World Religions. 64 See my ―The I-Milieu: Its Implications for Culture and Thinking (I)‖ (pp. 1-59, December 2007), and ―The IMilieu: Its Implications for Culture and Thinking (II)‖ (pp. 1-68, June 2008), Journal of World Religins. 65 Raymond M. Smullyan‘s The Tao Is Silent (Harper, 1977) misses all this silence. 66 Psalm 19:1-4. Moffatt‘s translation.
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Chuang Tzu (2/76-77) told us a story of Mr. Tall Tree, who promises Mr. Jittery Magpie some mindless words (wang yen 妄言) for Magpie to listen mindlessly (wang t‘ing 妄聽). The whole operation is mindless-of-you (妄 as composed of 亡 loss and 女 you, devoid of you) the listener in telling, and mindless-of-you the teller in listening, a careless/reckless 67 telling and listening in abandoned way. Again, silence is here, being quite active in nature‘s non-sense that blows to breed sense. The wind blows through time, to make us all friends. We befriend everyone, birds, trees, and the ancients who are now silent. Ancients are scum, says Mr. Wheelwright in a story of Chuang Tzu‘s (13/68-74), who is now quite an ancient person of 399-295 BCE. The silent ancients erase themselves to befriend us; true teachers are dead ones. All stories told here are from our historic masters on birds and trees, and from thinkers sensitive to them. 68 Did I talk too much? I‘m afraid so, being eager to be a companion to silence—to ancient silence and to tree-silence here now. All companion-talks must cease, as John the Baptist must decrease for Jesus to increase, who deceases on the cross for us. All is silence, talking without talking, hearing without hearing, mutually telling and listening, mindlessly, recklessly, care-lessly, and ceaselessly, while the wind ceaselessly blows where it wishes. (D) ―Wait!,‖ someone says, ―the wind may blow aimlessly, senselessly, but what about our silence that talks, even our silence that talks no sense? Our human silence cannot simply be aimless and senseless as wind, can it? The wind is not our silence, and can never be human silence. What is their difference?‖ This inquiry asks how two silences, natural and human, relate. Let us go this way. To grow is being alive, to be alive is to self-move, and to move is to be here and not-here at 69 once. We grow up as nature is alive. Nature is alive in the wind blowing; we grow up kicking the past-ladder as we climb it. Our climbing-kicking tells that we are growing. All move in silence that tells. The wind tells of the weather, spring breeze, wintry gale; the wind is the weather that 70 breathes to tell of the life of nature. The wind-story tells that nature is alive with the birds 71 singing in the wind, singing the world. Birds are so small, invisible, yet they sing so unmistakably radiant, penetrating everywhere, up there no one cares. Bird songs make me feel sky-blue good, sky-vast good. My friend chimes in. ―Do you like birds? I go bananas over them! I forget myself overhearing them chirping and honking. They are nowhere, invisible up there, and yet their 67 See my ―Learning as a Master from a Master,‖ On Metaphoring, op. cit., p. 631. 68 I tried consistently to be a companion to Chuang Tzu in Butterfly as Companion, op. cit. Max Black was inconsistent in this regard in his Companion to Wittgenstein‟s „Tractatus,‟ op. cit. 69 Logically unable to tolerate the contradiction of motion, being here and not-here, Parmenides cut motion from existence. For Plato, motion is real as long as it partakes in the unmoved Forms. Aristotle retrospectively took motion as acorn-potentiality maturing into oak-actuality; it is a quibble because motion does not mature, it just moves. Logical analysis has no room for motion, then. Motion is alive only in storytelling that stretches coherently to accept it. 70 Weather is ―t‘ien ch‘i 天氣,‖ heavens‘ breaths. 71 I always listen to Lang Elliott‘s incomparable CD, poetry-packed ―Songbird Portraits‖ (Ithaca, NY: NatureSound Studio, 1999) with Bach‘s coherent-lively ―The Well-Tempered Clavier‖ by Edwin Fischer (EMI, 1989). I hear them all day one after the other continually. Birds and Bach blend in so well that Bach is ―birds singing in human language.‖ This may be why Bach‘s measured music is relaxing/nourishing, as noted in ―§ Music, Poetry, System.‖ Schubert‘s ―Fantasia in C‖ by the Menuhin-Kentner team (EMI, Menuhin Edition, 1991), from its exquisite beginning till its undulating end, is also a pure bird song, though I would hesitate to generalize and say all human music is ―bird songs.‖
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presence is heard loud and clear, everywhere.‖ Nature is alive with the bird singing, with the cows grazing in the field of swinging grass, and with raging tornado and hurricane. Nature never dies; it just keeps going alive with the wind. If we humans ―mess up‖ nature and ―pollute‖ it until we can no longer live in it, the wind still keeps blowing as it does in other planets and stars. Has nature a purpose? Well, religion says it does mysteriously; somehow we feel in our spines that nature is not aimless. Nature wordlessly says to teach us; 72 ―To stop listening to it would lose ourselves,‖ say our sages and our history. How do we follow nature? By wordlessly saying as does nature. We call it ―silence.‖ Saying silence allows saying to come alive as nature, breathing with birds, settled as stately trees, and awesomely invincible as gale—perhaps all at once, that is, as we bird-breathe we tree-settle to be gale-invincible, all thanks to saying silence. Saying silence carries nature‘s 73 weight, as we use words to wordlessly say, and as we silently show. How? Casting about for words to describe a scene, we say, ―Not A, not B, not C,‖ and soon just ―A, B, C,‖ as Nietzsche and Beckett did. The hearer on her part takes both routes together as ―absurd,‖ as she realizes that the scene simply cannot be A, B, or C, and all of them at once, at the same time, and worse, denying them as well, and so she goes on to explore the scene on her own. This is to use words to wordlessly say. And then silence shows; silence acts out, exhibits, when people expect words. This is an extension of ancient rituals that act out cosmos-meaning. We have social rituals today, sacred as ancient ritual. Neither ritual can be mocked. Of course silence can go on holiday as can language. Silence can be showy, signifying nothing, silent, and then showy senseless silence shows as well, as ―showy.‖ (E) A long quiet evening sinks in to stay with us for life, as our grandmother‘s soft story mumbles on, serenaded by insects‘ rhythmic sounds. Do we remember her story? It does not matter; we remember the scene, the warmth, the insects, and our grandmother, all evoked, or rather released, by her droning story in that twilight evening, and that is what counts. Her story is insects‘ sounds, telling meaning by singing nothing. Grandma is invincible matter-offactly, as insects are. Such is silence that talks—and none can withstand it; none can help but blend into it to be part of it. Here are our Grandma Theresa‘s silent story-bits, mumbling into us. People are often unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered; Forgive them anyway. If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives; Be kind anyway. If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies; Succeed anyway. If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you; Be honest and frank anyway. What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight; Build anyway. If you find serenity and happiness, there may be jealousy; Be happy anyway. The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow; Do good anyway. 72 Sartre may be mistaken in claiming that we are condemned to meaning. The claim implies that only we humans mean, but it is nature that means, we simply follow it. Besides, we are not ―condemned‖ to meaning; we thrive in it—in nature. On both counts, then, his claim allows no room for us to simply be as nature is, naturally, meaning without meaning. Sartre‘s claim suffocates us, for his condemnation has no history that is the lifeprocess of nature as meaning that we follow. He is too legalistic and too uptight to allow leisure, to room in our living to leisurely grow, silently grow, in our own way. He has no silence in nature. 73 The following two or so paragraphs may sound like a repetition of [B] of human ―how‖ above. All the better if they are repetitions, for such repetition shows how our how conforms to nature‘s how.
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Here Mother Theresa‘s soft nudges of ―anyway‖ melt us into the big fold of humanity, a part of Nature. Hearing her calm words (she was tiny), moving to act in her way, nestles us in motherly togetherness of all in all. This serene enfoldment is quite irresistible, for it is part and parcel of all of us. Our Grandpa Charles Dickens chimes in, ―Have a heart that never hardens, a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts.‖ Being dead now, Theresa and Dickens tell stories of ―anyway‖-consistency that ―never‖ quits; cynicism74 vanishes in marvels at how we love all this, blended into Lao Tzu and Mencius‘ stories of the Nature Family of Father Heaven and Mother Earth silently nurturing Humanity. No wonder, Chinese people are history-conscious, as Chinese wisdom is storyphilosophy,75 shaking hands with Mother Teresa and Papa Dickens. Now, we have just told a story of silence-talk. Storytelling must include silence-talk to be real storytelling to its real hearing. Telling without telling, hearing without hearing, storytelling here silently joins story-hearing in nature‘s story-thinking. In silence the birdhearer and the tree-teller blend into one silence, into nature itself that is alive, saying wordlessly, expressing silence. That is true storytelling truly heard and read. Here are stories in the wind and the river, in story-hearing in story-telling with birds and trees, in storythinking of our inter-mothering co-presence in nature-silence.
74 All queries and objections melt away in wonder; we forget to complain that the ―Good Samaritan‖ is counterproductive as a practical policy. Love of my neighbor as me stays put with Mother Theresa, in silence. 75 Enter my Chinese Wisdom Alive: Vignettes of Life-Thinking, NY: Nova Science Publishers, 2010.
Chapter 9
FROM ONESELF TO THE MUSIC TOGETHER In all our consideration of silence we must not lose sight of the fact that all this starts at oneself. First, we must realize that ―my self‖ is ―my body‖ that thinks, tells, and acts all this out. This bodily process is expressed as embodied storytelling. Then, we realize that storytelling is always an autobiography, even when we read a story. It is in the self that things happen, and cohere into a story-system, of silence as music. I am story-thinking.
MY BODY, MYSELF To begin, my self is embodied. This truth cannot be overstressed. ―Body‖ can mean something physiological and physical. The ―physiological‖ body is scientifically abstracted, empirically objectified, from the natural concrete body that is ―physical,‖ in the original sense of ―phusis,‖ active nascence, nature as birth, origination and growth, natura naturans.1 In fact, ―physic‖ refers also to human body.2 The physiological body is thus derived from the physical body in an active natural sense. Physiological body disappears at death, while physical body keeps on naturing, birthing, without ceasing 生生不息, full-blooded and enfleshed, postmortem or non-physiological3; this fact beyond our usual knowledge of our usual world can only be described in poetic stories, as Chuang Tzu does here (6/45-60): ―Messrs Oblation, Carriage, Plow and Come talked to one another, ‗Whoever takes nothing as his head, life as his spine, and death as his buttocks, whoever knows dying, living, existing, and perishing as one body? I will be friend with him.‘ The four mutually looked and smiled. Nothing was against their hearts-of-being, so they became friends. All too soon, Mr. Carriage fell ill. . . . Mr. Oblation asked, ‗Do you hate it?‘ He said, ‗No! Why should I? Soon (it) changes my left arm into a rooster, and I will seek (during) night-hours (to crow). Soon (it) changes my right arm into a pellet, and I will seek an owl to roast. Soon (it) changes my 1 ―Nature‖ is birth; it means ―nature naturing,‖ as summed up well in William L. Reese, Dictionary of Philosophy and Religion, NY: The Humanity Books, 1999, p. 509. 2 See ―θύζις‖ in H. G. Liddell and R. Scott, Greek-English Lexicon, Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1996, p. 1964, and ―physic‖ in The Oxford English Dictionary, 1989, 2001, XI: 743. 3 This postmortem and/or non-physiological body performance is touched on but not fully brought out in my exploration in On Chinese Body Thinking: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 1997.
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Kuang-ming Wu buttocks into wheels, and with my spirit I will ride it; why (then) need I change a carriage? Besides, to gain is timely, to lose is to follow; dwell in time, stay following, and no grief or joy can enter. This is what the ancient called ‗bonds loosened.‘ . . . Why should I hate it?‘ All too soon, Mr. Come fell ill, gasping, dying. His wife and children circled him and wept. Mr. Plow who went to visit him said, ‗Shoo! Out! Don‘t startle change!‘ Leaning on the door, he talked to him, ‗Great! Change molds! What will you make next? Where are you going? Will you make a rat liver? A bug‘s leg?‘ Mr. Come said, ‗A child under parents goes anywhere, only at their bidding. The Yin and Yang to us are not less than our parents. If they bring me near death and I do not listen, then I defy. What blame is there in them? Huge Clod loads me with a figure, labors me with life, eases me with age, and rests me with death. So what ‗goods‘ life is why it ‗goods‘ death. Now if as a great smith casts metal, it jumps and says, ‗I must become an Excalibur!‘ then the smith must think the metal inauspicious. If one who chanced to be shaped a man insists ‗Just a man, just a man!‘, then Change the Molder must think him inauspicious. If the heaven and earth are a great forge, the Molder-Change a great Smith, where could I go and not be all right?‘‖
Our life in all aspects, thinking included, is thus completely embodied, as shown in the following body-performances. Theoretical thinking such as mathematics is our body tracing out calculation. My fingers set down ―7,‖ add ―+‖ to ―5,‖ to sum up ―=‖ as ―12.‖4 ―7+5=12‖ says that, in essence, mathematical thinking is body-performative. ―Thinking‖ theorizes, literally ―looks at‖5 things to produce their schema, a system, and looking and producing are bodily acts. Our body performs theoretical seeing from somewhere, some-when, initiated by Plato, say, and embodied in Plato. ―Platonism‖ is Plato‘s full-blooded body-performance of theorization, which is later reenacted by Platonists, then Neo-Platonists, by seeing more things than originally in Plato, then somehow reenacted in Hegel who idealized Plato‘s insights. It was later reenacted again in Neo-Hegelians6 that in turn bred its upside-down version, Marxists,7 on the one hand, and its pulverized version in Russell, Wittgenstein, and Austin, on the other. The folks cited above may be surprised at themselves classified in the Plato-family against which they revolted; but ―revolt‖ is a sort of creation out of Plato provoked by Plato.8 If someone still demurs at taking Austin as a revolting Platonist, we must remember Austin is an empiricist as Locke with Aristotle who closely studied Plato and came out of Plato. As philosophy is ―a series of footnotes to Plato,‖ the self is a series of reenactments of the past. The ―series‖ shows the past fact; ―footnotes‖ show creation in reenactment of the past. Union of the two is history called thinking. History is thus the union of fact and its fiction, fact reenacted. There is no fiction without fact, and no fact without fiction, for both fact and fiction are literally ―made‖; they are the past creatively story-thought for the future. Both are ―concresced‖ in one whole ―process‖ of
4 See my interpretation of Kant‘s ―7+5=12‖ as synthetic a priori (the first Critique B15-17) in my History, Thinking, and Literature in Chinese Philosophy, Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1991, pp. 16-17. Maurice MerleauPonty similarly describes ―geometry‖ as bodily performance (Phenomenology of Perception, tr. Colin Smith, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962, pp. 384-386). Cf. my Body Thinking, op. cit., pp. 300ff. 5 See on ―theory‖ in Oxford English Dictionary, XVII: 902. 6 It has surprisingly wide varieties, e.g., P. T. Forsyth who applied Hegel‘s moving logic to Christian theology. 7 And we are surprised at varieties in Neo-Marxism, e.g., Herbert Marcuse and Eric Fromm. 8 Russell revolted against Bradley a Neo-Hegelian; Hegel revolted against Plato.
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concrete ―reality,‖ to borrow Whitehead, and this real process of time, history, is made—as fact and in fiction—by reenactment of story-thinking. Thus, literary history 文史 is at the heart of Chinese culture that is at heart history-aware. Chinese history is story-reenactment written down. The past 史 is judged as written down 文 in Tso Chuan 左傳 and Shih Chi 史記, that idealized-revered legendary sage rulers 三皇五帝 and throne-ceding 禪位, to create new fictive facts as Taoist ―Village of Ultimate Virtue 至德之鄉‖ in ―Small State and Few People 小國寡民.‖9 China executes the ―prose of the world‖ (Merleau-Ponty10) in history, the world in its dynamic time-depth in literary depth. All this is the self writing-itself out, the self writ-large, as Plato said of res publica,11 and writing is one of the self‘s bodily acts. The self as body is a verb, reenacting, concrescing, naturing, fact-ing,12 and fiction-ing, story-thinking spreading unceasing. It is the realityprocess called ―history,‖ and this fact-fiction is storytelling, all too historically concrete. Concrete is the body-concrescence of process-reality, an active body-chiasm of historical reenacted story-thinking, which is a going-backward to go-forward, swinging back and forth, in wave after wave of regressive time-progression. Reenactment is history as Collingwood claimed,13 and history is story in time. We have told stories of mathematical and philosophical thinking, thereby reenacted Collingwood‘s ―reenactment.‖ Reenactment is story-doing, a concrete body-act where ―objectivity,‖ ―precision,‖ and ―validity‖ are performed by the beholder-thinker‘s eye/hand, to spread to other body-thinkers in history. Philosophy and mathematics are body-phenomenology, ―appearing as body story-thinking,‖ in historical process. This body-thinking as storytelling-and-doing is ―history.‖ Every time we open our bodily mind and our book, historical persons appear—Socrates, Confucius, good people, evil ones, our forefathers and foremothers, in full bodily conversations. And we reenact their lives by probing the events by re-envisioning them, assessing their merits by perceiving something else in them they did not realize, and thereby provoking us to create something new originally not among them. All this body-act performs story-thinking. All this is storytelling where concrete persons emerge enfleshed and full-blooded. Jean val Jean and many others in Victor Hugo‘s Les Miserables always capture our excited attention as fully embodied beyond physiological existents. Their bodily presence so enthralling, their love and hate so penetrating, they are more vivid, more compelling, and more concrete than our indifferent neighbors here now. Such is the concrete presence of physical body beyond physiological one, full-blooded and enfleshed, fully embodied. Mind you, all this begins at my being myself story-thinking. Let us now think of my self thinking.
THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ONESELF I have a story of why it is important to be myself, in three points: One, the question 9 Chuang Tzu, 10/29-35, 12/80-83, 16/5-17, 20/9-28. Tao Te Ching, 80. 10 Sadly, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (The Prose of the World, tr., John O‘Neill, Evanston: IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973) mentions no ―history,‖ the time-depth of the world-prose. 11 The Republic, II. 367e-372a. 12 Never mind ―manufacturing.‖ 13 R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, Oxford University Press, 1946, 1993.
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answers itself. Two, self-identity justifies itself and is the base of all my engagements. Three, my life-engagements enjoy being myself. 1. ―Why is it important to have self-identity?‖ I ask. Well, why/how is it that I ask this question in the first place? It must be because (a) the question is important (otherwise I would not have asked it) and because (b) for the question to be asked at all, it is important to have self-identity (otherwise there would have been no one there to ask it). Therefore, the question, once asked, answers itself! Someone may object, saying that I confuse two sorts of importance—one of questioning act, another of questioned content. That ―I ask the question because asking is important‖ is not the same as ―I ask the question because what is asked is important.‖ This good objection, however, does not hold in this specific case of asking for the importance of self-identity. Selfidentity is self-as-itself, i.e., self-consciousness, part of which is self-examination, and one way of examining oneself is to ask why it is important to have self-identity. So, in this questioning, questioning-act and what is questioned coincide. The question is important both because questioning is important and what is questioned is important, for questioning act is what is questioned in action; self-questioning is part of self-identity, so questioning here is the questioned. Thus, ―I ask the question because the question is important, otherwise I would not have asked it.‖ This point-(a) directly links to point-(b), ―for the question to be asked at all, it is important to have self-identity, otherwise there would have been no one there to ask it.‖ 2. This is to say, because it is important to have self-identity, the question must/can be asked on why it is important to have self-identity. In other words, self-identity is the rockbottom base of life that justifies itself. It is the base of all, so it justifies all other life-pursuits, including inquiring why of self-identity, and cannot be justified by anything other than itself. 3. This truth—it is important to have self-identity, to be myself—requires no reason other than itself to be true; it is its own reason for being true. This amazing point has four implications. One, education, psychology, arts, science, and philosophy directly express this truth, so they are crucial and basic in my life. Since ―education‖ nurtures my growth, ―psychology‖ pursues and enriches me, ―arts‖ (literature, music, sculpture, painting, sports, etc.) express my experiences as myself, ―science‖ satisfies my curiosity to know, and ―philosophy‖ reflects on 14 all this as important for me, these five activities express the basic pursuits of my life. Two, all other pursuits are also important because I need them to live; their importance derives from myself as important. I engage in commerce to nurture me, to enrich my knowledge; it helps express myself. I reflect on it, saying, ―Customers are always right,‖ thereby become myself. I engage in computer engineering to nurture me, to enrich my knowledge; it promotes me, for I reflect on it, saying, ―See, how easier, faster I can do it now!‖ thereby become myself. Etc. Three, this means that I will enjoy all engagements as enjoyments of the truth that my self-identity is important. In every activity of mine I will say, ―This is myself, in whom I am well pleased.‖ Enjoyment is being in-joy, and no joy is greater than the joy of being myself. I
14 Noting that we are by nature interpersonal, we can take sociology, politics, and perhaps economics as basic to human existence as well. Still, we can say that those communal sciences are based on the other five on selfidentity, in a similar way that for Aristotle ethics leads to politics; see conclusion to this section.
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should not say, ―I am too busy for this.‖ I must say, ―Let me enjoy it, let me be in joy doing it,‖ for ―it‖ (reading, writing, engaging) is myself enjoying being-myself, as I enjoy myself. I have just enjoyed telling the story of all this, of course. I invite you to enjoy commenting on it. It will be telling another story, and yet another. How enjoyable is our mutual showing and telling! Perhaps such mutuality is also basic to our human nature, so sociology, politics, and perhaps economics are also basic to human nature; but remember, communality is part of self-identity, not the other way round. Four, how this is so can be explained as follows. All our philosophizing, our thinking, does Socrates‘ self-examination and Kant‘s self-critique; Locke‘s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) is written by his human understanding, and Hume‘s Treatise of Human 15 Nature (1739) by his human nature. All this thinking raises the specter of a problem trying to solve the problem that is itself; philosophy is a self-critique, and we are sucked into the quagmire of critiquing the self that critiques the self, and so on. In contrast, a story told by a storyteller is immune from such a meta-problem, for a storyteller always tells a story; that is what a story means and is. Even ―a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing‖ is a tale; a silly story is still a story. Why does self-critique defeat itself while storytelling does not? It is artificiality that examines the self; the process makes a system. In contrast in spontaneity the self realizes oneself, and this process tells stories. Chuang Tzu said that once we get the rabbit we forget the trap, so words are for what is meant, once we get the meaning we forget words, and then he sighed after word-forgotten 16 ones to word with. Such wording-with obtains in storytelling that just tells and then forgets the telling. Thus it is legitimate to describe in storytelling how the self looks as mirrored in the water of actuality. One self-inquiry realizes oneself; another self-inquiry self-critiques. A spontaneous story-system of self-mirroring is natural; a strenuous system of self-examining is sucked into an infinite regress. History is such self-inquiring self-mirroring. ―History‖ derives from ―historia,‖ 17 ―learning/knowing by inquiry, an account of one‘s inquiries, narrative, history,‖ harvested 18 by ―historeō,‖ artlessly to ―inquire into or about a thing.‖ ―Narrating‖ all this makes a story, and the greatest of stories is life-story, obtained by inquiry into the selves. Thus we see that inquiry, life, self-story, and history inter-implicate; they form a series of connected web, fascinating as follows. Our life tells a story, silly or no, to make ―history‖ (story and history are etymological 19 twins ), to judge and justify itself, how ―silly‖ it is, how far it is justified, as explained in points one, two, three above. Why does a life-story, our history, ―judge‖? We instinctively shrink from introducing TV cameras into the jury room deliberating on cases, for fear cameras will destroy spontaneity of deliberation to sway the jury‘s judgment. But why do they fear? They must fear another party, Big Brother-like, looking into their otherwise natural ongoing quite spontaneous. Now, fear ciphers judgment; TV cameras make a journalistic ―story,‖ an instant ―history‖ in public view; story is history that judges. Interestingly, as I write on myself into 15 And he wrote An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) by his human understanding. 16 Chuang Tzu 26/48-49. This concludes this Chapter of ―Outside Things.‖ 17 See ―history‖ in Oxford English Dictionary (1989), 2001, VII: 261. 18 H. G. Liddell and R. Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996, p. 842. 19 Compare ―history‖ in Oxford English Dictionary, VII: 261 and ―story‖ in XVI: 797, ibid.
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autobiography, I fear nothing; in fact, I instinctively desire to display myself at least to myself. I am deeply human in desiring to inspect myself, much as I naturally want to look at myself in a mirror. Thus self-realization begs no question any more than storytelling does; we tell our story to realize ourselves, and every story is in the final analysis an autobiography, writing and 20 narrating my life, for my storytelling shows me as I observe others. Zinsser astutely said, Ultimately the product that any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about, but who he or she is. . . . What holds me is the enthusiasm of the writer for his field. How was he drawn into it? What emotional baggage did he bring along? How did it change his life? It‘s not necessary to want to spend a year alone at Walden Pond to become involved with a writer who did. This is the personal transaction that‘s at the heart of good non-fiction writing.
A cartoon has a painter painting nature on a mountain slope, having his self-portrait in the making on the canvas. People show themselves in telling about many things, for the telling tells of the teller. Telling about something tells a story of life of things, a biography of things that sketches an autobiography of the teller. A story is an autobiography that merges into the world and its biography. Such examples abound in history. Socrates has the story of his world in The Apology and Crito, Jesus has it in the ―Four Gospels.‖ Ssu-ma Ch‘ien (c.145-c.85 BCE) vindicated himself 21 in the portrait of Chinese history in his legendary Shih Chi (History Records), and Boethius wrote his influential The Consolation of Philosophy (524) while awaiting execution. President Nixon had many autobiographical attempts, having been forced to resign, to canvas the world of his day; and the list goes on. This is how individual histories merge with the vast world history toward world understanding in self-understanding, and, in the end, world judgment-justification in selfjustification, non-threateningly, without self-regress, all too naturally. This enormous history, at once individual and global, is where we sigh at the immense cosmic river of time, of which we are a part. Storytelling is ubiquitous, even self-inclusive, as we have just told a story about storytelling. ―Heaven‘s Net is vast, so vast, sparse-meshed, and loses nothing,‖ Lao Tzu said (73), and this saying is another of our human weaving, our insatiable storytelling, of the heaven‘s Net, ubiquitous through time and space. Is the Net the storytelling? Storytelling is a closest human approximation to the Net, if not its human replication. Storytelling, autobiography/history, and self-justification/self-identity, these three remain, and the greatest of these is storytelling. To attend and perform all this is story-thinking. It is story-thinking that does all these deeds, to fulfill and justify them all. No wonder we instinctively tell stories of ourselves and our world in our world. ―Baby soft,‖ ―morning fresh,‖ ―more shoutouts for outlast,‖ commercials are everywhere with us, too many to cite. They are clever talks, straight to the point, word-stingy, eye-catching, and mind-blowing if 20 William Zinsser, On Writing Well (1976), HarperCollins, 2006, p. 15. 21 On Shih Chi and Ssu-ma Ch‘ien, see 史記, 韓兆琦注釋, 臺北市三民書局, 2008, eight volumes. Cf. William H. Nienhauser, Jr., ed., The Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature, Indiana University Press, 1986, pp. 689-692, 720-723. This famous example is particularly poignant because Ssu-ma told ―his story‖ on the vast canvas of Chinese history from 2697 to 87 BCE to vindicate himself. This is the best example of complete merging of oneself with one‘s societal history, thereby to fulfill oneself.
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we pay even scanty attention to them. They chant stories; they rhyme, sing, and soar, all over the world. I keep learning from them to learn about myself.
MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY “MY PHILOSOPHY” My autobiography is shown in ―my philosophy‖ because what I am shows how and what I think about the world, and what I think of the world shows me. What is my philosophy? I want to promote interculturalism. By ―culture‖ I mean our customary way-of-thinking. I want two different cultures—the logical analytical West and metaphoric storytelling China—to come together to inter-learn and inter-enrich. How did I reach ―my philosophy‖?22 At first I felt uncomfortable at Yale where I exclusively studied Western philosophy. Its philosophers congenial to me were only Søren Kierkegaard, Paul Tillich, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, i.e., a handful of existentialists and 23 phenomenologists ; I found that they share reasoning-in-existence with Chinese thinking. Then I was attracted to Chuang Tzu‘s jovial thinking, ever ―goofing around,‖ telling stories, joking and discerning, systematic without system. I began writing on him, and came to publish two books in English on him. ―Writing Chuang Tzu in English‖ led me to thinking how thus writing China differs from writing China in Chinese. Here is a fertile inter-enriching field, impossible in writing China in Chinese, or writing the West in English. Inter-enriching of these two cultures is interculturalism. Since that moment of realization, my attention was riveted on what interculturalism means, how we do so, and how significant it is. My curiosity made History, Thinking, and Literature in Chinese Philosophy (266 pp.) and a trilogy in ―a cultural hermeneutic‖ (504, 469, and 672 pp.), totaling 1,911 pages. My love of Chuang Tzu made the above process of growth. My first volume, Chuang Tzu—World Philosopher at Play (1982) announces him as an alternative option in contemporary thinking to Western. Then The Butterfly as Companion: Meditations on the First Three Chapters of the “Chuang Tzu” (1990) explores what Chuang Tzu‘s word-world is, a companion to his thought-text. My later volumes continue to explore Chuang Tzu‘s significance in today‘s world. First, History, Thinking, and Literature in Chinese Philosophy (1991) briefly reflects on the ―Chinese philosophy‖ as historical-literary thinking (wen shih 文史). Then, On Chinese Body Thinking: A Cultural Hermeneutic (1997) dialogues with Maurice Merleau-Ponty the West‘s body thinker close to Chinese. On the “Logic” of Togetherness: A Cultural Hermeneutic (1998) shows how interculturalism proceeds. On Metaphoring: A Cultural Hermeneutic (2001) describes how this ―how‖ is metaphor at work. Chinese Wisdom Alive (2010) unpacks what China is. On Storytelling: Intercultural Meditations (this volume) presents how this ―how‖ proceeds. Nonsense: A Cultural Meditation on the Beyond (yet to publish, 556 pages) tells how inevitably this human ―how‖ 22
See my autobiography in Jay Goulding, ed., China-West Interculture: Toward the Philosophy of World Integration: Essays on Wu Kuang-ming‟s Thinking, NY: Global Scholarly Publications, 2008, pp. 3-32. 23 Soon I came to be much enamored of Gabriel Marcel, with his crisp insightful responses to thinkers, displayed in The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel (eds. Paul Arthur Schilpp and Lewis Edwin Hahn, La Salle, ILL: Open Court, 1984), completed, sadly, just about the time of his death in October 1973. I am yet to formally dialogue with him on how related he is to the Chinese way of thinking.
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stretches as nonsense to the Beyond, elaborated in The Beyond: A Cultural Hermeneutic of Religions (623 pages, yet to publish). My future is open as the Beyond is open—toward Heaven and Earth into history.
AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN GENERAL—STORYTELLING OF THE SELF My above self-description is an example of autobiography in general, in this way. The self is the central dynamo of autobiography, but what is the self itself? To answer this question is also the self‘s job. This self-description of the self amounts to ―autobiography in general.‖ We must now tell stories about it. The stories are surprisingly diverse, indicating how rich and diverse the self is. Five sorts of the self below show so. Let us put it another way. As I listened to Schubert‘s music, I was impelled by a desire to see him after I die. But then I realized that listening to his music is to meet him. Similarly, I don‘t need to meet Plato; I just read him closely. My writings also express my soul, any reader who cares to closely read my words would meet me even after I die. Why do I have to realize this fact, however? Why was it not immediately obvious to me? Schubert‘s music does not tell of him, but we ―tell‖ that it is his he, not Beethoven. Schubert‘s music does not tell him; it lets us tell. Similarly, all our life activities let others tell about us. Our life and our words are indirectly autobiographical, as our style of behaving does not tell but shows us, as our sexual identity.24 In fact, normality, what we usually are, evaporates when advertised as ―normality in general.‖ All this does not discount the significance of usual autobiography, however, such as Clinton‘s massive one.25 We simply alert their readers that the straight autobiography should not be taken as a literal reflection of the life described there. It must be sympathetically interpreted, to discern how it shows the life described in it. At the center of human life is the self that thrives in self-telling of self-story, an autobiography that spurs life-growth. Since all human activities are obviously acts of the human self, all human knowledge is initiated and animated by self-knowledge,26 and every science naturally clusters in this self-storytelling. It is exciting to see how many genres of autobiography came out of human history. At least five kinds of our human story of what the self is stands out: Plato‘s story, Freud‘s, my son Peter‘s, the baby‘s, and folktale-wise. (1) Plato‘s riding self: Immensely popular today is Plato‟s story of the self, made of three 27 elements, rational (logistikon), ―spirited‖ (thumoeides), and appetitive (epithymetikon). It is our familiar story of how reason drives the self-carriage drawn by two steeds, will and appetite. We can say today that the desire-appetitive element may well be our felt sensitivity and emotion, the spirited element is the will to push and thrust, and the rational element is reason to synthesize both and guide them in a deliberative direction.
24 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, tr. by Colin Smith, corrected by Forrest Williams, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962, pp. 154-173. 25 Bill Clinton: My Life, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. 26 Anthropology and psychology are then at the top of the totem pole of scholarship, but now they operate as objective sciences of quantitative empirical physicalism, blind to Dilthey/Weber‘s constant reminder that they are sciences of subjectivity. We must tell our own story of the self, with empathy, not objective empiricism. 27 Plato‘s Republic, IV: 435e-444e, IX: 580d-581a; Phaedrus, 246a-b, 253c-255b; Timaeus, 69d-72d.
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We today would add that these three are not separate ―elements‖ but interpenetrated ―aspects‖ of the self, how reason must be felt and directed by feeling and willing to be truly reason, that feeling is directed and meaningful under rational deliberation, and will is humanly empathic and reasonable when felt and discerned. (2) Freud‘s negotiating self: Plato gave us a story of the inner structural dynamics that constitutes the self, and then Freud told a story of how such a dynamic self interacts with outside and inside itself. His tripartite story parades as a ―theory‖ to frame Freudian 28 therapy. Ego the center of rational awareness and action tries to negotiate between Superego the social requirements and Id the inner libidos, to attain some compromise/harmony. If proved too much out of line with Superego, Ego censors/represses Id into the unconscious to effect genius-creativity and/or neurosis-abnormality. Psychoanalysis digs all this out into consciousness to ―heal,‖ i.e., to help the self to set the situation straight, adjusting the environment to adjust to it. Here the Ego-I creatively synthesizes Superego the above-I with Id the inner-I, involuntary physiological functions of the ―biological principles‖ (Nietzsche). Self-identity consists in this dynamic self-synthesis. (3) Interactive self: Besides Plato‘s act-elements and Freud‘s interrelation-regions, we have another fascinating story of the self, the whole self in reflective interaction. My boy Peter once told me, ―Dad, I have three names, me, myself, and I. Bye, Dad!‖ and out he ran to play. He left me stunned, to begin pondering on what he could possibly mean. I have ―me,‖ my object to examine, clean, and shape. Yet this ―object-me‖ is no simple object but an I-subject objectified by myself the subject, myself as an other-to-me. Here the subject objectifies the subject into ―myself‖ as the subject to the subject, myself as another. All this is a strange convolution of self-reflection. The I is such an inter-reflective dynamism, an ongoing self-interactivity that is a ―whole,‖ alive as my ―self‖-as-―me‖-the-other that is ―myself.‖ When ―I‖ takes care of ―me‖ from beyond me, ―outside me,‖ it is really my own action reflecting on ―myself,‖ a strange subject-object interaction, an ―I‖-subject reflecting on ―myself‖ as ―me.‖ It is in this me-myself interaction that ―I‖ come to be me myself, my true ―I.‖ The I synthesizes the objectifying/objectified ―me‖ and the reflected/reflecting ―myself,‖ and the self consists in this I-synthesis. Moreover, to think of it, my conversation with Peter was itself a projection of such memyself interaction, since Peter is myself pro-jected, thrown-out onto the screen/scene of intersubjectivity, which originated in my self-reflective interaction within myself. It was myself-within-myself outside me. After all, Peter is my dear son! (4) Sleeping baby-self: So far, we have considered the self as an interacting among Platonic elements, Freudian aspects, Peter‘s names, not as the natural whole thriving in daily rhythm. It was the self often in conflict inside and out, not in daily routine. Babies live to show the self not as integrated but as an integral whole living non-self-consciously in daily rhythms of waking-and-sleeping, not occasionally, repressively, if not sinister-unconsciously (Freud). Instead, our routine non-self-consciousness is quite natural as our breathing, acting, and sleeping. Importantly, all such self-ing as above described is not self-enclosed but always surfs on waves of time for more, wave after wave, each in waking-and-sleeping, every day-and-night. 28 See Sigmund Freud, The Philosophy of the Unconscious (1893), The Ego and the Id (1923), etc. Significantly, he conducted analysis in discomfort, both physical (cancer in his mouth) and mental (depression).
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―Surfing for more‖ bespeaks growing. This whole and self-interactive self alive throbs in time-rhythm, as the day dusk‘s as the night dawns, day into night, night into day . . . I sleep into awakening, into sleeping, into . . . , continually sleep-coming home to myself to stretch myself out into activities. Babies show us so, telling us so by living it. We call it ―growing.‖ Moreover, it is in sleep that I come home to myself—to grow; I grow in sleep. Growing in sleeping, and sleeping to grow, babies show us how by living in sleep to wake up, and wake up to sleep again. If anyone doubts how we can grow in sleep at all, just watch why we simply do not play music as fast as we can to reach its end as fast as we can. Music tarries while it savors, as it goes on to grow itself. ―Tarries where? Savors what?‖ Music tarries in itself and savors itself, performers and listeners together, enwrapped in the shared melody that mature—for them to enrich, enhance, and grow in themselves. That tarrying is essential for growth, and such tarrying is fulfilled in the evening hours, for the ―first time‖ every 24-hours, called ―sleep.‖ Sleep is music as music feeds us unawares. Babies live sleep, to tell us this important truth, our existential essence, that sleep is an ingredient part in the musical rhythm of our growth. The baby tells the story by living its music, showing it in its show-and-tell living. The baby sleeps as it grows, grows as it sleeps. Sleep comes-back-to-self to shrink-back to consolidate, thereby to expand as it grows and integrates the self synthesizing outside as its milk. (5) Folktale-self: Sleep is non-self-conscious. Folktales are also, for they are part of our communal selves. They are common folks‘ stories that spontaneously express common folks‘ taken-for-granted impressions of things and events. So we cannot ask if they are ―in fact‖ true or false, any more than we can dispute if someone really hears a lark flying up, as she is enwrapped in the music, ―A Lark Ascending‖ by Ralph Vaughn Williams, as surely as she is seeing a lark. Similarly, we cannot dispute her if she really sees a lark, for if she sees a lark she sees a lark, as surely as she tastes her mom‘s homemade pie. Sensing and tasting could be checked later, even changed later, of course, but while we sense and taste something as that something, we sense and taste such, and that is all there is to it. Our checking on it later— checking is later business—cannot happen without this primal sensing that we are sure we sense at the moment. Thus, as there is no dispute on tasting our favorite dish, there cannot be quibble over sensing something as our indisputable ―fact.‖ In fact, all ―facts‖ we say ―true‖ or ―false‖ are what we take so; they are and express our ―folktales.‖ ―Facts‖ are our folktales, and science and technology are folktales of the West fast spreading all over. As surely as our facts are ―facts,‖ so surely our folktales are our tales. Being part of ourselves, we take our folktales for granted so much that we are not aware of them. They are non-self-conscious until confronted with other common folks‘ ―strange‖ folktales. We usually take these other folktales as ―folktales,‖ even laugh at them as untrue or superstitious tall tales, ―myths,‖ for our folktales are ―true,‖ of course, and differences in their folktales from ours bespeak their falsehood. Once in a while, however, their strange differences make us think, as the primal folks‘ folktales, expressing how they habitually cherish nature, jolt us into thinking twice about how much we pollute, waste, brutalize, and horrendously devastate natural things and habitat, in nature and among ourselves. Folktales are softly jolted (as it were) and silently judged by folktales, nothing else.
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At the same time, the fact that we usually laugh at folktales different from ours shows that folktales cannot be imposed on by folktales from outside, that folktales cannot be legislated, called ―ideology,‖ by dictators or government. Sadly, however, the society has its own folktales, ideology, mores, ―common sense,‖ by which the minority‘s folktales are often judged as ―false‖ or ―heretical.‖ Unfair conformity follows as fashion imposes. All this while, the minority‘s ―heretical‖ folktales that protest—silently and vociferously—the majority‘s folktales can and do often spread to form a new folktale-milieu; such phenomenon is called ―democracy.‖ It is thus that an individual‘s life-autobiography, spontaneously produced/expressed, spontaneously spreads to form a new folktale, to compare with, learn from, and adjust to other folktales of other societies—historically as time goes, and socio-politically in protest and in revolution. These five images in stories of the self tell of—show—what sorts of persons these five storytellers are. For Plato, the self is seething element-acts showing Plato the vibrantly analytical and objective. For Freud, the self is depth-regions interacting, showing Freud the perceptive seer of the unseen. For Peter, the self is three names in one, showing Peter the playful sharp observer enjoying his observation. Thoreau is a spectacular Peter in magnificent Journal of ―I to myself.‖29 For the baby, the self is a natural whole unawares, just showing so. The ―just‖ shows to charm and disarms us. In the folktales, the self frames thinking and doing, to show that folktales are the historical-communal self to compose us. Now, there must be so many more varieties of such self-stories that we know beyond our knowing. Such self-telling telltales appear—show—in every world-engagement of every person, ―ten eyes seeing, ten fingers pointing‖ at a person‘s ―wherewith, wherefrom, whereat‖ that tell, nothing hiding.30 A person‘s engagement is always engaging the world. It is the fascination of humanity that their stories are same-different, to compose the world, as their self-descriptions are the mirror-images of the world that is interactive differences (Plato), invisible depths controlling the visible to be controlled by the visible (Freud), subjectivity as objectivity (Peter) always just beginning (baby), always framing-telling-showing (folktales). And the list goes on, on self-world inter-telling inter-showing. They ―self‖-show the world that tells of them. The world is born with me so many, and I inter-exist with myriad things31 in the world the orderly chaos. Story-thinking of the self tells all over the world to tell of the world. Now, three points are worth noting in all these five sorts of self-ing—Plato‘s, Freud‘s, Peter‘s, baby‘s, and folktale-wise. One, this is the drama of self-as-synthesization, a ―family‖32 making of autogamous interrelation, subject-subject interaction. Such an autogamous family of the self is the origin of families to form a social community. Two, the coherent synthesis of self‘s various elements, aspects, and activities called ―autogamous‖ above, composes our self-identity; the synthesis is self-identity. Three, all this amounts to many sorts of telling a story, a self-ing storytelling. A story forms itself by telling 29
I to Myself: An Annotated Selection from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau, ed. Jeffrey S. Cramer, Yale University Press, 2007. 30 I rifled Great Learning 7 and Analects 2/10. 31 Chuang Tzu 2/52-53 is cited-explained here. 32 Oxford English Dictionary I: 803 takes ―autogamy,‖ ―autogamous,‖ and ―autogamic‖ as biological selffertilization of cells, being apparently too far-fetched to apply to human family.
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it, whose life-application further tells an enriched story. So is the self that is an expanding growing story; the self is such a dynamic autobiography. Story is thus the stuff of which we are made, the frame in which we live, and storytelling is the way we live on and grow daily. Now, as my life tells a story of my telling my own story, my own storytelling, having nothing to do with others, can often so irritate others that the society calls it a ―heresy.‖ Considering heresy, then, leads us to think of what an ideal social system should be. It should be a democracy to be carefully defined so as to conform to the authenticity of individual storytelling. Such a society authenticates individual integrity as individual integrities consolidate the authentic society.
HERESY AND DEMOCRACY One of many genres of autobiography, writing one‘s own life-story of an individual into the world, writes ―heresy.‖ ―Heresy‖ is a term of social irritation at those who dare to be different-and-independent, and to risk life to warn society that its ―irritation‖ may well heal its fatal smugness. This is the message of Socrates, Confucius, and the young Chinese students bravely perished at Tiananmen Square. ―Heresy‖ is the name of society‘s irritation as it is confronted with lone independent people who warn it of its smug ―orthodox‖ way of life, for the heretics are so self-critical as to invite us to criticize ourselves, and criticism irritates. If an unexamined life is not worth living, as an arch-heretic Socrates said, then a society without heretics collapses into inhuman monster. ―Democracy‖ tolerates heretics of social critics; here to protest is patriotic. So ―heresy‖ as individuality is related to ―democracy‖ that defines community; heresy defines democracy. All this is a storytelling of life. 33 34 Let us begin with defining ―heresy‖ that has an interesting etymological route. Mr. 35 Organ said, The Greek term ―hairesis‖ originally meant a taking or conquering, especially the seizing of a town by military force. The meaning shifted to indicate the taking for oneself, that is, the making of a choice. A heretic is one who prefers to make a personal choice rather than accept and support the view held by the majority of his community. A heretic is a noncomformer. His nonconformity is in the area of thought, although it is reflected in action. Heresy usually denotes aberrant beliefs in religion; but it can also refer to deviations in moral, economic, social, and political thinking. A heretic is a loner. The Greek term ―hairesis‖ is curiously related to the term idios from which we derive the English word idiot. But ―idios‖ in classical Greek was not one with a low intelligence quotient. Rather an idios was one who chose to live alone. . . . The heretic is unorthodox. He holds a view which is not the ―correct‖ view. Orthodoxy is right belief measured . . . by the number of supporters it has. An orthodoxy is right because it is held by the majority. A heresy is always the opinion of a minority. It can be the opinion of but one. The hallmark of heresy is individualism. . . . Protestantism starts with the prerogative of the individual. This is the root of all heresy.
33 In China, ―heresy‖ has similar socially unpalatable connotations, so we trace its sense-route in the West. 34 I offer it subject to the linguists‘ scrutiny. 35 Troy Wilson Organ, Third Eye Philosophy: Essays in East-West Thought, Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1987, pp. 56-57. See also Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, op. cit., I: 180-185.
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Professor David Schenker, a classicist in the University of Missouri, Columbia, raised an important objection that ―orthodoxy‖ can also obtain with an authoritative individual, a king, say, by decreeing a view to be adhered to by many. His caveat makes us cautious about individuality. We now realize. A ―heretic‖ is a lone exception to the majority, and desires to spread its views to the majority. This description fits two different sorts of heresy, legislative and protesting. One person can dominate people either as a political autocrat (as Schenker cautioned) or as a tycoon to spread plutocracy over people; it is ―legislative heresy.‖ The second sort of heresy issues moral warnings (Socrates, Confucius) or political ones (Thoreau and others); it is ―protesting heresy.‖ The so called ―heresy‖ usually protests ―legislative ―heresy‖ seldom called ―heresy‖; we here consider the former ―heresy.‖ Schenker‘s point becomes crucial also when we consider ―democracy.‖ Moreover, we will cite recent Bush presidency as a tragic example to warn of any power that be, an orthodoxy so easy to lead to cosmic disaster.
A. Heresy described We now connect, story-logically,36 the above wandering description. ―Heretic‖ is one who ―takes‖ (―heresy‖ relates to hairesis, ―take‖) a town by royal force against others (is this legislative heresy?), then37 one who ―takes‖ oneself by one‘s regal individual choice (idios) against society, and this latter ―taking‖ makes protesting heresy.38 This simple description39 has six ramifications, among others. 40 One, one who takes oneself is one, alone, idios, idiosyncratic. To oneself, this person is lonely; ―foxes have holes, birds have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to pillow himself.‖ Two, to others, this idios/lone person is ―idiotic,‖ insane, as Jesus was taken to be so 41 by his family and friends, and Paul by his ruler. This person is a ―soft heretic‖ we often despise as ―insane idiots,‖ yet so many literary essayists all over the world praise them as 42 crucial revolutionaries. 36 Story-connection, not logical one, is alive, free, and historical, as an etymological thread is. 37 ―Whether this ‗then‘ is logical or chronological‖ remains to be seen. 38 Heinrich Schlier‘s hairesis-schema has seizure, choice, school-formation, and heterodoxy (Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, op. cit., I.180-185). Schlier has no ―idios,‖ and the last link is logically inexplicable. But heretical independence can and should be generalized to democratic community, as long as individual choices can and did gather into a school or a community. 39 This twofold sense appears in all Greek lexicons I checked such as Liddell and Scott, Thayer, Arndt and Gingrich, and Kittel‘s Theological Dictionary. 40 I cannot find this sense etymologically connected with hairesis. I follow Organ because it makes sense here. Shih-ha Rokurō collected more than sixteen ancient Chinese ―heroes‖ who were intensely ―idios.‖ (斯波六郎著, 中國文學における孤獨感, 東京岩波書店, 1958) History remembers many who were executed for too much social criticism and/or under suspicion of sedition. Many withdrew to be literati, poets, and historians to ―establish words 立言.‖ We cite just a few quite obvious yet oddly taken-for-granted (as paradigms) examples in world history, such as Confucius, Jesus, Socrates, and students at the Tiananmen. 41 Mark 3:21, Acts 26:24. Religious insanity climaxes M. O‘C. Drury‘s The Danger of Words, NY: Humanities Press, 1973. He cited it without offering solutions. 42 Among the countless examples, we note just the following. Chuang Tzu‘s Chapter Five and many others are among the earliest. We see many utopias inhabited by ―idiots‖ (cf. J. W. Johnson, ed., Utopian Literature: A Selection, NY: The Modern Library, 1968). Desiderius Erasmus, The Praise of Folly (tr., ed., with commentary by Clarence H. Miller, Yale University Press, 1979), and Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot (tr.,
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Three, such idiosyncratic insanity shows that one who bravely takes oneself can risk being overtaken by oneself, becoming beside (what is expected of) oneself, off-centered, eccentric in the eyes of society, and sometimes even to oneself. One is now a heretic not just in the eye of others but turns literally ―insane,‖ as Socrates intimated in his Apology 28b. This is the negative aspect of taking oneself critically, seriously. Four, positively, however, seriously taking oneself, i.e., resolutely choosing oneself, can be a sign of ―genius,‖ a genie-haunted individual, as Socrates was ―demon‖-haunted. This is why heretics are literary heroes. A ―heretic‖ among social others can be ―insane‖ that can signify genius. Jesus‘ opponents said that it was only by Beelzebul the ruler of demons that he cast out demons, as the two Gadarene demoniacs haunting graves did recognize that he was spirit43 44 haunted. Confucius was ridiculed by ―insane people,‖ who figured prominently in Chuang Tzu‘s writings. Socrates was often taken as an eccentric, as Chuang Tzu was frequently accused of being a selfish unsociable cynic. These people cited here are ―insane‖ either as demoniacs or sages or both, as they often tend to be confused as either or both. Five, ―insane heretics‖ rarely congregate or cooperate but usually roam alone, as the 45 Gadarene demoniacs haunted the graves. Now, before we go on to the sixth ramification, let us pause, look back, and reflect. The five points above make us wonder about what such ―heretic‖ geniuses would take their utopia, their ―ideal community,‖ to be. They would obviously protest a monolithic totalitarian society under the dictator and the decreed ―orthodoxy,‖ and yet what else is ―government‖ in this world except such a dictatorial regime? Tom Paine‘s resounding 46 declaration opens his ―Common Sense‖ of 1776 : Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last is a punisher. Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our Constance Garnett, NY: Barnes and Noble, 2004), are two best known. In Japan, 芥川龍六介著, 河童, 或阿呆の一生 (東京新潮文庫, 平成十二年) and 夏目漱石著, 坊っちゃん (東京新潮文庫, 平成三年) (cf. his 草枕 [東京新潮文庫, 平成十二年] and 私の個人主義 [東京講談社, 1978]) are notable. Chinese Communists consider 魯迅 (阿 Q 正伝 and 狂人日記 [the latter title taken from Nikolay Gogol‘s Diary of a Madman, 1835], see their Japanese translations/explanations by 竹內好, 東京岩波文庫, 1955) a revolutionary hero. Significantly, 魯迅 the Communist revolutionary hero was so ―revolutionary‖ that even the Communists persecuted him and he had to flee into the Shanghai International Settlement. See Complete Works of Lu Hsün, 魯迅全集，上海人民文學出版社，1981，16 volumes. 43 Matthew 8:29, 12:24. 44 Analects, 18/5, Chuang Tzu 4/86-91, Chapter Five, et passim. 45 It comes much later, in Section E. 46 Thomas Paine: Collected Writings, ed. Eric Foner, NY: The Library of America, 1995, pp. 6-7. This sentiment echoes Thoreau‘s no less eloquent ―Resistance to Civil Government (1848),‖ Walden and Resistance to Civil Government: Henry D. Thoreau, Second Edition, ed. William Rossi, NY: W. W. Norton and Co., 1992, pp. 226-246. Both common men stood erect on the democratic land; both protested with ―common sense.‖ This fact alerts us to the truth that the government is in constant need of popular protest to stand as true government; once deprived of popular prop of protest, it at once prostrates to tyranny, even in the name of ―democracy‖ as often in America today. Protest is patriotism in democratic regime.
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calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise. For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform, and irresistably obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver; but that not being the case, he finds it necessary to surrender up a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest; and this he is induced to do by the same prudence which in every other case advises him out of the two evils to choose the least.
Following his spirit of protest, we must raise two points here to protest his protest. One, the ―lawgiver‖ that Paine took to be ―impulses of conscience‖ is furnished by our ―heretical protests,‖ nowhere in the government. Two, unwittingly admitting the impulses of protest to be impossible to implement, Paine fell into Hobbes‘ trap of grudgingly admitting ―government‖ in as a necessary evil. He did not know that his ―Common Sense‖ is a heretical protest, i.e., his protest is a political act, and so his protest refutes his own implied supposition that he cannot practice his protesting impulses.
B. Community of heretics The point just raised deserves pondering further. Can the individualistic ―heretics‖ gather to form a community at all? Well, if a heretic is idios in the numerical exclusive sense of the minority of one, private and separate, as Mr. Organ says, then heretics cannot gather, for ―one‖ cannot mix with ―many.‖ But if a heretic is idios in the personal sense of ―one‘s own,‖ then a democratic community of respect of persons is not only feasible but positively required to conduce to cross-fertilization of ―one‘s own‖ insights that is democracy. Heresy, criticism, and protest converge in democracy. To begin, the heretic‘s ―one‘s own‖ is a dynamics of critical protest. The heretic can choose oneself because he is impelled by self-examination, self-critique in self-protest, all ―idios‖ so vigorously self-choosing against the status quo as to be critical even of one‘s own taken-for-granted views. Interestingly, belief/practice of criticism cannot be criticized without endorsing it, to bespeak communal togetherness of ―endorsement,‖ and so self-criticism vitalizes the self to spread to self-critical others to form a self-critical community. Confronted with one-―corner‖ raised by Confucius, his disciples must return with three more to make up the truth-―square‖47; it is likewise with independence in social interdependence of respectful disagreement, i.e., democracy. Self-protest makes me disagree with my own reasons, to spread to protesting others, and such mutual disagreement breeds a community of inter-critical democracy. Only a liberal can write an epitaph on ―the end of liberalism‖ to promote liberalism, as only self-critical philosophers can write ―after philosophy‖48 to annul and thereby animate philosophy. As philosophical self-critique vitalizes philosophizing camaraderie, so liberals 47 Analects 7/8, cf. 5/9. 48 See Theodore J. Lowi, The End of Liberalism: Ideology, Policy, and the Crisis of Public Authority, NY: W. W. Norton, 1969; no orthodox conservative could have written the end of conservative orthodoxy; Russell Kirk‘s handsome Redeeming the Time, Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1996, is a collection of selfpraises. Kenneth Baynes, et al, edited After Philosophy: End or Transformation? Boston: MIT Press, 1987; no historian or sociologist could have written ―after history‖ or ―after sociology.‖ Here, ―after‖ means both ―end‖ and ―transformative beginning.‖ Only self-critical philosophers can pull off the punch.
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continue to gather into a community precisely in criticizing themselves. Only49 the heretic criticizes himself, and self-criticism is a royal road to self-creation to discover many truths among many comrades.
C. Heresy as youth vigor To behave as above is to be fresh, vigorous, to grow mature, and these three typify youth to characterize democracy, as USA is often called a ―young nation,‖50 and describes an amicable rebel, a gentleman who is an independent heretic. Confucius is such a ―gentleman‖ as they called him a ―princely man‖ (chün tzu 君子)51; vigorous, princely, and gentlemanly heretics make and keep USA young and democratic. Such vigorous gentlemanly-ness persists to risk dangers. Jesus left 100 sheep of orthodox platitudes to look for the one common compassion lost,52 ―until he finds it‖53; his relentless search found two in one ―it,‖ compassion and the lost. No wonder the despised common folks flocked to Jesus; their flocking comprises democracy. ―You come too,‖54 called Jesus to orthodox people, as he finished his parable of the prodigal son55 that completed this parable of the persistent shepherd, all told to those orthodox people. Incredibly and sadly, they were offended, declined his invitation in disgust, and killed him. Compassion composes democracy that cannot mix with elite orthodoxy. Democracy is government of the heretics of compassion for the neglected, the oppressed. Democracy is the government of all people, for all people, and by all people, all suffering from oppression. As such, heresy resolves one of the ―paradoxes of democracy,‖ that democracy as people‘s government is a contradiction; ―government‖ governs people, people are the ruled, yet ―democracy‖ is government by the people, i.e., people the ruler is the ruled. Democracy is then a paradox that the ruled rule. Democracy, however, is not ―demo-archy‖; it does not rule people or is ruled by them, but the ―people-power‖ of individual heretical protesters in their respective idiosyncrasies. ―People‘s government‖ is a shorthand for protesting camaraderie. For such all-people‘s government to obtain, people must shout, and shouting often takes heretical protest to irritate people, to whom the protest really belongs. For Thoreau, ―That government is best which governs not at all,‖56 where common folks have the overall ―not‖ 49 No ―orthodox‖ people criticize themselves, for they are already so ―right‖ as to need no critique, as history shows repeatedly among the Athenians, the Pharisees, China‘s royal courts, and USA today of the uncritical. 50 Harold J. Laski‘s reflections of America as ―young‖ fail to see its root here in the self-critical ―idios‖ of revolution (The American Democracy: A Commentary and an Interpretation, NY: The Viking Press, 1948). 51 Such princely man 君子 often protests the prince 君主, however gentlemanly as Confucius did. 52 ―Common sense is not so common,‖ Voltaire said (―Self-Love,‖ in Dictionanaire Philosophique, 1764). The common sense of being humane—to live decent humanity—is surprisingly rare and difficult among us. 53 I extrapolated from Luke 15:4. ―Wilderness‖ here can imply the barren public. 54 Robert Frost repeated this phrase in ―The Pasture.‖ His pastoral ―You come too‖ was eternally fresh, and eternally young and inviting, thereby the poem turned so famous as to caption The Poetry of Robert Frost: The Collected Poems, ed. Edward Connery Lathem, NY: Henry Holt and Company, 1969, 1975, p. 1. 55 ―And he was angry, and would not go in: therefore came his father out, and intreated him. . . It was meet that we should make merry, and be glad: for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found.‖ (Luke 15:28, 32) The parable of entreating and seeking in compassion cannot end, even after being rejected and crucified. 56 This is Thoreau‘s (op. cit., p. 226) clarion call that begins his scathing ―Resistance to Civil Government.‖ He radicalized Emerson who said, ―Hence, the less government we have, the better—the fewer laws, and the less
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by protest while governed. This is how the ―no‖ of criticism creates people‘s government, democracy. Protest is patriotism (Jefferson) and criticism, its means and measure. All this is not obvious; people are easily lulled into smug orthodoxy. Why do half of the Americans still want to vote for George W. Bush into his second term, even after all his disastrous blunders have been exposed so thoroughly via official channels and scholarly publications? As reported by NPR on August 8, 2004 and repeatedly thereafter, we see their four typical sentiments. One, Bush can handle the situation, for he has been handling it. (They are blind to disasters left by Bush‘s mishandling.) Two, Bush is resolute, consistent, and so trustworthy; he says he will do it and he does it. (They don‘t know resoluteness without consultation and deliberation is stubborn, foolhardy inflexibility rushing to disaster.) We shiver to note Obama‘s reverse danger, who has done nothing even with his democratic Congress. Three, ―I am uneasy but I will vote for Bush anyway, for I don‘t like Kerry the stranger and dangerous liberal.‖ (This attitude shrinks from any change by ―dangerous liberals‖ and rally to ―Bush our boy,‖ for we are familiar with his governance, and he is faithful to our ―familiar values,‖ our cozy tradition.) Security-conscious women want to vote for Bush because of the popular rumor/impression that Bush is an experienced defender of our national security, not to check to see how actually Bush made USA much less safe! In herd-mentality, 57 democratic election is competition in demagoguery; plain facts are plainly out of question. Four, finally, this attitude stems from the gut ―loyalty‖ to the grand old tradition of the Grand Old Party. Our loyalty cannot, indeed should not, be shaken loose by a rotten apple or two in the grand old barrel of the tradition and the party that has more than a single person or deed. The Bush supporters would surely have supported anyone else, as long as that person is up for re-election in the Party‘s name. Why does all this sound so natural? Everyone wants to be part of the grand ―tradition.‖ Nothing can go wrong here. Whatever our ruler does is of course correct; any facts to the contrary are just our enemy‟s propaganda; the world is full of them all deserving zealous attack. Never mind the happenstance of our unfortunate failures. Here is ―honor‖ and comfort in the orthodox historic Party. ―We just stick to our old boy! Down with wayward, flipflopping, seditious liberals!‖ ―Orthodox‖ people accuse John Kerry of flip-flopping, not realizing that Kerry enacted true patriotism when, despite being able to dodge the draft, as Bush and Cheney did, he went to the Vietnam War because it was ―right‖ in his honest opinion at the time. He then protested the War on finding that it was a horrendous unjust war. He later voted to authorize funding the war against Saddam‘s tyranny, and then voted against unilaterally rushing into war without consulting with world opinions, no, despite the world‘s considered consensus against it. These acts identically express his situationsensitive58 patriotism. ―There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times‖ (Voltaire)59; patriotism is one such truth. Kerry is absolutely consistent in his deep patriotism. confided power.‖ (The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Brooks Atkinson, NY: Modern Library, 2000, p. 386). Sadly, the Republicans today take ―less‖ in a numerical sense, not in the sense of protest, anathema to ―orthodoxy‖ they claim to own. 57 See Bob Herbert‘s alarming ―Voting Without the Facts,‖ New York Times, November 8, 2004. 58 Dale Russakoff and Jim VandeHei fault Kerry (―Lifelong Collector of Data Can Bog Down His Staffs,‖ Washington Post, 10/13/04, p. A1); his situation-sensitivity is better than Bush‘s blind stubborn unilateralism. 59 Voltaire‘s ―Letter to Cardinal de Bernis, April 23, 1761‖ (see Bartlett‟s Familiar Quotations, Sixteenth Edition, Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1992, p. 306).
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Orthodoxy rejects all this in the name of ―consistency of the tradition‖; it is actually a ―foolish consistency‖ of sticking to our accustomed conventions, ―the hobgoblin of little minds.‖60 No amount of factual evidence can change such set mind, for change is painfully inconsistent with the comfortable status quo. They prefer ―steady‖ descent into disaster to venturing out to novel prospect. Their being smug killed Socrates and Jesus and ignored Confucius, and then turned around to enshrine Jesus and Confucius into ―orthodoxy‖61 to consolidate their contentment later, at a safe distance, sheltered under ―our good old ways‖ no matter what. Our ―democracy‖ suffers this fate of ―consistency‖ today. 62 Many unwary people are bewitched by familiar Republican demagoguery, accusing Kerry of flip-flopping. Heretics say, ―I will vote for Kerry precisely because he flip-flops!‖ in line with the situation‘s rhythm of flip-flopping. While boating, we suddenly hear water roaring around, clearly indicating we are heading for the Niagara Falls; should we not at once turn our boat around? Could anyone accuse us of flip-flopping? ―Flip-flopping‖ with reasons is essential to survival; Bush‘s stubborn refusal to flip-flop brought on deadly disasters to deserve impeachment, or worse. To err is human, to mend it, sagely. Confucius said, ―Mistaken and not to mend it, is mistake indeed!‖ (15/30). ―Mistaken? Hesitate not to mend it.‖ (1/8) ―Tzu-kung said, ‗Princely man‘s errors are like sun/moon eclipse; the whole world sees them. When he mends, the whole world looks up to him.‘‖ (Analects, 19/21) ―Ancient ruler (e.g., Chou Kung), mistaken, mended it. Today‘s ruler, mistaken, not just goes on along but tries to make excuses.‖ (Mencius 2B9) Socratic heresy today urges orthodoxy to mend its mistakes.63 Orthodoxy resents it as cries of ―Wolf! Wolf!‖ Orthodoxy has the divine right to be divinely right in ―preemptive unilateralism.‖ This is its ―tiger‖64 to intimidate and bully people around. Soon orthodoxy fears to dismount the tiger that gets hungry! Mao Tse-tung perceived rotten traditionalism, initiated ―down with Confucius‖ movement in people‘s name called ―Chinese Communism,‖ and promoted the writer of protest, Lu Hsün 魯迅. Soon enough, however, his ―Cultural Revolution‖ stiffened into ―orthodoxy‖ of the People‘s Republic of China that ruins democracy,65 and the heresy of Socrates, Jesus, Confucius, and now students at the Tiananmen, is what had to offend everyone to shake loose from their set mind. Traditionalism dies hard, constantly fostered by people‘s irrepressible desire to be ―in the right,‖ with no less strong desire to be comfortably nestled among the majority ―in the right.‖ It is a horde instinct; community is their secure correct home. Such ―orthodoxy‖ endangers 60 ―A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.‖ (The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, op. cit., p. 138) Here ―consistency‖ is blind conformity to communal opinions; self-consistency is ―self-reliance,‖ ―self-trust,‖ ―spontaneity‖ (pp. 137-141), which is the ―idios‖ of heretical independence. 61 Matthew 23:29-32! 62 This is why people badly need ―education.‖ 63 What ―mistakes‖ did Bush make? See an objective analysis of just one disaster in ―What Went Wrong in Iraq?‖ (Foreign Affairs, September/October 2004, pp. 34-56) by Larry Diamond, Senior Fellow at Stanford‘s Hoover Institution and Senior Adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, January-April 2004 (so he is Bush‘s man offering internal critiques to Bush-debacle). 64 We will meet this ―tiger‖ again soon enough. 65 See John Bryan Starr‘s devastating judgments in his Understanding China, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001, 16-17, 71, 204-219, 318-323, etc.
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security with a ―group think‖ that lulls its members into a comfortable ―no think.‖ Everyone now just sits and follows the status quo for ―consistency‖ and ―moral rectitude,‖ which is depraved rigidity/turpitude. This is an ideal breeding ground of a dictator, a ―monarch called George‖ (Ted Kennedy) under democratic Pax Americana.66 American people badly need a renewed jolt of the heretics to shake America‘s foundation. The heretics are independents who truly love the community to sting a gadfly warning, to risk being swatted to death, as the community had to rise up to kill a Socrates-gadfly who so loves it as to sting it awake. Socrates did succeed, at the price of his life, in arousing them to ―rise up‖! So did Mahatma Gandhi, Steve Biko, and Martin Luther King, Jr.
D. Heresy prevents democracy from choosing dictatorship Self-critical individual choices of unpopular heresy can dissolve another ―paradox of democracy,‖ that democracy can indifferently choose dictatorship. Here is how. Heresy is protest at the radical inner selves. Originating in protesting one‘s pet self and pet ideas, the heretic comes to naturally protest one‘s beloved government that is one‘s own family (China‘s ideal)67 if not oneself writ large (Plato‘s ideal).68 This view of government entirely differs from the view of Paine and Thoreau, and justifies protest more inherently than from Paine and Thoreau‘s viewpoint. This is because here, originally, government is not imposed or contracted ad hoc but is spontaneously extended from oneself of human self or human composition of family, where each member is born/raised/nurtured to grow into oneself. And so, self protesting self is impossible, and family-member‘s protest is innately telling to the family, inherently immediately bearing on the government-as-family. All this justifies the ―change of Mandate‖ (ke ming 革命) of rulership, people‘s revolution, ―raising the Proper‖ (ch‟i i 起義) family-rulership, popular revolution, has been horrendously effective in China‘s long bloody history. It is the Confucian basis/rationale behind Lin Yutang‘s insistence on the radical effectiveness of China‘s public opinion and ―journalism.‖69 Strangely, Mencius shares with American Declaration of Independence a divine70 unconditional rationale for the principle of government for the people,71 and the inherent right 66 The extravaganza of GOP National Convention in NYC in September 2004 was a classic example of splashing traditionalism, basking in all warm expensive Hollywood glitters and lavish festivities. 67 Mencius 1A7, 4B20, among others. 68 See Plato‘s Republic. Sadly Aristotle, Hobbes and Locke left this view, seeding later ―contractual government‖ in Paine and Thoreau. See The Politics of Aristotle, ed. and tr., Ernest Barker, London: Oxford University Press, 1946, 1958, p. 404 (index on Plato). Locke: Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett, Cambridge University Press, 1960, 2003, pp. 107-109. Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan, ed. C. B. Mcpherson, London: Penguin Books, 1968, 1985. Ironically, Hobbes was well aware that he was a heretic rejected by the society. 69 Lin Yutang, A History of the Press and Public Opinion in China, University of Chicago Press, 1936, reprinted, NY: Greenwood Press, 1968. The Poetry Classic 詩經 is China‘s earliest expression of public opinion, says Lin. How impressive it is that poetry expresses public opinion! 70 I emailed to Rev. Chuck Chamberlayne, ―Just yesterday, my buddy Dr. Terry Weidner, a political scientist, eforwarded me a long essay on the religious feature of our politics (Christian-tinged deism?) since 1776, validating Robert N. Bellah‘s ‗American civil religion.‘ Terry then worried about Americans being too religious, as Bush is who violates the principle of church-state separation into a horrendous mess. All this
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to revolution when dictatorship challenges their human dignity,72 though America details dictator‘s oppressions and China stresses people‘s right to independence. Today, the Blacks—casually butchered and shot—joined many conscientious Whites, turn mighty as raw waves of Nature and irresistible heavenly force, constantly welling up from their soul-centers.73 They relentlessly push with nonviolent marches, boycotts, and gutsy singing everywhere, until they forced the reluctant Congress to sign the Civil Rights Act in 1964. The rest is history, of the ―minority‘s‖ continuous protest.74 This spirit of normative protest takes on an historic seriousness in China. What Confucius said (12/11) should be actually fulfilled, that ―the ruler (is to be) ruler, the minister, minister, the father, father, the son, son‖; it is the necessary life-condition, the basic criterion of historian‟s judgment of events; to wit, we must live out what we profess, on pain of disasters. To be chief minister and fail to prosecute an assassin, as minister should, amounts to colluding with the killer, no, same as the assassin; vassal behaving as king usurps the throne, equivalent to regicide punishable by death. Events must be recorded with dead accuracy. Three brother-historians, one after another, braved executions by their lord who assassinated his own lord, to record, ―Ts‘ui Shu assassinated his ruler.‖ These historians chose to die rather than falsify the record. Their incredible bravery finally moved their lord to stop further execution of the third historian, to 75 let the record stand. raises an important question. America seems to have a threefold split-mind—tendency to celebrate ‗Independence from God,‘ religious feature of American politics, and the principle of church-state separation. I wondered about how to deal with this three-sided schizophrenia.‖ (I e-wrote this to Terry. ―Do you agree that [a] the divine base of individual protest is one thing, and [b] separation of religion from politics is another? These two are two legitimate factors in politics, yet they seem to be opposed. How do we reconcile them?‖) 71 Mencius (5A5) quoted the ancient T‘ai Shih saying, ―Heaven sees as ‗my‘ people see; heaven hears as ‗my‘ people hear.‖ (my translation) Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence, saying, ―We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with inherent and inalienable rights; . . . that to secure these rights, governments are instituted . . . deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed . . .‖ (Thomas Jefferson: Writings, selected by Merrill D. Peterson, NY: The Library of America, 1984, p. 19). 72 King Hsüan of Ch‘i asked, ―Is regicide permissible?‖ Mencius said, ―One who mutilates humanness is a mutilator, one who cripples rightness is a crippler; a mutilator and crippler is an ‗outcast.‘ I have heard of assassination of ‗outcast Tchou,‘ but not regicide.‖ (Mencius 1B8, D. C. Lau, Mencius: Volume One, Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1984, p. 39, modified) This political sentiment of ―people supreme‖ runs deep in all China‘s tradition of literary history, e.g., 師曠 advising 晉侯 in 襄公十四年 in 左傳 (臺北市三民書局2002, pp. 991-992), 邵公 remonstrating with 厲王 in 邵公諫厲王弭謗 in 國語 (臺北市三民書局2006, p. 7), and 鄒忌 advising 威王 in 鄒忌修八尺有餘 in 戰國策 (臺北市三民書局, 民87, pp. 366-370), etc. The Jefferson-drafted Declaration says, ―that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government [such] as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.‖ (Thomas Jefferson, op. cit., p. 19) Both opinions mutually tally. Cf. Linda R. Monk, The Words We Live By: Your Annotated Guide to the Constitution, NY: Hyperion, 2003. 73 My heartfelt view happens to fit—translate almost literally—an ancient Chinese injunction that people‘s mouths are irresistible river gushing, conducive only to channeling 導, never to dam up into disaster. 「防民之口甚於防川。川壅而潰，傷人必多，民亦如之。 是故為川者決之使導，為民者宣之使言。」 (―邵公諫厲王弭謗‖ in 國語, 臺北市三民書局, 2006, pp. 7-9). 74 See Reporting Civil Rights: Part One: American Journalism 1941-1963 and Reporting Civil Rights: Part Two: American Journalism 1963-1973, (with captivating pictures) NY: The Library of America, 2003. 75 Ch‘un-ch‘iu, Duke Hsiang, Year Twenty-five (548 BCE). See 襄公二十五年 in 左傳, 臺北市三民書局, 2002, p. 1097. Amazingly, the names of these brave grand historians were not recorded. See also The Tso chuan: Selections from China‟s Oldest Narrative History, tr. Burton Watson, NY: Columbia University Press, 1989, pp. 143-148.
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This lone historic protest to let history judge76 continues today when countless young students, lone, nameless, and defenseless, stood erect against the tanks of their own government to defend their own nation. People call it the Tiananmen Massacre of June 1989, we call it, in tears, Democracy of Heretics against the tyranny of thoughtless orthodoxy.77 Are they any different from Socrates, a lone heretic, aged, ageless, and penniless, defying his beloved government to defend his ―beloved Athenians‖ against their unwary selfdeception? The heretics, standing on their feet, never worship themselves but unceasingly examine themselves to criticize their government, to create democracy in history. Their idiosyncratic self-critical ―public awareness‖ even at the price of their own lives, distinguishes ―being nosy‖ from being public-concerned. Self-examined protest prevents democracy from choosing to abolish democracy.
E. Heresy against mob-rule of the majority Six, what is ―democracy‖ to the heretic who ―takes‖ a town by royal military force against others, turned one who ―takes‖ oneself by one‘s regal individual choice against society? It is not a mob-rule, tyranny of the majority that blindly follow, but a rulership that protects the minority of ―one‘s own,‖ the privacy of people to be left alone to make ―mistakes‖ of abortion, homosexuality, and treasonous protests against war even during the war, and so on. The heretics wish to live in the community under laws that protect the ―privacy of individuals‖ that the ―royal force‖ of society so easily crushes, as it did Socrates and Jesus. Social tyranny today keeps happening very subtly as the ―civilized‖ Superego dominates the 78 Ego (Freud) to lose the self in the ―lonely crowd‖ (Riesman ). Robert Reich and many others 79 are quite vocal on this danger. Hobbes was intent on controlling the individuals that threaten others, but left the collective acts uncontrolled. Besides, he completely bypassed the protection of individual thoughts that the society often imperially suppresses. Socrates, Jesus, Galileo, and countless writers and poets were persecuted. Many perished under social prosecutions, all for their 80 private ideas that were not socially destructive acts.
76 Lone heretical ―subjectivity‖ of protest to risk life was missing in Hegel‘s cool correct quip, ―World history is world judgment.‖ Even Søren Kierkegaard‘s ―Truth is subjectivity‖ misses the life-hazard of such ―heretical‖ historical judgment over the ―orthodox‖ political situation in the royal court. 77 Cf. Julia Ching‘s dissent/protest, Probing China‟s Soul, Harper and Row, 1990. 78 The classics of Sigmund Freud‘s Civilization and Its Discontent (1930), and David Riesman, et al., The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1950, 1953, are abiding warnings on this point. 79 In 2004 alone, luminaries B. R. Barber, D. Briody, Z. Brzezinski, T. Clancy/A. Zinni/A. Koltz, R. A. Clarke, H. Caldicotte, I. H. Daalder/J. M. Lindsay, John W. Dean, P. H. Gordon/J.Shapiro, E. A. Hermen/M. Green, R. Khalidi, J. Moore, M. Moore, MoveOn.org, B. Moyers, J. S. Nye, Jr., K. Phillips, R. B. Reich, G. Soros, C. Unger, J. C. Wilson, B. Woodward, etc, had books out, all cogently/scathingly argued against the ―orthodox‖ Bush-hegemony. 80 Of course, the society suppresses heretical ideas to ―protect itself from destruction by harmful ideas.‖ The society is unaware that heretical ideas ―destroy‖ only collective hegemony, tyranny of the majority that destroys individual ideas, nothing else.
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Hobbes never bothered to control the society to cherish the individuals‘ ―heretical‖ 81 sovereignty. His failure spells the story of a ghastly inhuman world. Mind you, the heretic does not protest Hobbes‘ own freedom to express himself. The heretic does protest Hobbe‘s self-expression that destroys his sovereign freedom of self-expression with all others‘ individual sovereign freedom. To protest society‘s royal/collective takeover of individuality, the ―heretics‖ need not give up an iota of their individual sovereignty for collective cohesion, as Hobbes erroneously proposed. Instead, they protest by fully choosing themselves, taking to the common pact to promote individual sovereignty of all. Here this ―social contract‖ nestles individuality; it does not break but gently nourishes a single bruised reed of heretical idea. Here is a loose coalition of heretics, a federation of sovereignties of individuals. We must look into what ―loose‖ means. Let us first go a negative way. Biko the lone protestor of apartheid said, ―The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.‖82 We can point at him and say, ―The most powerful weapon of the oppressed is also their mind—as yours!‖ So, the mind of the oppressed is the most powerful sociopolitical weapon either way. All depends on the decision of the oppressed on how to take their mind, either to let their mind be controlled by the oppressor to conform to his ―orthodoxy,‖ or else use their mind to become independent heretics. The key against the oppressor is thus the mind of heretics and the spread of their heresy. This spread of heretical protest makes ―democracy.‖ So, as the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Gospel spread, so the oppressor‘s hand is a catalyst to the democracy of the heretics. We must ever be ready to defend our nation against our government, whose power is ready to corrupt to oppress us its people. This defense is ―by‖ in the ―government by the people,‖ by their ever-vigilant protest and heretical scrutiny to form the government of the people. The journalists‘ undaunted editorials,83 elections of officials every few years, and candidates‘ mutual attacks and debates, express this democratic spirit of vigilance. Prophetic journalists such as Woodward and Bernstein, as well as George Orwell, H. L. Mencken, and Bill Moyers,84 tirelessly, persistently, call attention to social injustice. In democracy, plutocracy must be guarded against. Big money should not win election, otherwise the wealthy would have won every term, to turn election a mockery; no wealthy candidate would dare claim to win with big money, although sadly USA has more Republican presidents than Democratic presidents. Only heresy that protests to spread to all, should win. No orthodox conformity induced or intimidated with money makes democracy, but the spread of protesting heresy instigated by journalism. Let us now go a positive way. Although not related etymologically, we can easily surmise how praiseworthy ―choosing oneself‖ came to be ―heresy‖ of social disapproval. The society naturally demands ―sociality‖—conformity and docility—from its members, whose selfchoice often goes against sociality. ―How could the socially unpleasant heretics be sociable?‖ 81 Alan M. Dershowitz, America on Trial: Inside the Legal Battles That Transformed Our Nation, NY: Warner Books, 2004, tackles legal aspects of collective imperialism over individual ―heresies‖ in democratic USA; it is a tough issue. 82 This is Steve Biko‘s statement as witness, May 3, 1976 (Bartlett‟s Familiar Quotations, op. cit., p. 774). 83 The Arab world today has quite popular ―radio talks‖ to air popular discontent. Governments fear them. 84 Bill Moyers deplores plutocracy rampant in democratic America (Bill Moyers on America: A Journalist and His Times, NY: The New Press, 2004). The quality of his sentences is beside the point here.
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Well, not ―charming heretic‖ but ―graceful and tasteful nonconformist‖ is feasible and desirable for survival/efficacy of self-choice; self-choice must turn effective genially, gracefully. Thus for social ―conformity‖ an individualist can offer geniality and for ―docility,‖ grace and tact. Civility, to wit, grace and genial tact, give to cordial coalition ―friendly foes‖ of the self-chosen in civil disobedience (not ―civil heretic‖), nonviolent protest (not ―revolutionary sedition‖); nonconformists agreeably disagree into ―democratic‖ community.
F. Plurality of democracies ―Democracy‖ thus comes spontaneously out of grassroots individualist coalition each culturally coherent. Every democratic polity naturally differs from every other in form, air, and sentiment, and an imposition of one form of democratic polity (US hard sell?) onto another community (protesting Iraq?) is democratically impossible, for it is by definition contradictory; it is an ―imposition of democracy,‖ dictatorship in the name of ―democracy.‖ Democracy means leaving people alone, to protect and promote their ―being alone together.‖ Here in ―democracy,‖ people together make a specific/distinctive musical unity different from any other, and in each musical composition every individual note is special and essential. Again, to shift a metaphor, this community is a specific/unified family distinct from any other. Each family depends on each member to exist, and each member is enabled to live on, each head up high, thanks to a specific unique protective ―togetherness of heretics.‖ This ―musical family‖ has been China‘s ideal of ―people supreme‖ government,85 albeit not in the fashionable name of ―democracy‖ today. Such democratic community dissolves a ―paradox of democracy,‖ to wit, indifferently 86 choosing dictatorship against it, obtainable in unthinking mob-rule; democracy of individual self-critical choices cannot indifferently choose dictatorship, unless done by popular ignorance not critical enough to see through the dictator-wolf under cover of 87 protecting people‘s privacy. In history no dictator has succeeded without this cover, to 88 successfully fool populace. Do we see George W. Bush here?
85 Both ―government by music‖ and ―government as family-economics‖ were in fashion in classical China. See 孔子, 孟子, 荀子: 樂論, 吉聯抗譯注, 北京音樂出版社, 1963, 兩漢論樂文字輯譯, 吉聯抗譯注, 北京音樂出版社, 1980, and 呂氏春秋中的音樂史料, 吉聯抗譯注, 上海文藝出版社, 1963. Sadly, such ideals are preached, not practiced. 86 Section D considered heresy‘s dissolution of this paradox. Here we consider it from another angle. 87 See Arthur Waley‘s poignant description of it in China in Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China, Stanford University Press, 1982, pp. 191-196. 88 NPR (October 8, 2004) reported that FBI forcibly evicted people-with-tickets out of the Bush rally for wearing ―Kerry‖ buttons or ―Kerry‖ T-shirts, even after they took them off. If this is not dictatorship, what is? ―On issue after issue, this [Bush] Administration tells the American people one thing and does another. They repeatedly invent ‗facts‘ to support their ideological agenda—facts which they know are not true! . . . They quietly and drastically under-fund the ‗No Child Left Behind‘ Act . . . while President Bush pretends to be the ‗Education President.‘ They pay lip service to full disclosure of the failures leading up to 9/11, while doing everything possible to stonewall a genuine bipartisan investigation. They hand out blatant giveaways to oil, gas, coal and timber companies while talking about ‗Healthy Forests‘ and ‗Clear Skies‘ initiatives . . . They‘re putting hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars directly into pharmaceutical company profits and calling it a prescription drug benefit for seniors. This ‗Government by PR Campaign‘ is causing real and lasting damage to our country, our future, and our standing in the world.‖ (Senator Edward M. Kennedy‘s public letter, September 27, 2004) All this is appalling indeed.
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Of course, this heretics‘ Utopia literally has ―no place‖ in actual world, at least not yet, but Hobbes‘ Utopia is nowhere, either. Utopia for Utopia, we would choose the heretics‘ over Hobbes‘, for nothing should be more cherished than promotion of choosing one‘s own self. If the society is so irritated by these ideas as to brand them ―heresies,‖ so much the worse for the society, whose true mission it is to protect/promote such ―heretical‖ freedom of individuals to think for themselves. Four comments are in order. One, here is a paradox of humanity. The heretic is idios, an idiosyncratic loner at the edge of a community, yet heretic‘s self-protest, lone and unpopular, is dynamics to democracy. Marginalized individual recluses are the fountainhead of true sociality. The secret code here is authenticity; one true to oneself consolidates social democracy of individuality. Two, Voltaire the heretic declared, ―I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it‖; he expresses a dead-serious defense of anyone‟s expression of opinions, and his rage at desecrating expression by casually throwing opinions around. No 89 wonder he added, ―Liberty of thought is the life of the soul.‖ 90 This is the soul of humanity, the dignity of democracy. Voltaire‘s spirit applies to the rights to bear arms, use tobacco/drug/liquor/car, practice abortion, and decide against world opinions—so long as one is seriously responsible. The heretic would say, ―I detest owning rifles and drugs that kill. I believe in the fetus‘ right to life and would carefully consult with considered opinions before making my decisions. But I will fight for your rights to arms, drugs, abortion, a car, and decide despite world‘s contrary opinions. Just exercise your rights humanely, with extreme caution. They are risky rights; you are playing with fire.‖ The absolute principle here is ―Never hurt, never kill, oneself or others.‖ One‘s right to do all above must be regulated by law. Drugs, tobacco, liquor, and abortion must be prescribed and performed by doctors in consultation with patients, car driving must be licensed, rifles must be ―legally controlled,‖ and the president must be checked on his decisions by the Congress and the Supreme Court, with the ever-present threat of impeachment. These are all ―common sense‖ in the democratic society, though they are more preached than practiced. This is true democracy deserving of ―forcing‖ on the society against the powerful groups (NRA, tobacco/liquor industries, ―right to fetus‘ life‖ group, and the president) by 91 conscientious independent protesters risking mortal persecution under the name, ―heretics.‖ Nothing is more crucial in life than such liberty, and nothing is harder, as its practice often carries the social reproach and persecution of ―heresy,‖ as well as individual risks of life. Three, comments on heresy are at an autobiographical margin of community. The heretic‘s sting has no rancor; its self-critical gadfly-sting calmly cleanses itself and thereby others. The criticism of Bush and his GOP must itself be criticized against turning selfrighteous, turning anti-orthodoxy ―orthodoxy,‖ a Pharisaic monster. Bush‘s GOP is purposely cited as a recent example to the Obama‘s democratic regime. Beware, Mr. President, whoever
89 The first sentence is attributed to Voltaire by Beatrice Hall who claims it was a paraphrase of Voltaire‘s words in the Essay on Tolerance, ―Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so too.‖ The second statement (in English) is in Voltaire‘s Essay on Epic Poetry. (Bartlett‟s Familiar Quotations, op. cit., p. 307.) 90 See my views on impeachment (588-596), bearing arms (641-643), and abortion (572, 575) in On Metaphoring, Brill, 2001. 91 Many doctors who perform abortions have been shot to death, many abortion clinics are bombed.
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you are! Power so easily corrupts into orthodoxy so disastrous a monster, Leviathan, over weak lone individuals. Four, someone may ask, ―Are you sure Voltaire is correct? How can you be sure that heresy is always correct?‖ Our response to this important question is as follows. First, let us look again at orthodoxy. Orthodoxy in power would intimidate the populace with its ―tiger‖ 92 of ―we are always right!,‖ only to be devoured by its own tiger, false security in false 93 ―truths.‖ ―Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry,‖ said Churchill wryly, echoing Chuang Tzu‘s assessment of tyrants as 94 tigers. Tiger-death is here. All this originates in money involved with votes to produce a grave, thickly whitewashed with ―democracy‖ to keep its stench in. It is money stench that erodes votes. My Mom used to tell me not to touch money, or else wash my hands right after touching it. People never bother to dig out such money-stench of death under the beloved whitewash of thick lies, and 95 people‘s ―not bother‖ itself smells, being in the grave of plutocracy. History will either suddenly open up the grave with inner scandal, with outer debacle, or let the grave dry out gradually, and it will be history. Sad it is—the grave of orthodoxy, the 96 stench of death. Let us pray for a sudden inside scandal and/or outside debacle to jolt people into voting rightly. I am tired of the stench everywhere. Now, let us look at heresy. Heresy is quite otherwise. Not accidentally, heretic of hairesis as taker-of-oneself came from taker-of-others. ―One who takes others has force; one who 97 takes oneself is mighty,‖ said Lao Tzu. A heretic is one who habitually ―takes oneself as others,‖ that is, takes on oneself, one‘s ideas, constantly examining them. Self-examination takes oneself as another to self-critique. My son Peter said, ―Dad, I have three names, me, myself, and I.‖ Three is an interactive company that is oneself. I take on ―me,‖ to take me into ―myself‖ to make the ―I.‖ So I can afford to open to the opponent who is both myself as another and myself in the other. This is why Voltaire can defend his opponent‘s right to express ideas, open to them to examine-criticize them. Criticism is invincible, for criticizing criticism joins criticism. ―I do 98 not at all resent criticism, even when, for the sake of emphasis, it for a time parts company 99 with reality,‖ said Churchill wisely. In short, heretic criticizes even himself, criticism is 92 Maureen Dowd said, ―The Bushies‘ campaign pitch follows their usual backward logic: Because we have failed to make you safe, you should re-elect us to make you safer. Because we haven‘t caught Osama in three years, you need us to catch Osama in the next four years. Because we didn‘t bother to secure explosives in Iraq, you can count on us to make sure those explosives aren‘t used against you.‖ Her entire essay, ―Will Osama Help W.?‖ in New York Times (10/31/04) is worth reading. 93 To be precise, a dictator invents his own paper tiger, mount it to scare people, until he himself so believes in his own tiger/propaganda that he cannot afford to dismount; he falls victim to his own falsehoods. 94 Winston S. Churchill, While England Slept (1936), as quoted in Bartlett‟s Familiar Quotations, op. cit., p. 619. See also Chuang Tzu, 4/60-62. 95 Bill Moyers on America: A Journalist and His Times, NY: The New Press, 2004. Cf. Daniel Schorr‘s comment in NPR, 10/17/04. 96 This is of course another rerun of Matthew 23:27; there is money to destroy the temple of people‘s piety. Jesus will rebuild it (John 2:14-20) with piety without money. 97 Lao Tzu (33) parallels this saying with ―One who knows others is learned; one who knows oneself is enlightened.‖ The heretic reinforces the might of self-taking with this penetration of self-knowledge. 98 Being always right, orthodoxy resents criticism, marginalizing it as ―heresy.‖ We remember deep defensive resentment in Bush‘s face and tone in all three debates with Kerry. Churchill is remarkably out of this orthodox resentment while in office that tends to claim orthodoxy. 99 This is from Winston S. Churchill‘s speech in the House of Commons, January 22, 1941.
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invincible in including the opponents, and inclusion of opponents is liberal-cordial, so heresy is cordially liberal. Heretic‘s pan-critique conquers all. Thus heresy is always correct.
G. Heresy as liberal, opponent-accepting, independent of itself Accepting opponents is ―liberal‖ with many opposing ideas, with opponents inside 100 oneself, fractured in the self, with thorns in the flesh. This act of accommodating the opponents ensures being in the right. ―Being correct‖ is the dynamics of self-correction, always on the reformative move. not tied to a fixed self, and this ―not‖ is the élan of heretical protest. Heretics are independent of even themselves. They are liberals liberated from set ideas, from bigotry. Liberty of thought is the life of the soul (Voltaire); liberalism is the soul of democracy. Modern dictatorship inevitably comes as liberalism-eviscerated ―democracy,‖ a 101 wolf roaming among the sheep under cover of the sheepskin of ―illiberal democracy.‖ This odd ―democracy‖ is an historical variant of dictatorship that used to come ―in the name of the people‖; it is sad to realize, this ―sheepskin‖ is the ―orthodoxy‖ of ―democracy.‖ ―Orthodoxy‖ is already always correct and infallible; have we heard a cocksure Bush 102 admit mistakes? He has no self-corrective critique; he does not need it. Such casual refusal of self-examination spells self-satisfaction, stuffy, seamless, and crack-less smugness. Orthodoxy is illiberal, conservative of itself. set in itself, shuts itself in, to spell bigotry. Thus to practice orthodoxy gives the lie to its claim to orthodoxy—being correct—and must lie to everyone, including itself, to hide its own faults. Any warning from outside so 103 irritates orthodoxy as to brand ―liberal heresy‖ deserving of stamping out as enemy. Orthodoxy does not know that such ―heresy‖ brings ―orthodoxy‖ out of its own deadly rut of unorthodoxy under cover of fashionable ―democracy.‖ How does all this come about? How do we correct it? Democracy among unwary dolts spells tyranny of mob-majority ruled/swayed by ―the inalienable right to happiness‖ of greed, license to selfishness, dictatorship of demagoguery. This idiotic ―democracy‖ is the worst form of government (Plato, Churchill) of ―group-think.‖ This democracy of the uneducated is a disaster (Jefferson), so education is its cure. Education 100 The so-called Democratic Party is forever fractured, united only in their protest. Obama backed by the Democratic Congress is weaker than Bush backed by the Republican Congress. 101 Fareed Zakaria, ―The Rise of Illiberal Democracy,‖ Foreign Affairs, November/December 1997, pp. 22-43. Its rise is here fully before our eyes in 2004 Election. ―Reckless and arrogant‖ (Senator Robert Byrd, Losing America, NY. W. W. Norton, 2004) preemptive unilateralism bullies the world into one disaster after another, and bullies America with watertight ad hominem propaganda. Bloody bad news keeps piling up, processed as ―good news.‖ Bush is ―resolute‖ and ―steady on course.‖ Kerry is a liberal flip-flopper unreliable and risky in these times of ―war on terror.‖ The message is ―Be scared!‖ Spellbound, half of America is solid behind Bush. Naked voter intimidation spreads far and wide even before Election. (Bob Herbert, ―For Bush, Bad News is Bad News,‖ New York Times, 19/25/04) Here is classical dictatorship, Nixon‘s imperial presidency made more serious at home and abroad. 102 ―One of the most defining moments of George W. Bush . . . was the press conference . . . when he was asked if he knew of any mistakes he had made, and he said he couldn‘t think of any! Unbelievable! He couldn‘t remember the quagmire [he] led us into in Iraq . . . or his cavalier neglect of an economy that has lost more than a million jobs . . . the worst job record since Herbert Hoover.‖ (Senator Edward M. Kennedy‘s public letter, September 27, 2004) 103 Look at the clean handsome volume by Russell Kirk, Redeeming the Time, Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1996.
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is the ―soft power‖ of persuasive attraction (Nye), Plato and Aristotle‘s ―psychagoge,‖ 105 soul-winning-leading by allurement, as Confucius (9/11) was never tired of doing, 循循然善誘人. Public education is soft heresy constantly applied to populace by conscientious advertisement and courageous journalism; although preciously rare they do exist in history. The tobacco industry was collapsed by TV ads, and Watergate debacle did occur by journalism, as the Enron and Japanese bubbles did burst in free market economy also by journalism. 106 The final social correction is by invisible historical hand of radical contingency, which downed invincible Chinese emperors, Nero, Napoleon, and Hitler. History is often directed by raw spontaneity of the common folks who know where the shoes pinch and how the hunger hurts. Lin Yutang calls it ―journalism in China.‖ Schell sees ―hidden democracy‖ in China; Zinn is today‘s born-again Chinese sage to harp on the people‘s power to shape their own 107 historic destiny. So we have three sorts of heresy, the soft heresy of journalism and advertisement, the hardcore heresy of education in publicity of TV advertisement, and the invisible heresy of unpredictable history. They are the soft wind of ―democracy‖ that invincibly sways to correct the greed for power and for money. ―The wind of the virtuous ruler blows, and the people the grass will bend,‖ said Confucius (12/19). In democracy as people-power, the people are the ruler, and the situation gets complex; they remain the grasses while required to be the virtuous ruler-wind. ―Virtue‖ is the power of being human; here it means the power to critically assess the situation, and bend only to the considered wind of thoughtful journalists, officials, and scholars, not to the 108 wind of raw power, especially the power of their own undisciplined desires. So, the terrible fact is that democracy is extremely fragile. The ―inalienable right to pursue happiness‖ slips into license to pursue powers of irresponsible rifle, money, property, 109 abortion, noise, ecological disaster, etc. This monstrous license translates into bending to the wind of powerful interest groups. The terrible disaster peculiar to democracy is the people‘s right to rulership, i.e., to cast 110 vote, no matter how uncritical, ignorant, and easily sway-able they are, and the ill-designed
104 Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics, NY: Public Affairs, 2004. See also Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Jr., ―Power and Interdependence in the Information Age,‖ Foreign Affairs, September/October 1998, pp. 81-94. They mean the power to attract; we extend it to the alluring power of education. Sadly, Nye recently diluted his ―soft power‖ in ―Get Smart: Combining Hard and Soft Power,‖ Foreign Affairs, July/August 2009, pp. 160-163. 105 Plato, Phaedrus, 265d, 266b3-4; Aristotle, Poetics, 1450a33. Confucius (9/11) passionately practiced it. 106 ―A small input to such a [big complex] system can produce huge, often unanticipated changes—what the scientists call ‗the amplifier effect.‘‖ (Niall Ferguson, ―Complexity and Collapse,‖ Foreign Affairs March/April 2010, p. 25) 107 Orville Schell, ―China‘s Hidden Democratic Legacy,‖ Foreign Affairs, July/August 2004, pp. 116-124. Howard Zinn is too well-known to cite his volumes extensively. 108 The majority of journalists/scholars in 2004 were anti-Bush, while fully half of US people were pro-Bush; the US still totters after over 200 years of democratic polity. 109 This is not to say we must ban all rifles, properties, and abortions (it would be totalitarianism), but to urge us all to be responsible to our right to rifles, property and abortion, never to abuse them. Such counsel is terribly difficult, however, and the difficulty makes for extreme fragility of democracy. 110 These features go together to inter-exacerbate.
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Constitution compounds disaster by being used by the power group to manipulate the ―election.‖ How could all this happen? 111 I argued in 2000 that when two candidates are equally popular, the US Constitution must be fixed to accommodate two presidents, not one. The Constitution being what it is, it ―allowed‖ the Supreme Court to declare Bush as president (after vote count), bypassing the popular will. Incredibly, people complained yet obeyed for four years. The problem in 2004 appears different. Only a few thoughtful people complain that shady propaganda shapes/channels unwary uncritical people into a preset ―winner.‖ People seem not to care; powerful established ―orthodoxy‖ resents these few complaints even before voting, and tries its hardest to suppress them by propaganda. How propaganda differs from public education is a tough issue beyond popular intelligence to decipher, though people must decipher! In the orthodox circle, person counts, not policy and performance; if a person is ―one of us, he is a good guy,‖ and whatever he does is ―moral.‖ So, attacks on opponents are typically ad hominem; ―he is untrustworthy flip-flopper, so whatever he proposes is untrustworthy.‖ The end to demolish such ―immoral liberals‖ justifies whatever means at hand. Thus, amazingly, the foremost factor beyond Iraq and unemployment, responsible for 112 Bush‘s election, was the ―moral factor.‖ Many people regard Bush as ―one of us,‖ honestly doing what he says; ―tripping over his own words‖ shows not low IQ but a man of ―moral action, not of empty words.‖ Low IQ Bush could not have invented such ingenious lies; they must have been concocted by his clever attendants. How those high IQ attendants could have gone so low an abysmal length to such concoctions is part of the mystery of human hypocrisy. In any case, this is a crowning success of supreme ―orthodox‖ propaganda machine; with fully effective propaganda, Orthodoxy advocates decency, perpetrates abomination, and gets 113 away with it. No wonder, conscientious ―heretics‖ are historically in the minority, such as Socrates and Confucius, ever ready to be swatted dead and silent. Thus complaints, before and after voting, must come in to save fragile democracy that is ever ready to turn ―illiberal‖ liberty-robbed dictatorship, post-voting or pre-voting. People‘s complaint is protest; individuals‘ complaint is ―heresy‖ crucial, for democracy to promote the inalienable rights of individuals to their conscientious privacy, so fragile as to be stampeded out any time by the majority under the spell of ―orthodoxy.‖ Majority votes are less crucial than individual heresy in democracy. To advance democracy to promote thoughtful idiosyncratic independence is the mission of society, where we must courageously choose to take and take on, that is, criticize, our respective selves, risking being branded ―heretic,‖ ―insane‖ and ―idiotic.‖ Such ―heresy‖ is the only way to become human and democratic, individually, communally. ―Heresy‖ is the signature of humanity, the life-story of democracy. Tyranny is finished if people dare to die with a tyrant who despises their death.114 People dare not (yet) die against the US Tyrant, so its devastating tyranny continues. To stop repetition, we end now our story of ―heresy.‖115 111 See my Nonsense as Sense in Religion: Cultural Meditations on the Beyond, pp. 316-323, yet to publish. 112 National Public Radio reported so upon announcing Bush‘s election on November 3, 2004. 113 Cf. sharply worded ―The Everlasting Gospel,‖ The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman, NY: Anchor Books, 1988, pp. 876-877. 114 Tao Te Ching 74, 75; Chuang Tzu 4/2. 115 Read further my ―Heresy, Tradition, History,‖ Journal of World Religions, forthcoming.
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HOW TO READ STORIES It is time to take a turn. Storytelling without story-reading is no ―storytelling,‖ any more than a husband without wife is ―husband.‖ We must undergo four levels of reading to be judged having ―read‖ a story. To understand how, we must actually go through a story. Our previous exposition on storytelling must be repeated here to match it as story-hearing. Here are four, in the order of increasing difficulty. Story One: A young lady said cheerfully, ―Hi, Charlie, we stay friends; here is my email. Keep in touch, ok? Bye!‖ Now how do we read this short story? In no less than four ways and levels, we must say. (a) How the story went. This is a straight textual reception of a story. Textual criticism is here; in this case, we see that it is my arbitrary invention just for fun, to see how many levels a story involves; (b) what it amounts to. This is exegesis; we see that this story tells us about polite greeting to Charlie; (c) what it means. This is exposition; we see this story describes a dumping that is soft; (d) what it means for us. This is hermeneutic reflection; it tells us to be kind unconditionally, even in dumping trash. Story Two: (a) I once asked my granddaughter of three, ―Tessie, how come fish has no umbrella?‖ ―‗Cause it has no hands!‖ Wow! Her mom was ecstatic, ―See, she is so logical!‖ That led me to thinking (b): how logical Tessi was, (c): what sort of ―logic‖ Tessie gave me 116 (for that was why I wowed), and (d): what Tessie taught me. And then I nod; I now 117 understand this story. Story Three: (a) A Japanese scholar began his 1960 Wright Lecture at Yale with this 118 story. A company CEO strolled in a park on Sunday, and found several bums sleeping on the grass. He tapped one on the shoulder and said, ―Friend, wake up. You look healthy and intelligent. Why don‘t you report tomorrow at my office?‖ ―What for?‖ ―I‘ll give you a job.‖ ―What for?‖ ―To make money, don‘t you know?‖ ―What for?‖ ―Well, to buy a house and have a wonderful family.‖ ―What for?‖ ―O, come on, to be happy! Don‘t you know?‖ ―To be happy, eh?‖ The bum slightly raised himself. ―Mister, that‘s what I am. By the way, would you step aside? You are shading my sun.‖ Now, (b) what does it amount to? (c) What does it mean? (d) We uncomfortably feel here a challenge to our conventional ideals, but what is it that challenges us, precisely? It all eludes us. Story Four: (a) Chuang Tzu (2/38-40) told us that an offer of ―morning three, evening, four‖ to monkeys made them furious, so our Uncle Monkey changed to ―morning four, evening, three,‖ and they applauded. This story is one of the ―simplest and dumbest‖ of all his stories. He even appended its explanation so dumb, and everyone talks about it as if they knew it all.
116 I did so before in the section, ―Kids‘ Logic, Our Logic, Storytelling Logic.‖ 117 Jesus‘ parable of the sower is another example for our reading on four levels. [a] We note that all three Gospels have similar descriptions of this parable (Mt 12, Mk 4, Lk 8; descriptions of ―good soil‖ is quite interesting) but John‘s Gospel does not have it. [b] The same seed is sowed identically, and the four grounds are due to four different life-situations. [c] The same seed of love yields different results in different hearts; this is amazing. [d] The reason why this parable was told is that the listeners do have the choice; we can be any sort of soil, and we had better constantly decide to be ―good soil‖! Jesus on his part is the sower and the seed in one. The parable is an appeal, the sowing and the seed, appealing us to turn around and accept Jesus as his ―good soil‖ and ―good seed‖! This is Mark 1:15 all over again! 118 How did I come to know the story? I was a student in the audience at the time.
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I myself tried several times to see what it amounts to (b), what it means (c), and what it 119 means for us (d). Don‘t we see how Bush‘s violence of ―morning, four‖ replaces Saddam‘s ―morning, three‖? Chopping a tree chops the chopper? Bush, Saddam, and tree chopping may be on level (b), but, so what? I had better keep quiet, for the more I search for its significance, the more lost I get. Chuang Tzu gives us a lifetime challenge of ―reading‖ his story. In any case, except for my fabricated Story One, all stories above are difficult on level (d), as all life stories are ambiguous and open, as are all biographies and histories that reflect life, for brute facts are stories stranger than fiction, ever bottomless. Thanks to four levels of depth, stories are indefinitely various and limitless, pattern-less to overflow categories, yet carry a coherence of its own. We now cite three simplest kid-stories to see story-coherence. These kid-stories are so charming we cannot help citing them repeatedly in our pages elsewhere. Story One: ―Tessie, how come fish has no umbrella?‖ ―‗Cause fish has no hand.‖ Wow! The answer is so logical yet quite surprising, precisely because it is so trite that we adults would never have noticed it. Story Two: ―I hate Charlie; I want to kill him, Mom.‖ ―You can kill him tomorrow; now come eat your dinner.‖ And then Tommy forgets killing Charlie. Mom says OK, and fulfills Tommy‘s immediate need, to lead him to naturally forget the whole matter. Story Three: ―I don‘ wanna sleep!‖ ―Ok, don‘t, just sit here and hear your favorite story.‖ Tommy nods. ―Once upon a time . . .‖ and he hits the pillow. Mom ok‘s Tommy not wanting to sleep, to give his favorite to disarm/nurture him naturally, all ―no-do‖ logically senseless. We see in these stories five features, among many others. One, stories are natural, so trite on things as they are, and logically indifferent. Two, stories are tact-full, discerning, and attractive, not logically formulaic with set rules. Three, stories trail and follow along the situation, not logically, absolutely. Four, stories move on in situation-dynamics, not logically settled. Five, stories are concrete, unsuspected, surprising, not logically eternal, all-inclusive, exception-less. Stories have more features than above, of course. E.g., we could say on the fish-story that, on an exegetical level (b), of course fish has no hand to hold an umbrella, so it has no umbrella; what else is new? On an expository level (c), we could say that Tessie is so fresh, for all her assertion of obvious fact, as to surprise us into laughter. On a hermeneutic level (d), we could say that unless our logicizing is as fresh to surprise people into laughter as Tessie‘s does, we are not yet really ―logical.‖ as Mom proudly says she is ―logical.‖ I said we ―could,‖ for this is only one of many other possible readings of this story. In any case, all above tells us that story-thinking entirely differs from Western logical thinking, and yet stories are inevitable in their own ways, never arbitrary, never to mock as ―illogical.‖ One wrong move, wrong interpretation, and failure of all sorts ensues at once. We have thus told the story of the coherence alive of storytelling, the ―logic‖ of story-thinking. In all this, stories have four levels. Without taking into account all of the four levels, 120 stories simply vanish in time‘s indifferent flow. Moyers‘ volume begins by bewailing that 119 I tried my interpretive hand on this story in ―Relativism and Storytelling‖ above, in Butterfly as Companion, op. cit., pp. 178, 387, 419, and in Chuang Tzu: World Philosopher at Play, NY: Crossroad and Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1982, pp. 73-74. I have now come to realize that the story has much deeper implications than customarily suspected, and its unfathomable depths are revealed only as we plumb it step by step. 120 Bill Moyers, Moyers on America: A Journalist and His Times, NY: The New Press, 2004, pp. ix-x. Actually, he says that journalists connect the dots and disappear. He hopes that his volume lasts longer, but does not say
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the journalists often vanish as they report fleeting bits of events, and hopes that connecting dots in his volume may enable him to survive transience. His connections are his judgment, out of years of dots-connection, that US democracy is turning plutocracy, money-power, not demos-power at all. These connections and judgments are activities on levels (b) and (c), which make great 121 writers out of journalism, such as Lafcadio Hearn (b. 1850), H. L. Mencken (b. 1880), and George Orwell (b. 1903). Legal proceedings are on levels (a) and (b). Dershowitz rises to 122 level (c), for which he is justly famous. Why must we connect dots? Because life fractured into bits and pieces is ―sicker‖ than fractured life called ―schizophrenia,‖ life split into bits, cut off from actuality. Such bits-cleft life is senselessness that spells death; senselessness is nothing nowhere, no life whatever, as words are split into letters and scattered around no longer words, no sense at all. As we read no ―words‖ of meaning, just watching ―letters‖ of events scattered, life goes schizophrenic. Dots-connection shapes jumbles of dots of letters, themselves not hot or cold, scary or pleasant, silent or noisy, into sensible words. Stories told connect dots; stories read complete the connecting into their meaning. Stories spell life‘s meaning. Lifeworld is history 123 of spelling-process, story-in-in-the-making, meaning making itself. But what is meaning? Meaning is a milieu where bits and dots gather to fit inter-weaving a con-text. A context is composed of dots cohered, that is, stuck together, to fit into a world where there are beings. Conversely, dots appear as things, each as distinctly itself and no other, only in its context, in the milieu of this context, to exist, to stand-out as itself. Things and their inter-woven context thus inter-depend, and such inter-texture between things and their context they compose, is ―meaning.‖ ―In other words, in order to be things at all, they must stand-together into a system,‖ says an analytical mind. What is said here says less than the fact of the matter, however. It is rather that things must cohere, stick-together, into a shape, blend and enter one another, inter-melt to com-pose the ―music of meaning‖ to which we resonate to co-compose the Music, the world. Existents co-resonate in music to live the world‘s ongoing sym-phony. To live on is for bits to interweave into life‘s music of existence; all this is meaning beyond ―system‖ that does not make music that is meaning. 124 A bit of autobiographical confession is in order. My close reading of Chuang Tzu proved to be decisive in my journey in cultural hermeneutics. I found that Chuang Tzu is China shouted aloud, distinctive of China, on five counts. One, a grain of sand in Chinese history, Chuang Tzu, shows all world of China, as we read on. Two, this is because a typical spot in writing shows how things are written, and the ―how‖-method shows the ―what‖-matter. Three, this in turn is because the Chinese writing that Chuang Tzu exhibited mirrors life, how we live showing what life is. Four, all this what his volume does to last long. I think he lumps together two types of connecting, story-telling [b] and story-judgment [c]. To avoid confusion, I put storytelling as connecting-and-judging. 121 Breathtaking on [b]/[c] level is Frank Defoe‘s sports-reportage in ―All Things Considered.‖ 122 Alan M. Dershowitz (Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard), America on Trial: Inside the Legal Battles That Transformed Our Nation, NY: Warner Books, 2004. 123 I have meditated on ―meaning‖ at the basic level in Butterfly, op. cit., pp. 364-373. We continue our reflection on ―meaning‖ here. 124 I refer to my two volumes, Chuang Tzu: World Philosopher at Play, NY: Crossroads and Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1982, and The Butterfly as Companion: Meditations on the First Three Chapters of the Chuang Tzu, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990.
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amounts to a life-logic, life-reasoning, where every bit is inter-involved in every other in time, looking forward to whatever will happen. 125 Five, I called life-reasoning the ―‗logic‘ of togetherness,‖ and then, now, ―storythinking,‖ i.e., historical thinking, participating, reenacting, re-living, in life-developing, which is surprising yet later found as sensible. It is in the ―sensible‖ that the historical thinking is ―logical,‖ and in the ―surprising‖ that the thinking is ―in time,‖ not spatial as with symbolic logic. I found all these five features as I wrote on Chuang Tzu‘s writings that present life-dots as dots, with subtle indirect suggestions of how they could be connected. This dot-connection is ―meaning of life.‖ In contrast, when we cannot read the scribbles on the wall of time, all dots and bits scattered there redound to make us scatter-minded, schizophrenic, and we see random things to randomize and depress us. Actuality is wall of time, ever changing; we must be patient enough to wait out, to let dots turn into scribbles that write out a sensible sequence-of-events, that is, a meaningful story, a history to go by. ―If you don‘t like the weather, wait a minute,‖ says Mark Twain. This waiting-out does an active patient reading on four levels mentioned above. Our waiting is how we partake of time-process, we being time itself, so as to understand actuality as timedynamics, making its own musical meaning, its history. Dots are events; their connections are literary stories in time, history. Chinese tradition is made of literary history or historical literature, ―wen shih 文史.‖ Chinese thinking collages the story-bits of events without rhyme or reason, and montages them into a meaningkaleidoscope. Reading it moves this kaleidoscope to see meaning, and all four levels of the reading inter-involve, and the beauty of wen-shih, literary history, historical literature, results to present meaning. Sociopolitical events make impacts on us all, so history tends to be sociopolitical. Chinese thinking tends to be dominated by a kaleidoscope of dynasties and social history, although by no means exclusively so, as sociopolitical history blends with metaphysics, culinary arts, literature, music, poetry, and so on. These blends compose the moving beauty of four levels involving one with the others, into beautiful meaning. In short, we have not read a story until we have been through all these four levels, textual, exegetical, expository, and hermeneutic. Analytic-symbolic logic is an ―organon‖ (Aristotle), a tool, at exegetical level (b), to clean and straighten the coherence of a story that is journalism, to go to expository level (c) (as commentary) to perceive a thread that runs through the story (in (b)) of events. Maureen Dowd, for example, bites wide and deep into the trend of the times. And then we sit back to meditate on what all this means, in (d) level. Why, however, do we have to bother reading a story on all four levels? Can‘t we just learn how things happened in the 911 Incident ((a)) and just see that the Incident amounts to a terrorist attack on the American soil, and Americans must retaliate in kind ((b))? The answer 126 is a somber serious No. In fact, our interpretive exercises on all four levels are not idle armchair speculations but 127 This point can be absolutely essential for our survival, on pain of cosmic catastrophe. 125 See my On the “Logic” of Togetherness: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden, the Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1998. 126 The first somber story below shows that stopping at [a] and [b] worsens terrorism. 127 Confucius said (2/15), ―Study and not think, then blank-folly; think and not study, then at-the-brink-of-fall,‖ to clearly assert the necessity of combining levels [a] + [b] (study) with levels [c] + [d ] (think).
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visibly borne out by three tragic story-examples below. The first two are close at hand, another no less close but more patently pervasive. All these three stories ripple out world tragedies in our failure to think through, with care and sensitivity, what the story-incidents 128 ((a)) that we see as such-and-such ((b)) mean ((c)), and mean for us now ((d)). Here is the first somber ―story‖ (level (a)). During the Christmas and New Year of 20034, several Europe-to-USA flights were cancelled; then the 1/7/2004 news-report said that France and Germany were looking for passengers who booked the flights and failed to appear at the airports. We at once understand the story at level (b); the West‘s alert system worked. Tragically, however, no one in the West, much less Bush, cared to go to levels (c) and 129 (d). The invisible ―terrorists‖ tried and failed this time, and will try again to use our airplanes, a fruit of the West‘s money-terror, mixed with their blood, to spectacularly advertise mass blood-terror—to tell us something. What is their message? This is level-(c). What does their message mean to us? What should be our response besides trying to smash them? This is level-(d). Sadly, our interpretive failure, (c) and (d), contribute continuously to worsening world terrorism, our money-terror and their blood-terror, each exacerbating the other. How do we fail in interpretation levels (c) and (d)? Such terrors did worsen and did spread worldwide. 130 Here is a tragic hermeneutic failure worldwide. Here is the second sad story. During the 2004 New Year season in Taiwan, a young man proposed to marry a young lady, who begged off because she learned of his recent affair with another girl. Enraged, he murdered his beloved lady‘s sister, her roommate and the roommate‘s boyfriend, inflicted deep wounds on his beloved, and then jumped from the ninth floor to his death. A note left behind claimed that he was determined not to let his beloved fall in someone else‘s embrace. This is how the story went, on (a). We could see on (b) the cause of the tragedy to be his private soul-dependence on his beloved, whom he desperately needed to be himself; losing her loses him. So we see the story, on (c); it is the story of the young man‘s self-poverty in other-need. In short, this story describes a completely private affair ((b) and (c)). The story blood-teaches us, on (d), further, that privacy is communal; his private decision harvested several deaths beyond his and his beloved‘s. His self-poverty is not his alone but pervasively social. ―No man is an Island‖ (John Donne). A baby gives smile all around; one 131 Personal travail is desperate other-need makes dire impacts of life and death on us all. communal responsibility. Neglect this message of our responsibility, and we harvest deadly tragedies all around. Staying in (b) and (c), we get individualism that is a deathtrap. 128 In the so-called ―news analysis‖ Eric Sevareid, Daniel Schorr, and Washington Post tell stories predominantly on level [b] and just a bit of [c], if at all. 129 They indeed did on Christmas Eve, 2009, aborted by an astute passenger. 130 Similarly, the phrase ―crimes against humanity‖ we casually brandish about needs four levels of deliberation. [a] We are surprised at seeing it everywhere, in USA (against the Indians), Germany (the holocaust), Spain, Japan, Korea, China, India, Africa, Russia, Eastern Europe, etc. [b] We are horrifically saddened at the high cultures coupled with the savagery of inhumanity. [c] We then think of what all this means. Is it a sin? Akrasia? [d] We shudder at the mystery of our radical evil unspeakable. Until we sink into the fourth level, we have not understood such crimes against humanity. 131 Similarly, [a] here is a ―birthday party.‖ [b] It is a joy together for someone‘s birth in the past. [c] Why? What does it mean? Isn‘t it silly to giggle at birth in the distant past? [d] What is so important about someone‘s [a] birthday and [b] rejoicing together over it? Why not rejoice at someone‘s funeral, celebrate a death-date? We celebrate at a centenarian‘s funeral for life well lived; why don‘t we celebrate a funeral at any age for the same reason? Why celebrate births at all? Or deaths?
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Here is the third final story to show how our individualism, translated into technological corporate selfishness, is a deathtrap of cosmic catastrophe. We first tell ((a)) our sad story of industrial pollution, now worldwide. Our natural environment is riddled with global warming, extensive forest clearing, and chemical-infusion on land and sea, to radically change the climate and decimate species in droves, including the human species. This story is so sadly familiar that we now silently live with it, resigned under the hegemony of our wealthy industrial employers. We see ((b)) how the whole trouble originates in greedy individualism among the industrialists, and we advertise scientific technology to clean up the environment to reverse the trend into an environment for all species to live 132 together; we scheme to make pan-profit by nature conservancy. 133 Marcel digs with surprising depth into level (c); we extrapolate. Pollution is a gigantic ―metaphysical error,‖ basically misdirected. Pollution originates in taking nature as ―a set of technical possibilities‖ for human ―conquest of nature‖ to make profit. ―Technical conquest‖ takes nature as an object to exploit, indicating cosmic ―alienation,‖ our radical existential rift from nature. The rift is pollution; so, we cannot technically un-pollute technical pollution, for pollution cannot be un-polluted by pollution. Techniques, polluting or un-polluting, all manipulate mechanically and can never go beyond (a) and (b) of simply responding to problems piecemeal as they arise while cleverly manicuring the trees of profit to miss the forest of nature. Manicuring mechanization shows ―machinating mind‖ to ruin humanness (Chuang Tzu); trapped in manipulation, we can never 134 rise to humanity (Heidegger). Species individualism in corporate selfishness mortally seals itself in the prison of itself separate from nature, to devastate nature for all. So, actually the situation is worse than physical pollution; technology-obsession is already a universal species deathtrap; to use techniques alone against technical pollution worsens it. Technology snaps us out of nature. No baby survives out of mother-milieu; no spouse lives outside ―each other,‖ ceasing to breathe in their love-air. We dwell in Mother 135 Nature (Heidegger ) as water is no object to the fish swimming in it; treating nature-milieu as object destroys it to destroy us all, human and non-human. We say on level (d), pantechnology is metaphysical error to ―technicalize‖ nature into cosmic tragedy. ―Pollution in physical nature‖ shows our radical defect, our life-attitude, shown in turn in 136 ―psychological techniques that work.‖ ―Treating‖ mental illness technicalizes a person, tears a person out of a person; this attitude, even if not actually carried out, pollutes a person to death. Technical attitude kills the person. We see a surgical operation going flawlessly in a textbook way, to result in the patient‘s death; it‘s all the fault of the patient. Nature is 132 Cf. Kent Gilbreath, ed., Business and the Environment: Toward Common Ground, Washington, D. C.: The conservation Foundation, 1984. 133 I here variously quoted from The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel, op. cit., pp. 240-243. 134 Chuang Tzu 12/56, David Farrell Krell, ed., Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, HarperSanFrancisco, 1977, pp. 243-317. This is not to oppose technology but technical mindset, taking all problems to be machine-handleable. We will soon see the ―divine‖ ―heavenly‖ skills of those-in-nature, in Chuang Tzu (chapters 1, 3, 19), as praised in Japan. 135 Heidegger‘s ―dwelling‖ is everywhere on his pages. His Being and Time is full of it (cf. Joan Stambaugh tr., Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996, p. 434, Index on ―dwelling‖), his later poetry revolves around it (Poetry, Language, Thought, tr. Albert Hofstadter, NY: Harper and Row, 1971). His dwelling indicates my ―milieu‖ in sections above, ―Kids, Dawn, Milieu,‖ ―Storytelling Rhymes With the Situation, Our Milieu,‖ and ―Self-ed and Self-less Milieus.‖ 136 I shiver at A Guide to Treatments That Work, eds., P. E. Nathan and J. M. Gorman, Oxford, 1998.
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Motherly Milieu, as personal as our mothers. Technologically ―treating‖ nature as object denatures it to kill nature, living species, and ourselves. Fish cannot survive in polluted water, and fish polluting its water commits suicide. We will be quite painfully surprised to feel how impossible it is to dwell in nature as we pollute it with our technology, as technology ―deals with it‖ to kill it. We cannot technically deal with nature to dwell in nature as home; we must dwell in nature to be at home there and in ourselves. It requires more than technology to heal pollution done by technology; we need a revolution of our own overall life-attitude to cure our ―metaphysical error‖ (Marcel). ―Ecology‖ is a revolution of attitude, from one of technical manipulation to proudly snip ourselves out of nature to objectively deal with nature, toward dwelling in nature as dwelling in our Mother-Milieu where we are at home to nourish our beings. We would now treasure her and appreciate her while we adjust her as our motherly milieu our home with our liveswith-technical-hands, as we adjust ourselves into being her children in reverential love of her. Now, technology cannot un-pollute pollution, but our life-with-technical-hands can adjust Mother Nature back pristine alive; thus, the situations and ways of using technics differ while technics remains identical. ―What is going on here?‖ Well, the same composition results in one sort of music when performed by one group of musicians, and entirely another sort by another group. All physicians are not created equal, nor are all pharmacologists. Infants know only too well that the ―same‖ feeding in a nursery is not at all their own Mom nursing them at home. No feeding is alike by different feeders. By the same token, mechanical technology is not quite our human technical hands lovingly tending Mother Nature where all species thrive as members of one cosmic family. We have learned how concretely we can do so as we observed Japan‘s agrarian science and 137 technology ; here technology is part of nature, to wit, part of ourselves and of physical nature, thereby empowers us to be one of natural operations of Mother Nature, and then we 138 can do everything at will. Such performances are ―divine,‖ ―heavenly.‖ Nature now does naturing itself through our hands. 139 A homograph of a Chinese character, ―ch‟ing 情,‖ elucidates this situation as it is illuminated by it. We now know how it can mean objective reality (e.g., ch‟ing shih 情實) and subjective feeling (e.g., ch‟ing kan 情感), as the bird-milieu has the birds there and the birder here. The situation of ―heartfelt co-presence‖ aptly describes the milieu of subjectively felt objective presence that nestles and nourishes; this character describes the reality of how real heartfelt co-presence is an overall objective situation of inter-subjectivity, to nurture subjective integrities. This situational unity tells us that after all a ―situation‖ is shown by the character, ―ch‘ing 情,‖ unifying the objective fact of where we are with the subjective fact of how we feel. When our heartfelt presence really presents this true situation, a miracle of inter-making 137 See our section above, ―Agriculture in Technology in Japan, China, and Beyond: The World‘s Post-Industrial Revolution.‖ It‘s no accident that the Kyoto Accord, that initiates ecologically tangible proposals to industrial nations, was drafted in Kyoto, Japan. 138 Chuang Tzu 1/28-34, 3/1-12, 19/6-26, etc. 139 Chad Hansen has an objective socio-cultural interpretation of ―qing or ch‘ing‖ (Encyclopedia of Chinese Philosophy, ed., Antonio S. Cua, NY: Routledge, 2003, pp. 620-622), where he missed this character as the unity of subjective feeling and objective reality of the situation. His careful documentation of various uses of the character only deepens this impression. See my review of the volume in Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, Summer 2003.
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everyone whole takes place. This subject-object unity is an invincible tonic, quite natural, and storytelling just performed effects this heartfelt inter-mothering milieu that heals, for story partakes of the situation ecological, and story-partaking is an initiation, a flowchart, of technology as the loving hand of human children of Mother Nature. The attitude-revolution is nowhere more apparent and radical than in psychology, our science of our self. We now reflect on psychology in general in four levels of interpretation. Psychology today so leans on empirical (a)/(b) levels as to exclude interpretive (c)/(d) ―what‖ and ―how related‖ problems, such as what psyche is. Is our psyche a behavior pattern, feeling, knowing, or consciousness, or what else? How are feeling, knowing, behaving, and consciousness related? 140 David Burns‘ ―cognitive behavioral therapy‖ toward ―feeling good‖ adjusts the client‘s cognitive perspective to tune bad feelings good. Asked why it works, he would say that feeling follows knowing, so adjusting knowing adjusts feeling. Has he reflected on this assumption, though? Doesn‘t knowing also follow feeling, such that cold calculation—isn‘t it also ―a mental disorder‖?—can/should be tempered/guided by humane feeling? Is this tempering, ―cognitive behavioral therapy‖ or ―emotional behavioral therapy‖? What is ―emotional intelligence‖? More basically, is Burns sure that knowing and feeling are related, and how is the relation structured? Do we call this interactive unity the human ―psyche‖? What is psyche? Besides the questions of why it works (if it does) and what it amounts to (adjustment of psyche?), he must consider for what purpose he is doing this, what ―healing‖ means. Why is good feeling 141 preferable to bad one that conduces to Van Gogh-creativity more than good feeling of common folks achieving nothing? All these are questions on (c)/(d) levels bypassed in the heat of immediate business of ―healing‖ people. Without such reflection on the (c)/(d) levels his therapy is just a hit-and-run technique, a psychological engineering without interpretive roots, prospering branches and leaves, if they prosper at all, without the trunk and root called ―psyche‖ and ―psychology‖ its study; isn‘t ―psychology‖ the study of psyche more than ―healing,‖ whatever it means? It is similar with Skinner who proposed that human psyche parallels pigeon‘s, both subject to behavioral conditioning. All his experiments proceed on this assumption; is he sure his assumption is accurate? Is ―parallel to pigeons‖ same as ―being identical to pigeons‖? Skinner lacks reflections on the interpretive (c)/(d) levels on what being human means, and missed the value-complexity of human life, as evinced by above critique of Burns‘ cognitive 142 behavioral therapy.
140 David D. Burns, Feeling Good: A New Mood Therapy, NY: A Plume Book, 1980, 1999. 141 How were ―mental disturbances‖ of John F. Nash (b. 1928) related to his Nobel Prize accomplishments, and ―personal instability‖ of Kurt Gödel to accomplishments that won his Albert Einstein Award? How did Dr. William C. Minor, a graduate of Yale Medical School and a murderer confined in an ―insane asylum,‖ come to be the most devoted contributor to the Oxford English Dictionary? (―Nash, John Forbes,‖ The Columbia Encyclopedia, NY: Columbia University Press, 2000, p. 1952.) John W. Dawson, Jr., Logical Dilemmas: The Life and Work of Kurt Gödel, Wellesley, MA: M. K. Peters, 1997. David Goldman, ―Shocking, Lurid, and True: Doctor, Scholar, Murderer: The Strange Tale of Dr. Minor and the OED,‖ Biography, July 2003, pp. 22, 98.) And the list goes on. 142 Cf. An important debate between Brand Blanshard and B. F. Skinner in their essay, ―The Problem of Consciousness: A Debate,‖ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, May 1967, reprinted in Philosophy Today, No. 2, edited by Jerry H. Gill, NY: Macmillan, 1969, pp. 183-208.
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Freud is risky for opposite reasons; he (a) proposed our psyche to structured as Superego, Ego, and Id, whose harmony is psychic health, and (b) the present psychic situation as resulted from past one. Both gather to make ―psychoanalysis‖ to dig into past to get at where psychic imbalance began, to begin there to restore harmony. All this may be at the interpretive (c)/(d) levels. But is this view feasible or ―accurate‖? Is psychoanalysis practical, practicable? He lacks these probes in the empirical (a)/(b) levels. Today, psychology is popularly identified with counseling, which is identified with what works. Both these identifications are questionable, for psychology as science—knowledge— is not counseling as social work, nor is counseling just for what works, whatever ―what works‖ means. Here is a telling example. A lady came to a counseling clinic desiring to be desensitized to her husband‘s infidelity. Her counselor does have several means to comply, such as cognitive behavioral therapy, behavioral conditioning, and/or drugs (psychopharmacology). But should it be done? Do we feel the specter of a dictator ―correcting‖ political dissidents in psychiatric ward? Why is it all right to do it? Do we have a better alternative to simple desensitizing? What does ―better‖ mean here? Here is the core of human psyche for counseling; here we enter ethics that is part and parcel of human culture and humanistic sciences, without which humanity ceases to be. Someone protests, ―All right, if you are so smart at complaining, in quest of the true mission of psychology, do it yourself.‖ OK, let me try. Psychology studies soul, thereby soul143 but healing144 does not always make us ―feel good‖ singing, ―O, what a beautiful heals, 145 morning, what a beautiful day! I‘ve got a beautiful feeling, everything going my way!‖ ―Healing‖ should instead mean making-whole our existence. To ex-ist is to stand-out of the surrounding as uniquely itself, and unique out-standing creates things fresh, novel, and outstanding. All these points conspire to claim that ―healing‖ makes whole our existence for its maximum creativity. This description of healing allows geniuses to be eccentric to be creative, and far from ―repairing‖ them, facilitates all defects, injuries, and obstacles to become part and parcel of maximum creativity of one‘s own. Psychology would free Van Gogh to feel however he feels 146 to enter his paintings, and let Beethoven be freely deaf toward his Ninth Symphony. In all this, unique human creativity stands out against its humus, what is common, an ordinary communal lifestyle, ―culture‖; psychology that makes-whole human creative soul is intimately couched in culture our perspective, mind-frame, and behavior pattern. Psychological counseling is intercultural, a cultural mutuality between counselor and client, to yield their cultural inter-readjustments to maximize creativity of both parties in their respective cultures of hang-ups and idiosyncrasies, as in culturally pluralistic USA where counseling originated and prospers.
143 Psychology as psyche-study is related to psychotherapy, soul-healing; the latter visibly ciphers the former, while they differ. The one is not the other. 144 Here I accommodate the prevalent view that psychology involves if not being equivalent to counseling and healing, though I do not really agree. Psychology is the science (-ology), i.e., knowledge, of what psyche is. 145 Cf. Dan Greenburg with Marcia Jacobs, How to Make Yourself Miserable, NY: Random House, 1966. 146 How? Well, we often can see how a style of political performance shows a personal biography. If we can chart how a specific musical excellence shows a specific personality and its biography, then we can, Freud-like, relate Beethoven‘s biographical thrust to him to enhance his musical creativity, and design ―musical therapy‖ for Beethoven with Beethoven. Similarly with ―painterly therapy‖ for Van Gogh with Van Gogh, ―mathematical therapy‖ for Kurt Gödel with Kurt Gödel, etc.
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Now, in China ―thinking‖ ―reads stories,‖ understands their meanings ((c)) and their significance ((d)), not just recites what they say ((b)), much less just check on their historical accuracy ((a)). Story-thinking includes not just capturing what the stories say ((a)) and what they amount to ((b)), but also what they mean ((c)) and what they mean for us ((d)). ―China‘s story-thinking‖ includes all four levels of understanding the situation storytelling present, with a stress on the latter two interpretive levels. Further, the four levels interpenetrate into a hermeneutic circle as a mythological Snake 147 biting its own tail, to compose story-thinking. Discerning ((c) and (d)) a story‘s meaning is substantiated by the solidity of its textual criticism ((a), (b)); accurate textual criticism ((a)) and exposition ((b)) of a story is directed and guided by how apt and discerning our understanding of its meaning ((c)) and its significance ((d)) is. Such is to ―read a story,‖ to 148 ―read‖ a situation told by story, to do story-thinking, to do Chinese philosophy. We now see, in this light, that many who claim to be ―Chinese philosophers‖ are neither Chinese nor philosophers-in-China. They are not Chinese because they do not take stories seriously, but just check on their texts. They are not Chinese philosophers because they do not ponder on stories and their life-significance; they just argue, and leave by the roadside stories and what they point to, their meanings. They are no Chinese for they do not understand stories; they are not philosophers for they do not understand stories but just analyze them or argue without them. Let us be specific. First, they stop at levels (a) and (b)—of plain textual and exegetical 149 or else, they skip (a) and (b) and scrutiny of historical documents on cultural ideas, ―logically parse‖ Chinese statements that pass as ―philosophical‖ in Western analytical, anthropological way. Then, they do three sorts of philosophizing. One, they end up unconsciously imposing their ready-to-hand thinking-mode onto China; Western philosophers do so who claim to be ―cosmopolitan.‖ Two, they blindly tout 150 conventional Western thinking pattern ; as do China-enthusiasts in Asia and the West who 147 Professional historians of ideas excoriated Heidegger to have gone all-wrong in interpreting pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, and medieval thinkers. Heidegger could have retorted that it is they who need to examine their assumptions as they spin out their ―orthodox‖ interpretations, and that Heidegger was simply keen to expose and correct their wrong assumption, although Heidegger on his part should reveal the rationale of his interpretation that looks so idiosyncratic. 148 Cut such inter-involvement of all four levels, and we harvest a disaster. With no [c] or [d], Wing-tsit Chan‘s verbally correct translations, stuck on [a], are as coke de-zinged, and his explications of notions on [b] are as insipid. Waley and the Ames-Rosemont team over-interpret and add/cut too much. Lau and Lin Yutang waver between Chan and Waley, sometimes missing too much, sometimes adding too much. The fact is that Chinese sentences mean with their rhythm and cadence; their sense ties in with their sound-resonance, and so a literal translation mistranslates, and a literary one over-translates. See my ―Sound, Sight, Sense,‖ in History, Thinking, and Literature in Chinese Philosophy, op. cit., pp. 125-174. Heidegger cannot be translated, they say; Tao Te Ching and Analects are less capable. 149 No wonder many ivy-league universities in USA relegate ―Chinese philosophy‖ to departments of cultural anthropology, cultural history, or Asian civilizations—separate from ―philosophy‖ department. Arthur Wright was correct in saying (1959) that China has no philosophy (in the sense of Stanford logical analysis where he dwelt). David S. Nivison in the same tradition agreed. Henry Rosemont, Jr. said (1983) that China has no ethics of an Aristotelian systematic sort. H. G. Creel and Wing-tsit Chan criticized Wright-Nivison and Rosemont, yet none said what ―Chinese philosophy‖ is, not just as convention or thought in China. I reacted to them all in ―中國哲學的共相問題,‖ 哲學論評, 臺大哲學系印行, 八十年一月, pp. 1-23, On Chinese Body Thinking: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 1997, pp. 207-208, On the “Logic” of Togetherness: A Cultural Hermeneutic, same press, 1998, pp. 304, 305, 435. Here I continue my reply. 150 Or they criticize it from Western conventional philosophical perspective. I was heartbroken at the otherwise impressive scholarship in A. C. Graham‘s massive Later Mohist Logic, Ethics and Science, The Chinese
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claim to represent some revolutionary waves of new contemporary Confucianism or Taoism 151 in Asia and in the West. Three, they do both above; some ―Chinese philosophers‖ today— both Chinese and non-Chinese—combine the two. 152 In all these activities, not only do they miss the Chinese forest for the textual trees ; they take the trees as the forest. Worse, they misidentify the Chinese trees as belonging to a forest in the West, which for them is the only ―philosophy‖-forest there is. All this is the result of missing interpretation on all four levels, not just the former critical-exegetical two ((a), (b)) or just the latter expository-hermeneutic two ((c), (d)) in one‘s own way, Western. Of course true exegesis—reading-out—of a text cannot be guaranteed even if we have gone through all four levels of reading, but a lack of one or more of these four levels 153 reading into the text our ideas. Scholarship in and on China and guarantees ―eisegesis,‖ Japan is consistently blind to this trap. This truncated phenomenon is not confined to China. Any undertaking that claims to be a ―conscientious‖ historical scrutiny of the historical texts of any philosopher, Western or not, 154 can easily fall into this interpretive trap. Here there is no mythological -hermeneutic Snake biting its own tail—or if there is, they take the Snake as of only their sort. The result is tragic. To elucidate the above point, we tell two telling examples from the West, one on Wolfson‘s ―reading‖ of Spinoza, another on Black‘s ―defense‖ of Wittgenstein. We cite examples from the West because we usually take its exegetical scholarship to be so carefully, lucidly, objective that it is free of prejudicial assumptions or omission of important matters. Particularly tragic is that both Wolfson and Black are well-known scholars, well-known for their scrupulous objectivity and care. 155 Our first sad story is Wolfson‘s celebrated ―reading‖ of Spinoza‘s thoughts ―behind‖ Ethics. Wolfson prefaced his almost 800 scrupulous pages of commentary on Spinoza‘s
University Press, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1978. He simply ignores Mo Tzu‘s incorrigibly concrete terms and their poetic cadence, and logically parses Mo Tzu‘s rhythmic sayings in a customary Western way. See his ―Chinese Logic‖ in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards, NY: Macmillan and The Free Press, 1967, IV: 523-525. All this ruins the subtleties of ―Chinese logic.‖ 151 Half of articles in Encyclopedia of Chinese Philosophy, ed. Antonio S. Cua (NY: Routledge, 2003) are on levels [a] and [b] alone, and the other half proceed on the assumption that ―philosophy‖ is of Western sort, nothing else. See my review of it in Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, Summer 2003. I am yet to see ―Chinese philosophy‖-essays that criticize my volumes that try to include all four levels of this storyphilosophy of China, to strike out as distinctively Chinese. These ―Chinese philosophers‖ simply take philosophy in China to consist only in the first two levels of [a] and [b], and identify [c] and [d] with Western sort. 152 Bernard J. F. Lonergan stressed how crucial such a forest-missing is (Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (1957), NY: Philosophical Library, 1970). He began his 784 pp. by saying that all clues in the world cannot give us the criminal unless we use ―organizing intelligence that places the full set of clues in a unique explanatory perspective.‖ (Preface) ―Insight‖ here means holistic perception or synthetic judgment. R. G. Collingwood also uses a detective story to say the same point on ―historical reason‖ (The Idea of History, Oxford University Press, 1946, pp. 243, 266-268, 281-282, 320). Such is how organizing perception functions, without which we can look but cannot see, as Jesus said (Matthew 13:14). This is the area of levels [c] and [d] where our unique humanity is manifested, to cooperate with computers that excel in levels [a] and [b]. 153 This word appears in Oxford English Dictionary, V.102. 154 ―Mythological‖ can of course mean ―storytelling‖-sort. 155 Wolfson‘s opinion is so weighty that it is placed as the beginning essay in Grene‘s anthology on Spinoza. See Marjorie Grene, ed., Spinoza: A Collection of Critical Essays, Anchor Books, 1973, pp. 3-24.
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slender volume by announcing what his ―systematic search‖ for its ―basic (and valid)‖ 156 understanding consists of. He said, The first step, the basic step, . . . is the determination by the method of historical criticism of what the philosopher meant by what he said, how he came to say what he said, and why he said it the manner in which he happened to say it. It is this threefold task that we have . . . in the present study of Spinoza. Now, the historico-critical method really means the presupposition that in any text . . . there is a . . . dual authorship—an explicit author (Benedictus), who expresses himself in . . . conventional symbols . . . and an implicit author (Baruch), whose unuttered thoughts furnish . . . the material for grasping the full significance of those symbols . . . (W)e cannot get the full meaning of what Benedictus says unless we know what has passed through the mind of Baruch. . . . (We) construct the arguments (and) the criticism and . . . show how (they) underlie the statements . . . in the Ethics (which thereby) emerges as (having) order and . . . continuity (to) assume meaning. . .
Wolfson‘s purpose in his commentary is to find Baruch-ideas hid ―behind‖ Benedictus of geometrical proofs—by way of textual-historical criticism. Wolfson‘s comments well elucidate the relation between level (a) of Benedictus that level (b) of hidden Baruch supports. Suppose however we ask him why he has to bother doing all that ((d)), and what basis he has for claiming his interpretation to be ―the first step, the basic step‖ and bias-free ((c)). And 157 he would be unable to answer on levels (a) and (b), in which alone his reading operates. The answer must come from levels (c) and (d). Staying at (a) and (b) makes a well-read 158 ignoramus, ―Analects-read, Analects-dumb.‖ This ignorance is what dictatorship wishes to 159 enforce and maintain in the name of pure scholarship. Guthrie‘s words recur: A recent writer has remarked on the powerful impact which has always been made by fresh and immediate contact with the great minds of ancient Greece. More than once it has proved an inspiration to struggles for political freedom, so much so that the authorities of Czarist Russia, unable to suppress classical studies entirely, sought to combat their revolutionary effect by confining them to the harmless channel of the textual exegesis of a few selected authors instead of allowing them the more dangerous outlet of education in ancient political theory.
This description replicates the situation of textual critical studies imposed on the scholars in China during the Ch‘ing Dynasty days.
156 Harry Austryn Wolfson, The Philosophy of Spinoza: Unfolding the Latent Processes of His Reasoning, (two volumes in one), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934, 1983, pp. vii-viii. 157 Wolfson did cite four uses to which his volume can be put. It can be a systematic presentation of the philosophy of Spinoza, a commentary to his Ethics, a companion volume with other standard works of studies of Spinoza, and a study of development of basic problems in the history of philosophy (ibid., pp. viii-ix). But what is it that links his ―fundamental‖ textual-critical studies to those uses? We need consideration on levels [c] and [d] to supply the link. 158 ―論語讀みの論語知らず‖ is a Japanese saying, quite bitter and well-known. 159 W. K. C. Guthrie, The Sophist, Cambridge at the University Press, 1971, p. 1. This point underlies the importance of classical textual studies that refuse to be confined to textual scrutiny alone. The remark of ―a recent writer‖ refers to H. G. Graham‘s ―The Classics in the Soviet Union,‖ Classical World, LIV (1960-61), p. 107.
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In fact, any sensitive conscientious textual ((a)) exposition ((b)) cannot help but bleed interpretation ((c), (d)). Fingarette (in Confucius: The Secular as Sacred) and Richards (in 160 Mencius on the Mind) rise to the sensitive level of (c). That‘s why they are justly famous, strongly indicating the importance of levels (c) and (d). Max Black‘s commentary-labor on Wittgenstein‘s Tractatus considered in our previous section, ―Relativism as Storytelling,‖ shrewdly mixes interpretive critiques with expositions, on level (c). Alas, however, Black missed Wittgenstein‘s rise beyond mere logical analysis, for Black‘s defense of Wittgenstein‘s last declaration, ―throw away the ladder,‖ remains at elucidating the usefulness of the ladder of logic, not the what and the why of the throw161 This is a crucial mistake on level (d) because this is the grand conclusion of the away. whole Tractatus and, in fact, all Wittgenstein‘s writings can be said to turn on this pivot. 162 Black is thus fixated on levels (a) and (b) to miss this pivot, however far Black goes on (c). Or rather, unless gone all the way to (d), going to (c) is just a report of (a) and (b). To miss this pivot, the throw-away of the ladder, misses Wittgenstein; missing (d) misses all (a), (b), and (c). Why, then, did Wittgenstein throw away the ladder? What does the throw-away mean? This questioning pursues ―reading‖ of Wittgenstein on level (d). The answer lies in where he is now, after the throw-away. Where is he? Confucius said (2/17), ―‗Know‘ as ‗know,‘ ‗not know‘ as ‗not know,‘ this is to know.‖ He gives us two sorts of knowing. Know-1 takes known as known, unknown as unknown; know-2 knows about all this. Know-2 that knows know-1 goes beyond know-1, yet know-2 needs know-1 to go beyond it, and know-1 is known as know-1, only thanks to know-2. We need know-1 to realize know-2, and need know-2 to realize that know-1 exists. Throwingaway (know-2) needs a thing (know-1) to throw away; only after throwing-away (know-2) do we know the thing as a thrown-away (know-1). Each needs the other. Socrates goes negatively to warn us (know-2) against pretending to know the not-know (know-1), against ignoring knowing ―not know as not know.‖ This is to warn against ignoring know-2. Lao Tzu goes a positive way to say (know-2), ―Tao tao-able is not Always Tao‖; we must know that only by negating tao-able Tao, can we attain the Always Tao. Then, warning thus, Tao Te Ching expounds (know-1) on tao-able Tao, expounded (know-1) only after disavowing tao-able Tao (know-2), as Wittgenstein climbs the logic-ladder (know-1) before kicking it away (know-2). We now know what Wittgenstein, Confucius, Socrates, and Lao Tzu have all been pointing at. They want us to climb up on the ladder, realize the know-1, to avoid ignoring know-2, and to scrupulously go through know-1, tao-able Tao, in order to throw it away to go beyond to know-2, the Always Tao. The ladder and the know-1 are levels (a) and (b); the throw-away and the know-2 are levels (c) and (d). They all warn us against ignoring know-2 and affirm the importance of levels (c) and (d). On (c) and (d) alone can we understand the importance of Wittgenstein‘s throw-away, not just his ladder. Going this far, we can now say we have ―read‖ Wittgenstein; we would have otherwise fixated on (a) and (b) to miss Wittgenstein. 160 Sadly, Richards and Fingarette did [c]/[d] in Western way, due to their neglect of Chinese [a]/[b]. 161 For Black, the throw-away of logic is itself logical, so the throw-away amounts to just a rung of the ladder. It amounts to Black leaving the throw-away undefended, or else Wittgenstein throwing away no ladder at all. 162 All logical analyses of Wittgenstein without this point are an exercise in futility, going nowhere. They are fixated at the ladder and can neither climb up nor down, much less throw it away.
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―But why do we have to do all this? Any cash value in life to going to (c) and (d)?‖ Asking this question leads us further. Our three devastating stories above on terrorists, the young man, and pollution, boil down to this basic answer, ―We all must grow up.‖ Wittgenstein must climb up on his ladder to throw it away, to go up further. Socrates in the Meno must hermeneutically dig deep into the slave boy‘s recollection, to lead that boy to new truths, for Plato in turn to soar up to the Heaven of the Forms beyond actuality here now. Likewise, Confucius (7/5) must cease to dream of the tradition of the Duke Chou to go beyond, for Neo-Confucians to go further beyond. Chuang Tzu‘s Wheelwright (13/68-74) taught his Lord that the words of the great dead are scum, and this story itself was scum to lead us beyond. The word-trap of Lao Tzu must be used to catch the intention of the rabbit of life, the Always Tao alive in Chuang Tzu‘s free roaming (26/48). 163 Let us put it another way. Wittgenstein must play the game with the conventional grammar. We freely use words as we invent new rules of word-game, to mean new sense. Our free use of words breaks conventional rules, twisting them to the breaking point to hit the point, and yet all of us with Wittgenstein must continue to use old words and old rules to break them to hit the point. As we grow up and climb up, we keep climbing up on the ladder as we keep throwing it away. The ladder is ever with us as we throw it away. Words must be forever with us as we keep discarding them. Words must be forgotten to be useful to go beyond them, and all this while words are with us useful, as forgotten. Without forgetting and discarding words, words are useless, and yet words are useful only while they are with us. Now we can respond to Chuang Tzu‘s call (26/49), ―How can I find one word-forgotten to word with?‖ How? Well, we cannot listen to music unless performed, yet performer who calls our attention to her ―excellence‖ is no performer, for we want music, not her; as she buts 164 in, music vanishes. We cannot read an essay in foreign language unless translated, yet the 165 translator who buts in with her ―excellence‖ is no translator. Performer-translator must vanish (ladder kicked away) to be of use. Their integrity is their not-existing. The finger ((a)/(b)) points to the moon ((c)/(d)) to forget the finger itself, so as to attend to the moon (attending to finger blocks moon), yet we need finger to attend to the moon (we
163 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, tr. G. E. M. Anscombe, Oxford: Blackwell, 1953, etc., 1997, §§7, 81, 83, 182. 164 Many performers today use music to display their excellence, not use their excellence to make music. They don‘t realize that only making music truly displays them; their self-display kills their excellence. Since the loud tends to stand out, loud is a special challenge to music-making, and the soft comes naturally to it. No wonder the display-supreme performers avoid soft ―dull‖ parts of the composition, and they perform the loud so violently as to destroy music. In this regard, Lindsay String Quartet is a marvel in their subtle sensitive blend of loud and soft to bring out Beethoven (Beethoven: The Complete String Quartets, 10 CD-set, Academy Sound and Vision Recording, 1979, Musical Heritage Society, 1997), though they shaped Haydn too much as to ruin him, The Lindsays: Haydn: String Quartets Op. 50, Nos. 1-3, ASV: Musical Heritage Society. Sadly, we hear ―Xin Jiang Ming Ge‖ (BMG Hong Kong, Ltd., 2003), folksongs in the remote Xin Jiang region of China, sing Western music set to Chinese tunes, so Westernized in structure and in singing style. Here is Americanized Chinese musical cuisine, neither Chinese nor American. 165 Performers today display their cutting mechanical accuracy to loudly intrude into the music to erase it. Likewise, Arthur Waley‘s literary excellence tends to get in the way of understanding the original. See complaints he cited in Three Ways of Thoughts in Ancient China, op. cit., pp. vi-vii and Edward G. Seidensticker, tr., Murasaki Shikibu: The Tale of Genji, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000, p. xiv.
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don‘t know where to look without the finger). The finger must be discarded without 166 discarding; it must be there without being there, must be there tacitly. The finger is our ladder to climb up, our trap to catch rabbits, and our words to get what is intended. We must ignore the finger to see the moon, kick the ladder to go beyond, discard the trap to have the rabbits, and forget the words to see the intended. We need them as they disappear, that is, discarded and forgotten. Thus we forget words to word with word-forgetter 167 without word-obstruction. Lao Tzu in self-wiping vanishes with Tao Te Ching, now a 168 finger pointing at the Tao-Moon beyond all, to illuminate all here now. This tacit disappearance of storytelling-(a) in the story-(b), and of the story in its 169 understanding-(c, d), is performative ―silence,‖ twofold. First, story in levels (a)/(b) vanishes into (c)/(d) to support them; expository hermeneutic (c)/(d) is based on critical exegesis of (a)/(b) to understand the story‘s text. Then, critical-exegetical (a)/(b) text-scrutiny needs direction-criterion in (c)/(d). What is a goal of textual scrutiny, what counts as a valid harvest, and when/how is textual research ―achieved‖—these questions lead research in sure steps to guide to a definite goal. Thus (a) and (b) are the invisible basis of (c) and (d), as (c) and (d) are the ineffable guide to (a) and (b). They gather into a storytelling Snake biting its own hermeneutic tail, a tacit ―hermeneutic circle‖ to understand a story, the story of life, a self-recursive hermeneutic to rewrite ―history‖ and provoke ―science‖ into revolution. The process goes on170 as (c) and (d) shift to change ranges of (a), vary vistas of (b), and, conversely, as these changes of (a) and (b) redound to further multifaceted revisions of (c) and (d). Such is story-thinking selfrecursive to press ahead into history. All this inter-involving process is a long story of human history stretching far back into Socrates, Confucius, Lao Tzu, and Chuang Tzu, and beyond. We have told their stories to learn from them, to play with them, to climb up on them, and then throw them away as ―scum‖ to move on forward—with them now reenacted anew, again and again. Reenactment is life‘s exercise in levels (c) and (d) built on them in (a) and (b), to freely engage (a)/(b) based on (c)/(d).
166 Michael Polanyi (1891-1976) who devoted his whole life to elucidating the ―tacit dimension‖ of knowledge may not have realized its intercultural-exegetical significance. 167 John the Baptist said, ―Behold, the Lamb of God!‖ His two disciples then left him to follow Jesus. John was happy, saying, ―He must increase, and I must decrease.‖ Jesus needed John to take off, and then John vanished. (John 1:19-37, 3:26-30) John was human words pointing to the Word of God. Prophets (forth-tellers of God) point to God, while cult leaders point to themselves. This is why John was greater than the greatest of cult leaders. (Matthew 11:11) 168 In The Tale of a Bamboo-Cutter, Taketori Monogatari 竹取物語, Lady Dazzling Night (Kaguya Hime 赫夜姬) goes up to the moon, with her love of this world. The Lady belongs to the moon, beauty beyond here now. The Tale is a ―cruel loveless‖ finger to the moon, love and beauty beyond this-worldly ―they lived happily ever after,‖ to illuminate this world with love. We cannot help but remember human passionate tenderness in the Song of Songs that expresses God‘s extreme love of humanity. Their connection is the conclusive phrase, ―love is as strong as death‖ (8:6); human love dies to revive in God‘s love deathly intense, shown on Jesus‘ cross. No commentary has touched on this crucial point; 8:6 does not appear in William G. Cole, Sex and Love in the Bible, NY: Association Press, 1959. But read the matter-of-fact Marvin H. Pope, Song of Songs, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977, pp. 671-672; I do not know how Pope could contain his feelings on such a matter. 169 Wording is fulfilled in its silence. This point concludes our entire essay on storytelling in story-thinking. 170 This process cannot be a smooth going, a straight ―progress,‖ because of repeated self-recursive revolutions, back and forth, over and over again.
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We have surveyed above on the limits and prospects of research works on levels (a) and 171 (b). We now realize the reason why we must go further up to level (d), as we considered Fingarette and Richards‘ labors on (c) in ―§ Writing China in English‖ above, where we tried to reflect on (α) how the way Westerners tackle Chinese texts differs from the way Chinese people do them, (α) what we all can inter-learn from these differences (logical/analytical vs. literary/historical), and (β) how indispensable such inter-culturalism is for our living now (to be sensible and sensitive to living). I have in my small way been trying to cover all these four levels of reading China‘s ―story-thinking philosophy‖; it is ―cultural hermeneutic.‖ All this is what ―reading‖ a story entails/means. We would have not really read a story, if we stop and confine ourselves anywhere short of all these four levels, ever inter-involving—textual, exegetical, expository, and hermeneutic. This fourfold circular hermeneutics of life-story typifies ―beauty‖ that tacitly, silently, reigns supreme in the lifeworld to lead us beyond us. We see how beauty does so before unifying the music of things and their storytelling in silence to round up our whole meditation on storytelling in story-thinking.
BEAUTY SUPREME Beauty is one of life‘s primal notions indefinable that self-evidently defines everything, including itself. Beauty is profound and pervasive, a specific overall sensibility. We will go straight to what/how beauty does, its universal impact in life, to obliquely see what it is, in two points, (A) beauty co-throws things into their joining, their grand togetherness, and (B) it is a basic dynamics, the vanguard, to promoting the true, the good, and the religious beyond. (A) Beauty the joint: Beauty is often said to be symbolic. ―Symbol‖ is a tri-faceted dynamics. It ―co-throws (sun-ballein)‖ disparate things into one pot, bridges things mutually unrelated, into a unity of all in all. Symbol as verb co-throws things into one another; as a bridge, symbol as co-throwing gathers all things into one; as a product, it is a unity of things co-thrown-in without confusion. Symbol is thus a cosmic gathering, unity of subject-in-object, object-in-subject, actual in real and real in actual, to reign unobtrusively supreme in all. How does co-throwing and joining go? By metaphoring ―as the familiar this, so the unfamiliar that,‖ ―warming up‖ the familiar old to ―know‖ the unfamiliar novel (Confucius 2/11), only to go ―as the unfamiliar that, made
171 Sadly, Wolfson confidently took his levels of Benedictus and Baruch in ―the method of historical criticism‖ as those ―upon which any subjective form of interpretation or any literary form of presentation must rest.‖ (ibid., p. vii) He in his pride was woefully blind to how much involved his own ―subjective‖ assumptions are in his supposedly ―objective‖ textual critical methods. Subjective and objective aspects in interpretive probe make a hermeneutic circle that he missed.
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newly familiar, with which to renovate the old familiar this.‖ Such is the joining modus 172 operandi, the symbolizing dynamics, of performative beauty. (B) Beauty the vanguard of the true, the good, and the religious: Beauty is thus a cosmic symbol-verb that co-throws all things to join without confusion, and the joining reveals 173 ―truth.‖ No wonder later Heidegger had truth as revealment poetizing ; he saw, perhaps unawares, how beauty reveals truth, and perhaps he stressed truth as the process of revealment too much to explicate what it is. We can say for him that truth is dynamic beauty that co-throws things into their unity in their diversity. Such a unity-diversity is negatively revealed by defective falsehood, violence, as desperate hunger after the joint of all in all. Its effect is swift and temporary; it repels us by destroying things. In contrast, beauty-in-action penetrates and attracts us for long, to feed us to grow. Moreover, we all feel in our bones such a lasting impact of beauty-gathered as inevitable-necessary, coming from deep in existence itself. Its necessity is concretely expressed as ―ethical imperative‖; Kant remotely sensed it in 174 the categorical imperative of absolute consistency. We feel the consistency by feeling that we must join ourselves in ourselves with things to pull all things together in harmony—for we feel harmony as happiness that lasts, and happily to gather as many enjoyers are possible is much more enjoyable—beautiful—than being happy alone, as Mill announced without rationale. Beauty-dynamics is thus the base of morality to fulfill it. No less significant is beauty as human dynamics to religion the Beyond. Tillich simply proclaimed that the reason why things must exist, not to be destroyed, is because all things 175 have their Ground of Being in God, and here lies the religious basis of morality. We agree, but we must explain why it is so. We can take religion as our soaring-up to the Beyondhuman, which is more intelligible to us than God as the Ground of Being below existence. We can then see how beauty enables us to soar beyond ourselves, on at least six counts. One, the attraction of beauty lasts long in history beyond all humans living together. Some beauties last only for a day, but that one day is eternal, thanks to their ―beauty.‖ In fact, 176 to live beautifully one day at a time is to live in eternity. Two, we enhance beautyenjoyment by going beyond selfish hoarding; the more people enjoy the beauty of a painting, a sculpture, or a musical performance, the merrier enjoyment we harvest. Three, as we transmute what we desire into beauty, be they sex or jewelry, and as we turn what we dread into beauty, be they snake or war, their beauty goes beyond desire and dread 172 See my On Metaphoring: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 2001, pp. 1-2 and note 5 there. This entire volume is on metaphor as explosive dynamics of togetherness, to explicate On the “Logic” of Togetherness, Leiden: Brill, 1998. 173 Perhaps ―beauty‖ is also an assumptive framework of Chinese thinking. See, e.g., my On Metaphoring, op. cit., pp. 519-566, 方東美集, 唐君毅集, 北京: 群言出版社, 1993, and collections of other notable contemporary thinkers in the same series, 當代新儒學八大家集. 174 This is because consistency is the sine qua non of existence. For anything to exist at all, it must be selfconsistent. Kant should not have abandoned this insight in existence to pursue pure logical consistency, especially when he goes to the Critique of Judgment. 175 Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume Three, University of Chicago Press, 1963, pp. 158-159. 176 Jesus bleeds eternity when he says, ―Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.‖ (Matthew 6:34) ―Today‖ is beyond our pre-planning, and its ―beyond‖-ness bespeaks the weight of eternity. Thus, during the shortest time in Buddhism, a kşaņa 一剎那, 90 or 100 are born and die. Both are and have inspired moments of eternal beauty, as evinced in Zen arts (poetry, paintings) and in William Blake who held ―Eternity in an hour‖ (―Auguries of Innocence‖).
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that vanish in their beauty. Four, anything turned beautiful confronts us as it is beyond practical utility. Five, anything turned beautiful embraces us in its inherent being; we live in it beyond our objective confrontation. Finally, all beauty leads us beyond daily ongoing to 177 provoke self-reflection here now. Thus beauty is the human dynamo that pushes us beyond to religion. In short, beauty in action is the vanguard to revealment of all to promote truth as beautygathered, to moral necessity to promote our cosmic harmony and happiness gathered, and to the religious beyond human limits to promote the joining of this world with the Beyond. Beauty is the way, the life, and the gist of the true, the good, and the religious, to constitute a specific overall cultural pattern, to fulfill our world and ourselves. Let us now take a common concrete example. The vast expanse, ever up above us, we came to call ―sky‖ and ―heaven‖; all humans are so much under the impact of the vast Expanse Above that our expressions about It constitute our respective cultures, yet It threatens to vanish from scientific vocabulary. Its disappearance indicates that It belongs less to objective investigation than to beauty in deep pervasive impression, ever at the base of science and of life. Among the ancient Greeks, the sky was an empty expanse to be filled with Olympian divines, who are projections of human inner turbulences; the sky was the pantheon arena of Greek sky-gods, we humans writ large up there, inter-fighting. This fascinating sky-situation was later transferred into arts (myths, paintings, sculptures, music, dance, etc.), education, morality, and religions, until it so pervaded the entire Greek culture as to alarm Plato into curbing them in the name of ―reason.‖ These Greek gods and goddesses were later renamed and enshrined as Romans‘, and 178 reappeared repeatedly in subsequent literature, arts, astrology, psychological complexes, and heavenly bodies today. What their omnipresence—befitting divinity—in human culture means is anyone‘s guess. The sky was filled from below often with the basest of human sentiments among the Greeks and the Romans. In contrast, the sky was held in awe in China; its unapproachable majesty descended from above to lift the human world up to the moral heights of social and political decency, patterned after heavenly law of loftiness. The sky-human relation was an awesome fatherchildren family, nurtured by Mother Earth; here was a unity of morality and religion in the imperial Imperative, the Heavenly Mandate to set up a dynasty, for the Son of Heaven (ruler) 179 in absolute filial obedience to the fatherly to care for his Heaven-people (ruled), on pain of 180 inexorable dynastic destruction. Heaven pervaded all things decent and praiseworthy, as expressed in great ―heavenly 181 Chuang Tzu was music,‖ great ―heavenly skill,‖ and great ―heavenly accomplishments.‖ 177 I irreverently rifled these six points from Tsai Yüan-p‘ei‘s voluptuous essay, ―On Replacing Religion with Cultivation of Arts‖ Selective Historical Documents from Chinese Aesthetics, Volume Two, Taipei: Kuangmei Publisher, 1984, pp. 804-809. (蔡元培, ―以美育代宗教說,‖ 中國美學史資料選編, 下冊, 中國文史資料編輯委員會, 臺北輔新書局, 總經銷: 光美書局, 民國七十三年, pp. 804-809) 178 Cf. Malcolm Bull, The Mirror of the Gods: How Renaissance Artists Rediscovered the Pagan Gods, Oxford University Press, 2005. 179 This sentiment impressed Huston Smith so much that he put its classical saying in China as a frontispiece in his popular volume, The World‟s Religions, HarperSanFrancisco, 1991. 180 History exhibits this unerring Law of Nature in time, and China is the world‘s most history-conscious culture. 181 Hsün Tzu (17/1ff.) said we must act in heavenly regularity 常, not do-nothing and just rely on Heaven.
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quite serious when he quipped, ―Heaven inside; human outside‖ (17/50), which makes 183 sense in view of the notion of our constitutive ―heaven nature‖ prevalent among people and promoted by Confucian gentry. Now, beauty pervading the good, the socio-political, and the religious makes culture; beauty pervades all things in a specific way of a specific culture. When we began storymeditating on religion vs. religions, we saw how naming something (a ―chair‖) names many things of a specific named sort (―chairs‖). Then, as we story-meditate on beauty, we see how naming something (vast expanse above as ―heaven‖) names a specific culture (Greek, Chinese). Hsün Tzu said (Ch. 22), naming shapes and manifests things in a specific named way, so be careful how we name anything. Mind you, beauty is specific and concrete, as exemplified by ―sky/heaven.‖ We must then leave general description of beauty and come back to storytelling itself that is a part of beauty; here the concrete symbolizes—co-throws—all beauty, as a grain of sand concretizes the whole universe for us to see (Blake). Storytelling is a sand-crystal, a symbol, of all beauty. Hear this atom-poem. ―Often I imagine the earth/ through the eyes of the atoms we‘re 184 made of—/ atoms, peculiar/ atoms everywhere—/ . . . no end,/ soaring together like those.‖ Atoms all over mean I-everywhere. A poem made of all my atoms is a compressed story often cosmic, comprehensive-significant, and, at the same time, as poem it expresses my heart of being. A poem is thus my heartfelt story of the cosmos singing the universe of things. We must then consider universals as the music of things.
UNIVERSALS THE MUSIC OF THINGS Life-story sings with birds the music of things, another life-beauty in daily living, where things remain silent. Thus the music of things is silent in their storytelling. Silence is ultimately the music of life and actuality. Silence, things, and names are the primal storytelling of things, the Music of the Spheres. The universe is silence in and of music, things making their music together, listening to it together, and living it together. This is the ultimate of things, things as music together in their storytelling, sung by our storytelling. Music is related to the names of things. Think of our prejudice. Musician Menuhin said that some tribes ask, ―How does it sound like?‖,185 while we usually ask, ―What does it look like?‖, when we want to know about something. Our knowledge is predominantly visual since
182 That ―heaven 天‖ is ―self-so 自然‖ is a common sense in China; even Chuang Tzu, right after saying, ―heaven is inside,‖ says that ―heaven‖ is ―cattle with four legs.‖ No one, however, shows how ―heaven‖ came to be natural ―self so.‖ Taking ―heaven‖ in the way above, self-so 自然 naturally connects with heaven-so 天然, and then heaven would be everywhere in nature. Thoreau cut ice and said, ―I look down in the quiet parlor of the fishes, pervaded by a softened light as through a window of ground glass, with its bright sanded floor the same as amber twilight sky, . . . Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.‖ (Walden and Resistance to Civil Government: Henry D. Thoreau, Second Edition, ed. William Rossi, NY: W. W. Norton and Co., 1992, p. 188) This sentiment resonates with Chuang Tzu‘s, and is responsible in part for today‘s ecological movement. 183 Does it mean ―heaven-endowed nature,‖ ―heavenly nature,‖ ―our nature as part of heaven,‖ or ―heaven-infused nature‖? Does it matter? 184 Dan Gerber, ―Often I Imagine the Earth,‖ Poetry, March 2010, p. 446. 185 Yehudi Menuhin and Curtis W. Davis, The Music of Man, Toronto: Methuen, 1979, pp. 1-43.
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Plato,186 and knowing exclusively by vision is only part of our whole understanding—as undergoing—of things; so we must mix our objective eyes with our musical ears. ―Kindness‖ is blank until applied to a situation, one at a time, one time in closing the window, another time in opening it. Things are situation-sensitive, each uniquely distinct from all others. As every artist sensitive to things is aware, this beautiful baby, this fresh apple, cannot be known until actually shown. Georgia O‘Keeffe said, ―Nobody sees a flower, really—it is so small—we haven‘t time, and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.‖ 187 Her ―seeing‖ involves more than a casual visual notice, as befriending things involves long years of personal interaction. Now, ―taking time‖ is not distinctive of instant vision but of hearing undergoing. We must listen long to friendship-music to make friends.188 Things overflow with voluptuous differences one from another; each is specific as itself, not the other, beside it. And yet each can mysteriously be named, rounded up, ―recognized‖ as belonging to a group of such-and-such, even the ―unnamed,‖ as ―unidentified flying object.‖ Such nameability of things so charms Plato as to miscue him into proposing ―universals,‖ the ―Really Real‖ Forms and Ideas, which are names timelessly seen (idea means see), in terms of which we grasp ―unreal‖ actual things. His proposal aroused a suspicion of how things so fleeting can be related to such eternal Ideas at all. Thus things remain hard to grasp, not because they are ―unreal‖ as Plato thought but because they are too real for thought, too real to grasp by graspable names or unmovable universals called Forms and Ideas. Actuality simply overflows our ideas, our vision. Still, what Plato noted demands our attention. What sort of commonality does a group of things named ―apples‖ display that differs from, say, the commonality of a group called ―stars‖? What is their difference that so manifests the distinction of each group as to enable its distinct naming, i.e., its unmistakable identification? If the commonality of this group is not its universal ―Form‖ or ―Idea,‖ what is it? It is, Marcel says, the specific music of things. Marcel nudges us to open ears to hear to meet the musical presence of things. The tribes who ask, ―How does it sound like?‖ are profoundly correct after all. He says,189 (I need only) three measures of a . . . melodic sequence . . . before I exclaim, ―That is Fauré,‖ even if (they) are from some work by Fauré that I do not know. Here . . . we are in . . . presence. The genius of Fauré takes form in a recognizable way of being . . . present. Can I rightly say that I have an idea of this genius? . . . (Y)es and no: yes, in that I have a distinct awareness of him . . . to identify him and to greet him as I (do) a beloved face; no, in that I cannot establish the identity of this genius for strangers to whom I wish to transmit a certain content (as) I transmit an idea of a philosopher and his system, or . . . an idea of a theory(,) a scientific hypothesis . . . (I)t is inconceivable that by words I could give an idea of . . . a musical order in its qualitative singularity. I could (give it) only by playing . . . a significant melody— . . . by participating actively in this music—(hoping to) evoke (or . . . release) in the listeners (an) inner movement by which (to) move toward an encounter with what I (want to) have them hear. 186 China has no Plato, however, and its tradition of knowing is an instructive counterbalance to Western visuality. See ―Sound, Sight, Sense,‖ my History, Thinking, and Literature in Chinese Philosophy, op. cit., pp. 125-173. 187 Her moving statement appears in the 1995 US Postal Issue of stamps featuring her ―Red Poppy, 1927.‖ 188 It was the intent listening that made an obscure ferryman Vasudeva an important friend to Siddhartha and saved him by listening to the river. ―Listening‖ is one crucial thread that binds the whole story of Herman Hesse‘s, Siddhartha, NY: Bantam Books, 1971, pp. 104-106, 108f, 114, 117, 120, 127, 132, 133-137, 143, 145. 189 The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel, edited by Schilpp and Hahn, op. cit., p. 273.
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To hear the ―music of a thing‖ is thus to meet its presence. Hearing ―melodic measures of an apple,‖190 the ―music‖ of its flavor and aroma as we undergo it, we meet the ―apple‖presence, and then apply this experience to spot ―apples‖ from non-apples out there, as we would distinguish Haydn‘s genre (e.g., in Mozart and Beethoven) from Wagner‘s. The above last statement has two points. One, this experiential recognition of ―apple‖genre of its musical presence, in the name ―apple,‖ is yet hard to visually convey. The recognition of a thing as of this name results from an audio-encounter with a presence, and this encounter is inexpressible and indefinable by vision.191 Two, this audio-experiential recognition is applicable to wider recognition outside the said specific experience. As this is recognized as an apple, so that is. I do so by referring back to my encounter with the music of this apple, in terms of which I recognize that as also an ―apple.‖ This ―in terms of which‖-process is my ―metaphoring.‖192 This experiential movement back and forth originates naming several things as ―apples.‖ Now we can generalize. A name is a universal in that it is a transversal193 traversing and con-versing, back and forth to thread previous musical encounter into present. Joining Marcel‘s musical encounter with musician Wittgenstein‘s thread of entwined fibers, we can say that all this is to hear a measure, a fiber-note over another of a specific being-music, ―wavicle,‖ crisscrossing back and forth, to and fro, circularly in family resemblances and family differences. Do we remember story-thinking-telling is a hermeneutical circle? Socrates and Euthyphro conversed (Euthyphro 11b-e, 15c) that Euthyphro‘s definition of ―piety‖ goes around in a circle, Daedalus-like. This musical thread of note-fibers not only threads forward but also backward. This is the ―hermeneutic circle‖ in stories, our way of understanding things. The name of a thing expands and ripples out, ―as this is an apple, so is that an apple, and so is that other one.‖ Then, to check on the naming, we just go back to rehearse the audio-experience of the being-music of an apple. Our knowledge of apple-things is a hermeneutic circle. This circle describes what goes on between language and its grammar, each goes into the other and check on the other. All rulers, even dictators, must bow to people ruled as 190 We can understand fresh apple-as-music of flavor and aroma from experiencing bird-as-music, that crisp cut, that clean stop, that silence-chirp. Pastorale music has been popular since the 13th century, and it spills over to ―Pastoral Sonata‖ (Beethoven, Scarlatti), ―Pastoral Symphony‖ (Beethoven, Vaughn Williams), ―Lark Ascending‖ (Vaughn Williams), ―La Mer‖ (Debussy). ―The Last Rose of Summer‖ (Irish folk song, lyric by Thomas Moore). Delius has ―Sea Drift,‖ ―Over the Hills and Far Away,‖ ―Paris: the Song of a Great City,‖ ―In a Summer Garden,‖ ―Summer Night on a River,‖ ―On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring,‖ ―North Country Sketches,‖ ―A Song of the High Hills,‖ ―The Magic Fountain,‖ etc. Clearly, everything is music; composers hear it. 191 My brother is a musician and an engineer at Corning. He said, ―Some of the sound attributes that we hear can be scientifically analyzed and displayed visually. The obvious ones are pitch, timing, duration, loudness, balance of frequencies, etc. By viewing these attributes, one can understand the interpretation better.‖ I replied, ―You propose and practice visual manifestation if not manipulation of music, to enhance audio music appreciation. Visual-investigation does enhance audio appreciation. It is the glory of science. Besides, your science again confirms my view that visuality is at the heart of science today. I'm yet to see scientists use their noses, ears, and fingers to measure things, for "measurement" is visual. Obviously you would not replace hearing appreciation with visual investigation, that is, you would not say that seeing all those wonderful charts and graphs is to hear the musical piece. You say that visually watching charts and graphs helps us understand how one musical style of performance differs from the other, and so on.‖ He agreed. 192 See my On Metaphoring, op. cit., p. 671 (index on ―universals‖). 193 ―Transversal‖ is Calvin O. Schrag‘s coinage (The Resources of Rationality, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992, the last chapter, and see my “Logic” of Togetherness, op. cit., p. 469, index on ―transversal‖). I borrowed it here and expanded on it in my way. I would later replace it with ―inter-versal.‖
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merchants bow to buyers, as the present must learn from the past. Asked about serving spirits and gods, Confucius said, ―Not able to serve people yet, how could you serve spirits?‖ Asked about death, he said, ―Not knowing life yet, how could you know death?‖ (11/12) He intimates the death-life interrelation (化), life birthing death that dies into life. Life is rounds of transmigrating transversals conversing to inter-define (Buddha). It is the circle as an auditory undergoing to understand the music of beings. It is as natural and direct as it is ineffable beyond vision. It is caught, not taught but released by one total bodyencounter and then by one with another, by one person, and then by one person with another, by experiencing and then by inter-experiencing.
MUSIC, POETRY, SYSTEM Now we can connect poetry and system in/via music. I recently ―rediscovered‖ Johann Sebastian Bach. Unlike Beethoven who is beautiful in his wide swings between the absolute 194 soft and the absolute stormy, I never felt as calm and balanced as in Bach‘s piano music, as 195 196 András Schiff, for example, performed it. I wondered why, and I think I got an answer. It is this. Bach infuses poetry into mathematics, the human into the mechanical, and quiet sanity into blind bland regularity, as the Change Classic 易經 does in math-poetry of vicissitudes. It has that steadiness of Oriental music, as reliable as ―day (after) day is a good day 日 日 是 好 日,‖ the rhythmic dripping of each drop of time going into me, going through me. It is thus that Bach‘s patterned spread supports me unobtrusively. Listening to his music thus calms me, bringing me into roomy balance. Thinking is as rhythmical and musical. Perhaps then our passion for and pursuit of a balanced system of a sort springs from such a Bach-like musical sanity, whose being systematic calms, balances, and allows us to dwell in roomy composure. 197 Of course there are systems and there are systems. A system is known to be bad by, Paul Tillich warns, how it imprisons the reader who dwells in it, and takes it as the final 198 answer, moving within itself, in its self-enclosed consistency, self-sealed coherence. It 199 thereby separates itself above the actuality it is supposed to describe. So a bad system can hurt us badly. Tillich was aware of such dangers of a system and told us to ―go beyond it,‖ but he did not tell us how to go, much less what a good system is. We must go our own way, taking ―music‖ as our cue. 194 Claudio Arrau said, ―In the 32 Sonatas Beethoven created a whole cosmos. . . Schnabel, uniquely, was man and artist enough to meet all the demands of this staggering outpouring of genius.‖ (quoted by Max Harrisson, 1991, insert, p. 11, to Beethoven: Piano Sonatas played by Artur Schnabel, EMI, [CHS 7 63765 2], 8 CDs) 195 András Schiff, J. S. Bach: Solo Keyboard Works, Decca 4522792 (12 CDs). 196 So uncanny—music the time-art is timeless, in composition and performance. The Léner String Quartet‘s 19241935 performances of Haydn‘s four Quartets stir our souls to tears today (The Léner String Quartet, Volume 1, NY: Rockport Records, 1999). Their performances are carefully crafted yet so bouncy, natural, elegant, and profound! They calm me and fill me with joy beyond this world! This is true of all historic performers mentioned here. 197 See my further ideas on ―system,‖ Jay Goulding, ed., China-West Interculture: Toward the Philosophy of World Integration: Essays on Wu Kuang-ming‟s Thinking, NY: Global Scholarly Pub., 2008, pp. 298-302. 198 Beware Bush and every dictator who refuse to listen to clamors outside! 199 Paul Tillich, A History of Christian Thought, NY: Harper and Row, 1968, pp. xii-xiii.
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What is the difference between good and bad music? J. S. Bach‘s music in geometrical tidiness is infinitely fresh every time it is listened to; his music sounded so fresh that I could not pass beyond the first CD of Schiff performing it, and Schiff has 12 CDs of it! In contrast, 200 his children‘s music and Salieri‘s, who taught Beethoven and Schubert, are tiresome as can be. Music is known to be inferior by how much it bores its listener. ―Why is J. S. Bach‘s music refreshing?‖ Because it is as natural as it is systematic. Nature is so amazingly systematic as to be amenable to scientific investigation, yet nature is also as spontaneous as children are unpredictable. ―The sun rises everyday in the east but the wind blows as it listeth‖ (Whitehead), actually more unpredictable in its predictability. Every sunrise differs from every other, and generally expected seasonal shift is totally unpredictable, as the snow this year may be more or less, earlier or later, than the last. Nature surprises us precisely because of its systematic reliability; J. S. Bach‘s music seems to pattern itself after nature, and nature-patterning qualifies him as a refreshing master composer. This is what makes for our indwelling trusting ourselves to breathe freely; this is where we can breathe with regularity and snuggle ourselves to come alive as ourselves, respectively. We are at home here as we undergo nature and its music. ―Naturally systematic‖ thus has two features. One, it is predictable, reliable, and so 201 casually supportive, to put me at ease. Two, it is unpredictably spontaneous, and so it is 202 forever fresh, so refreshing as to give me room freely to be myself. Nature is natural; it is reliable and roomy, spontaneous and us-stretching. This refreshing roominess makes us natural, in our grain our nature. This thought brings me to another recent discovery of mine. I suddenly came to smell the rustic crisp air to dwell, 203 enjoy, and taste Robert Frost. My life blossoms in the metronome-regularity of heartbeat, breathing, walking, and conversation. In this rhythm, Frost chants out ―Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,‖ ―The Road Not Taken,‖ ―The Death of the Hired Man,‖ ―Mending Wall,‖ in fact, all his poems of casual surprising mysteries. Such a surprise in daily life is nothing surprising, however; after all, this metronome-monotony is where diaries, journals, and our daily news spring. What is surprising is how Frost exhibits this unsurprising surprise. His unpretentious countryside lines are simple, and subtly rhymed, in sound and in sense. Here sonority is part of the message, sense is part of sound; it is amazing how his unintelligible lines come alive rhymed, in tone that soothes me into understanding as my understanding melts into intoned peace. These lines have depths in rustic ruggedness that deposits me deep at home, at ease. I need not pretend to be someone else than my good old me; I read aloud in my clumsy pace 200 How the stodgy Salieri could have taught Beethoven and Schubert into their exquisite freshness is beyond me. 201 Tillich (ibid.) says that system promotes consistency against contradiction. I say, consistency makes for reliability that supports us and puts us at ease, to be free to contradict what is gone if we want to, and yet consistency can play the devil of choking us to death and/or boring us to death. 202 I suppose this is what Tillich means by ―going beyond‖ the system; ―going beyond‖ can be synonymous with ―do not dwell in it‖ but the latter expression can be misunderstood. For there is indwelling and there is indwelling. I shiver to read him in praise of system as ―consistency,‖ ―the unity in which every statement is under the critical control of every other statement.‖ Isn‘t this precisely a system he warns us against? This is his ―concluding statement‖ in Philosophical Interrogations (1964), eds. Sydney and Beatrice Rome, NY: Harper Torchbooks, 1970, pp. 408-409.. 203 Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays, NY: The Library of America, 1995, his authoritative comprehensive collection. Strangely, now, I find his poems more compelling and pregnant than his prose that I used to admire much, and deeper and more straightly natural than Whitman on whom I used to ponder much.
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and accent. I chant and sing the lines, and they would come with all their faint plain smiles and wrap me all over. Such casual naturalness is the soul of a system, the organic togetherness of things as they are. This is where we live and have our being, coherently, naturally. So, ideally, a system is a poem, music in nature. System nourishes and supports, to guide and invigorate, to point and prosper. That‘s what system should be. System should flow as a river, never to be pushed. So should we. By going through a system, we become ourselves; by composing a system, we build ourselves, unbeknown to ourselves. System is where I truly live without contrivance, for system is music of nature and its poetry, and I am part of nature. Such a flow in nature is a flow in sense, that is, flow in stories. Storytelling is a system of poetry and music that flows to feed and nourish, where we grow into our natural selves. ―All this Platonism of heavenly harmony is well and good. But isn‘t it out of touch with storms and torrents of life, ‗separate from reality‘ as Tillich says?‖ Well, I said Bach calms me and Frost puts me at ease; it means that I was not at all calm and easy before meeting them. It is in the encounter of unease with such a Platonic harmony within this world (Bach, Frost) that such a healing takes place. Remember Frost‘s life was anything but balmy. His 204 poems were born amidst his storms of life. Besides, the very telling of the story of sad ongoing heals. Homer‘s Odyssey tells the hero whose name, Odysseus, is ―hated (όδύζομαι, ώδσζαο)‖ of the gods of our life. He was the chronic sufferer par excellence, and in his telling, the suffering somehow makes sense and makes for healing. Homer‘s sad storytelling is pervaded with therapeutic life-significance. The noble swineherd Eumaios said thoughtfully, ―But we two, sitting here in the shelter, eating and drinking, shall entertain each other remembering and retelling our sad sorrows. For afterwards a man who has suffered much and wandered much has pleasure out of his sorrows.‖ It is in the telling that the miracle of ―pleasure out of suffering sorrows‖ comes into being. ―So he [Odysseus] spoke, and all of them stayed stricken to silence, held in thrall by the story all through the shadowy chambers.‖ The alluring power of storytelling also captured the entire palace in Scheria, as Odysseus finished telling his major adventures to the hospitable king Alkinoōs, the queen Arete, and the beautiful princess Hausikaa. In fact, Scheria is a fabulously beautiful place, constructed out of Alkinoōs‘s quiet withdrawal from Cyclopes‘ bullying. He ―yielded‖ silently and went on to construct a calm land all by itself. Yielding to intrusion is part of nature constantly practiced by animals and plants. Scheria is beautiful naturally, where Odysseus told his story of adventures, naturally, and must have 205 been healed by his storytelling, naturally. Such Nature, both inner and outer, is happily musical, as the music of nature is surprisingly silent, as life is, in all life‘s storms. Now, naturally, calm and silence dwell together. Nature is music in silence. How so?
204 See his ―Chronology‖ in ibid., pp. 929-955, and his life summarized in Ian Ousby, The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English, Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 352. How his disastrous life-storms could have produced such a mysterious haven of nature poetry for our souls is, again, as much beyond me as Salieri producing Schubert. Cf. William H. Pritchard, Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered, Oxford University Press, 1984, among many biographies of Frost. 205 Richmond Lattimore, tr., The Odyssey of Homer, NY: HarperCollins, 1967, I.62 (―harsh with‖ p. 28), XVI.398401 (p. 235), XIII.1 (p. 198). Underlines added.
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SILENCE AS MUSIC Here comes a bombshell of life—―but the very song of (as mountains/ feel and lovers) singing is silence,‖206 imploding to ripple out in tsunamis of silence-music. Silence-tsunamis sway in recurrent waves of our sentences in music, our life in silent music. Silence is music; music is silence ex-pressed. We must explain this incredible fact of nature by noting silence in music, and then silence as music.
A. Silence in Music How could music sound forth soundless silence? Well, we take it for granted that a musical composition has pauses here and there. Pauses are essential in music, punctuating it to shape music into living rhythmic pulsation, the heartbeat of the beauty of life in nature. So we think music is music and pauses are pauses, just to help music go livelier. We may not realize that pauses are mere tips here and there that appear out of the vast iceberg of silence, music. No pauses, no music. Music is the power of silence making whole. Let us go slower. To begin with, music must have pauses, an eighth rest, a half rest, a whole rest; they are dots of silence, essential for music to make music. Pauses insert themselves among sounds to divide into a ―tick‖ and then a ―tock‖ to make a beat of ―tick, tock,‖207 then another beat, and anther, and music is born. Beats are the throbbing heartbeats of music, its life-pulses; beats come about through silence of pauses. Beats gather to organize/compose a metre-flow, ―rhythm,‖ with ―melody‖ and ―harmony‖ as three ingredients of music. Rhythm is the melody of monotone as melody is the rhythmic progress of tunes; it is Franz J. Haydn‘s ―Clock Symphony‖ (No. 101). All music is ―symphony,‖ syn-phōnē, beautiful clockwork of tick-tocks sounding-together. In all, silence penetrates sounds to build up the texture, timber, and trimming of music.208 So, the basic silent pauses turn audible in beats, and felt in rhythm to compose harmony and melodies, to make music. Music breathes in beats and rhythms of silence. Beats are silence at work; waltz and jazz ride on the accompanying beats of basses and drums. Music swings to rhyme with its own specific beats of the rhythm, what is tone-silent. We have thus shown how silence penetrates sounds to make music, to become its pauses, beats, rhythms, and melodies.
B. Silence as Music We have shown silence in music; now we realize music as in silence, to awaken to ―silence as music.‖ We must now tell the story of how silence in this way shows itself to be 206 These are two concluding lines of e. e. cumming‘s ―All Which Isn‘t Singing Is Mere Talking‖ (The Voice That is Great Within Us: American Poetry of the Twentieth century, ed. Hayden Carruth, NY: Bantam Books, 1970, p. 186). 207 Staccato pronounces beats. Here silence separates a note from others to articulate an emphasis 208 I have freely rifled from Stanley Sadie, ed., Norton/Grove Concise Encyclopedia of Music, NY: W. W. Norton and Company, 1988, and Rupert Hughes, compiler, The Music Lovers‟ Encyclopedia (1903) , NY: Random House, 2001.
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music. Silence can penetrate sounds to make them into music because silence is Music, and our music is an echo of silence the primal Music, to whose echo we must listen to return to its origin, silence as music. To realize so, we must return to music and musicians who lead us to nature that sings silence. Silence dwells in rhythm, where the loud silently makes room for the soft that silently makes room for the loud. The loud is thus the silent soft that is the silent loud, both undulating into a melody to swing to another melody for this melody to sing out. In undulation, these melodies sing silence as the sirens of the ocean waves singing with whales that sing in the belly of the vast seas. Whales are sirens singing the world with waves. Waves are moving silence of the seas of life. Some say Sirens are mermaids; some say Sirens sing whale-songs. We are sailors of lifeocean, forever enchanted. Our enchantment is not our doom, however; we are alive to the extent that we are enchanted by nature-whales singing in the ocean of life. Or rather, perhaps ―doom‖ is dissonant ―silence‖ in the music of the ocean of life to give depths to life, as graveyards are part of the pulsating life of temples and churches, season after season. Vaughn Williams captures this seasonal sea-sentiment in ―A Sea Symphony (No. 1).‖209 In all this, the louder the music of whales of life goes, the louder silence sings life. Yehudi Menuhin hugs silence to let stillness wax loud; he soars silence to soar high to tame our inner storms and tune us calm and whole, never letting us go. Fritz Kreisler lets silence go free, and roams to make room for silence with his relaxed violin playing quietude, to relax us. Artur Schnabel sparkles silence in a cascade of pearls of fresh piano-water splashing over us, cleansing us. Pablo Casals‘ cello-silence is a big boom-room to nestle us and nurture us. Andrés Segovia‘s warm vibrant silence shines through his transparent guitar, hugging us in undulating stillness. Dennis Brain‘s ample silence waxes and wanes, naturally heaving in his sincere horn to draw us in, and we begin to dance it unawares. Life parallels silence with ―patience‖ described as ―Bear it a while, and winds calm, waves balmy. Back off a step, and seas so wide, skies so vast. 忍一時, 風平浪靜; 退一步, 海闊天空.‖ Nature of springtime is matched by Taoist indifference. Taoist patient no-do in doing, in wu wei 旡為, extends the day into the night. Do we forget the night during the day? No matter, for forgetting is at home at night to unwind us. Gertrude Stein said, ―It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.‖210 Genius is a simple infant lying there just to be stroked by Mom‘s still tenderness, in genie warmth. Nothing can stop such motherly silence. Silence is in the parents‘ grin as they listen to children insisting and singing, in the teachers‘ smile as they beam to pupils rehearsing their opinions. Parents and teachers nod silently as they attend to their beloved. And that is what these silence-musicians perform, performing silence. Performance with old ―authentic instruments‖ plays the silent ―faded glory‖ of deep stillness. Performing silence is tricky, though. Silence cannot be performed but sound forth music that performs non-sound of silence. In relaxing us, in the loud and the soft, in melodies undulating, making room in rhythm, beats, and pauses, performative silence appears as the iceberg under and around the ocean of 209 Sir Adrian Boult has done it in CD1, in EMI Vaughn Williams: The Complete Symphonies, 8-CD set. 210 Gertrude Stein, Everybody‟s Autobiography, 1937, Ch. 2, quoted in The Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations, Oxford University Press, 1991, p. 207.
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music we swim in. Eighth pauses and half pauses are tips of the whole rest that supports all pauses that, in turn, support and enliven music. If silence is an iceberg at the base of music, music is a tip of its silence-iceberg for us to climb up, calm down, come home to unwind. In this way silence sings the world whole, and its music faintly echoes its slow swinging cadence. In short, music sings silence that never ceases to make its own music to sing the world. Silence can be noisy to signify nothing, and can be musical to signify everything, and both signify life that is a tapestry of the two sorts of silence. All this is the story of the world singing silence. We have just let silence tell its own story of the world singing silence. If life is music, then music is the life of silence as silence is the music of life. Religion comes to remind us to come home to silence, to let it pervade life. Significantly, graveyards attend temples and churches, and we regularly visit our beloved‘s graves to pay respect to them, thereby to rejuvenate ourselves. Deathly silence is the vigor of life. Zen Buddhists call such silenceliving ―meditation,‖ to which they devote their whole lives; Christians call it ―prayer,‖ to urge us to live a prayerful life. Life is thus the silent Music of the Spheres. Silence is our realizing that things always overflow the self, that things are its quiet milieu where the self can do nothing but tell of the milieu that nestles, that the telling performs the music of stories in which the self moves and has its being. Silence, music, and storytelling, these three abide, and the greatest of these is silence, pulsating in both, enlivening both in life.211 Traditionally going together, music and story reenact, present, and actualize silence. In all this, the secret of our growth is. Let us now come back again to music and musicians, to let them lead us to nature singing stillness. Measured Bach is loud in serenity. All musicians serve silence, as John Cage does explicitly, as Mozart does in melodic pulses, Beethoven in violence and tenderness alternating, and Schoenberg in rhythmical dissonance. We usually note silence by saying that the performer ―takes time,‖ ―phrases it well,‖ or ―leans on the soft.‖ Phrasing is silence pulsating, appearing in a performance that ―takes time,‖ not going slow,212 ―leaning on the soft‖ to sing silence. The performer thus spontaneously expresses throbbing stillness in melody alive, bouncing prim, rhythm-breathing in undulating cadence.213 The music now excites people, drawing tears, as their life prances, as they lustily sing this music of life, in winter or spring. To perform music is to dance it out with the musical instruments of words and ideas (literature and storytelling), as well as by singing-in-living called ―history.‖ ―But music is sound, how could it be silence?‖ the question persists. Well, silence can be in sounds, where silence is silent to bleed silence, as in idle endless chatters. Dr. Sacks told a story of a Mr. Thompson‘s unbroken tale-telling to make up for his loss of inner memory and 211 This story of silence in life, music, and nature rhymes with The Annals of Spring and Autumn of Mr. Lü (241 BC) (呂氏春秋, 仲夏紀第五, 季夏紀第六, 臺北:三民書局, 1995, I.197-295). It unifies music, nature, life, and politics; silence is silently there. Cf. also History Records, Shih Chi 史記, 卷二十四, 樂書第二, op. cit., II.144-207. Sadie (op. cit., p. 150) notes that China is aware of the cosmic power of music and so its government regulates and controls music. Sadie does not see that the reverse is also true, that music is everywhere revered to regulate governance under Heaven. 212 Schnabel goes faster than Annie Fischer or Walter Gieseking in the first movement of Beethoven‘s ―Moonlight Sonata,‖ and Schnabel is more serene, silent, than either. Kreisler also goes fast to shape, as does Menuhin to make room for ―slow.‖ Their speed sings silence to pulsate music. 213 I used to notice Schnabel‘s missed notes; they are now nowhere. His Beethoven Sonatas come alive so spontaneously in all their taking of time, natural phrasing, and leaning on silence. Everything is now sinuously alive, sparklingly warm and roomy.
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history. Sadly, his fictive sense keeps failing to bridge the abyss of senselessness beneath him, and his verbosity has a final touch of deep indifference, for ―nothing really matters any more.‖214 Here indifference joins silence, unbearable, nowhere-to-turn.215 Dr. Sacks seems not to have realized that we are all Messrs. Thompson. The only difference is that Mr. Thompson knows his senselessness while we do not. After all, our stories of the past history may well be as fictive as Mr. Thompson‘s, all indifferent sound and fury. Are we then worse off than Mr. Thompson? Shakespeare told the story of Macbeth who ruined his life by murdering his lord who loved him. Toward the end of his life, Macbeth had to mumble an epitaph to himself, that all life is ―sound and fury, signifying nothing,‖ that is, silence that settles nowhere. Did Shakespeare tell us that we are all Macbeths leading a senseless life,216 except that Macbeth knows that he does while we do not know so? Do we cut a more tragic figure than Macbeth does, for he knows he is an idiot and we don‘t, so we are more idiotic than he? Shakespeare was silent here; he simply kept telling us the story of Macbeth‘s sad senseless life.217 Shakespeare gives us the sound of music signifying nothing, and his sense remains silent, pregnant. Our words should be so likewise; ―Saying is not blowing breath; it says something. But what it says is never fixed. Do we really say something? Or have we really never said anything? If you think it differs from fledglings‘ twitter, do they really differ, or do they not?‖218 These hesitations of Chuang Tzu‘s betoken silence. They tell without telling; they forget words in silence that tells. Silence can be soundless or sounding. The soundless can be charged quiet or dead silent. The sounding can also be noisy or quiet. It is quietude that makes silence alive, in stillness where sounds and soundlessness join. Here fledgling birds and our hesitation join—in silence. If sounds of life are silence, music that echoes life is not sound, either, but sound-silent. Music silently ex-presses life as birds do, and sound-describes it as they do not. ―It‘s quiet when birdies 鳥 sing 鳴,219 isn‘t it, Dad?‖ my son Mark whispered. Birds don‘t noisily describe; they sing silence. Chuang Tzu (2/73-79, etc.) captures the singing silence, deepened in the dialogues of chitchatting birdies with a tall silent tree. Are the dialogues silence or sound? They are both, silently joined. So birds do sound-describe silence, after all. So is music; Bach‘s sonorous beauty in Menuhin turns hushed beauty of silence in Pinnock with period instruments.220 The whole music here is not sound; it sings silence for 214 Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, NY: The Summit Press, 1970, pp. 107-108. See my History, Thinking, and Literature in Chinese Philosophy, op. cit., pp. 13-14, et passim. 215 This is my best though clumsy rendering of an incomparable Japanese phrase, ―yarusenai,‖ having nowhere to put [my heart]. Jesus also said, ―Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.‖ (Matthew 8:20=Luke 9:57) What an unbearable loneliness! 216 George Bush conducted war against Saddam who has no ―weapons of mass destruction‖—against the world opinion. Bush killed masses of people with Bush‘s own weapons of mass destruction. Now American soldiers and other non-combatants are constantly being killed with countless Iraqi people. Bush‘s war against terrorism is worsening terrorism worldwide. Bush is yet to announce how he is as tragically silly as Macbeth, and worse. Macbeth mumbled he was silly; Bush does not. But are we who elected and followed him (though some of us kicked and screamed) too far behind him? 217 Shakespeare may after all be telling us all this in Macbeth‘s ―Life‘s but a walking shadow,‖ for Macbeth did not say ―my life is a shadow.‖ People certainly quote this line in this general sense. 218 Chuang Tzu 2/23-24. This is A. C. Graham‘s translation, modified. 219 ―Birds‖ (鳥) and ―sing‖ (鳴) write alike; Chinese characters are often paired as they are captured here. 220 Listen to exquisite Bach by Yehudi Menuhin, ―J. S. Bach: Orchestral Suites, etc.,‖ (EMI, 7 CD set, 2001), and Trevor Pinnock, ―Bach: The Harpsicord Concertos‖ (DG, 3CD set, 1981).
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what is there around to emerge softly. This is also why Bach‘s ―Well-Tempered Clavier‖ goes well with birds singing, for both are sound-silent.
C. The World and Nature as Silent Music People now dance with ancient Chinese poets, chanting, ―Poetry is where intention arrives. The heart intends; worded, it is poem. Feelings well up inside into words. Wording is not enough, so we sigh; sighing is not enough, so we chant, sing. Chanting, singing is not enough, so our hands dance and feet stamp unawares. Feelings issue in voices, voices interweave into music, to govern people into world concord.‖221 Silence sings to dance to the music of nature, as we perform life in the world. One who hears no music thinks the dancers mad, strutting, fretting, signifying nothing. They don‘t hear the music in nature-silence to which the dancers respond. No wonder, Chuang Tzu has stories of ―mad people‖ as sages/saints whose virtues, the power of their beings, tarries with tarry-ofbeings 德充符. Confucius met them. All this is in Chuang Tzu, Chapter Five. Deformed people are saints confronting Confucius the supposed Sage, to show him what true saintliness is. Our ―young man‖ in pain, ―Mr. Thompson‖ in vacuum, and ―Macbeth‖ in sound and fury are here. Even here is music, in deformity of actuality, in silence intoning. Silence pervades Beethoven‘s ―Moonlight Sonata.‖222 Calmly presented in the first movement, moon-silence pulses all agitation of the rest. That first movement tries the performer‘s mettle, as Jascha Heifetz confessed to balking at Mozart‘s ―easy‖ violin concerti; they are simply too abandoned to craft. Contrivance on Mozart‘s music and Beethoven‘s ―Moonlight‖ is out of the question; they have nothing to contrive for.223 Sadly, performers today would love to skip ―easy‖ spots for others of dazzling technical display. They show themselves off in clattery performance, off musical silence. Cut silence, and the music is pesky noises of steely mechanical performers.224 Musicians missing silence murder music. Played in silence, the music comes ―alive and kicking,‖ ever fresh as children prancing and singing, for nothing, for life.
221 This is the celebrated Preface to the Classic of Poetry 詩序 in ancient China (my translation). Cf. ―詩言志辨‖ in 朱自清古典文學專集(上), 臺北市宏業書局，民72, pp. 183-355. 聞一多全集，步漢湖北人民出版社, 2004, Volumes 3 and 4 are particularly detailed on 詩經. 222 Beethoven, Piano Sonata, No. 14, Op. 27, No. 2. I have failed so far to find it more delicately performed than by Schnabel, Beethoven: The Complete Piano Sonatas: Artur Schnabel, Piano, 1932-35, EMI, 1991 (8 CD Set). Walter Gieseking‘s tasteful performances (slightly stiff) of Beethoven: Piano Sonatas (1995), EMI, 1995, have the ―‗Moonlight‘ Sonata‖; its third movement is dreadfully pounded. 223 For similar reasons, Mozart‘s quartets are hard to play well. The historic Léner Quartet was beautiful, elegant, warm, and profound on Haydn and Dvorak, but not as well on Mozart (The Léner String Quartet, Volumes 1, 4, 5, NY: Rockport Records, 1999, 2000). Somehow Griller Quartet and Grumiaux-with-others did Mozart marvelously (The Griller Quartet Play Mozart and Haydn [1946, 1947], Dutton, 2000; Mozart String Quintets [1973; 3 CD-set], Philips, 1991, and Mozart: Complete String Trios and Duos [1967-1990; 2 CD-set], Philips, 1996). 224 A living outstanding exception is ―The Angeles String Quartet‖ led by Kathleen Lenski. Their superb Haydn: The Complete String Quartets (21 CD Set; Philips, 1994-1999) combine sensitivity with accuracy to present exquisite slow adagios juxtaposed with mellow prestos, and they are never brutal, even booming. The result is bouncy roomy rhythms all over to nestle the listeners. Haydn comes alive silently.
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Fritz Kreisler (1875-1962) has three wonders. He is (a) devilishly accurate, (b) casually relaxed to make us relax, and (c) soars warmly above poor recordings of his day.225 He kept telling young violinists not to practice; he must have meant, ―Be yourself to spontaneously dwell in relaxed silence.‖ Weissenberg said226 that the pianists sound studied who apply their own work, knowledge and capacity to the instrument, but those always sound vital who extract all its possibilities, because music is brought to life.227 Spontaneity is here to charm us, as Kreisler did who was quite serious about recording; he had 13 takes on a small piece of his composition. He was serious about extracting spontaneously all possibilities of his instrument without seriousness.228 How could seriousness join spontaneity? Going back to Nature, we can indeed be seriously spontaneous and spontaneously serious. We can, perhaps because Nature is natural where things inter-involve, where ―spontaneous‖ is natural, and where to be ―serious‖ is our nature. No wonder Kreisler said he derived inspiration and strength from Nature; ―Let him (young violinist Michael Tree of the Guarineri Quartet) know Nature, let him go to Nature, to learn that the most wonderful song in the world is the song of the forest!‖ Forest songs swoosh through us in silence. Applebaum said that Kreisler found serious replenishment in a few hours in the woods. He did not turn to his fine old books, his paintings, and not even his violin, to recoup calm after stress. It was in silent Nature that Kreisler reclaimed his strength.229 He dwelt in lively silence of nature to quietly put us at ease, as simply as Haydn‘s innocent symphonies do us. By the same token, Yehudi Menuhin (1916-1998) hugs silence with his rich-timbered violin. The warmer and higher his violin soars, the deeper ―tender silence‖ pervades the melody. ―Silence as music‖ incarnates in these musicians. Similarly, Pablo Casals (18761973) has four marvels. Silence enables him to be (a) vast, (b) slow, to (c) keep up his integral thrust all the way, and (d) marvelously unify these three features into music, alive and moving to compel us.
225 Listen to Fritz Kreisler: The Complete RCA Recordings (11 CD Set), NY: BMG Music, 1995, and Fritz Kreisler: Radio Interview (WQXR) on Kreisler‟s 80th Birthday (with Abram Chasin), where he said, ―Simplicity cannot be learned,‖ just infected, and is synonymous with silence. (By simplicity he perhaps meant simple silence to dwell in, wherever it occurs. In fact, Kreisler towered less in today‘s ―restored‖ versions that are less simple.) A dramatic example is a CD, Horowitz at Home (Deutsche Grammophon, D 125211, 1989), where Horowitz plays Mozart (Sonata, K 281, etc.) least well, then Schubert (Moment musical D 780, no. 3) better, and finally Liszt (Ständchen, etc.) best. Why? All those compositions are technically no problem for Horowitz. The reason must be that ―simplicity‖ is most evident in Mozart, less in Schubert, and least in Liszt. Mozart is most difficult precisely because he is the simplest; there is nothing to hang on to, no room to display oneself. Ingrid Haebler in contrast is young lass, prancing Mozart briskly, in her Mozart: Complete Works for Piano (10-CD set) and Mozart: Complete Piano Concertos (10-CD set), both issued by Philips. Both sets are my treasures. 226 I summed Alexis Weissenberg‘s words in Insert to Rachmaninoff Preludes: Complete (RCA, 1970, 1990, p. 4). 227 I would forget myself-tensed and come alive as I write, absorbed in things exciting as I am here now. I-theinstrument is not studied; it releases all its possibilities here. 228 All descriptions of Kreisler apply to Georg Kulenkampff, this century‘s most underrated if not neglected violinist. He is irresistible, adding his lusty singing riches to his depths of sonority in Beethoven and Dvorak. He impishly hops and jumps on ―casual throwaway‖ pieces, turning them into sparkling gems. Kulenkampff is as bouncy rich, meaty and alive, as Kreisler is softly abandoned. Kulenkampff is hard to describe because he died young (at 50), praised by Hitler, and his few recordings are collectors‘ items. Not many musicologists talk about him. I‘m so sad. 229 Samuel and Sada Applebaum, The Way They Play, Volume 1, Neptune City, NJ: Paganiniana, 1972, p. 99. This point joins with our later point about Nature and music.
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Casals thus made the cello a major respectable instrument in its own right (not just as a casual accompanying instrument). Dennis Brain (1921-1957) made the horn a major instrument as Andrés Segovia (1893-1987) did the guitar; both shared Casals‘ four features of active silence, vast, relaxed, and compelling.230 In fact, it may not be too much to claim this: All performers worth their salt must thus be embraced by silence,231 for silence is music as true music expresses silence, and both tell stories of life in the world in hushed pulses, in melodies of reticent rhythms. Living silence keeps music and storytelling intimately joined to sing the world pulsing through history. I was soaked in loud orchestral jumble while excitedly talked with a gaunt Arab-Egyptian young musician—I had to pile exotic adjectives because I do not know who he was. I even forget what we talked; I only remember we shouted over the music on how we are alike and different. We laughed and hugged. A middle-aged lady was singing soothing tunes with a tinlike small instrument, walking by. And I awoke. I was so full and happy. An Encyclopedia of World Music232 was I. I am now filled with this world-story. I am the lifeworld. The whole world is here now so loud a silence. This silence sings its music so loud telling its story. This world story is now a music resounding throughout me and my world. I and my world is vibrating in sync, in cosmic health. I am the story that sings the music of the world.
230 Casals performed (1936-1939) Bach‟s Six Cello Suites that he discovered (EMI 2003). Andrés Segovia did (1952-1962) Bach‘s various Suites that he transcribed (Deutsche Grammophon, 4 CD Set, CD4). Brain did (1954-1955) Mozart‟s Horn Concertos Nos. 1-4 and Quintet, K. 452 (EMI 1997), and Richard Straus‟s and Paul Hindemith‟s Horn Concertos (EMI 1986). All these are stunning masterly performances. 231 E.g., Artur Schnabel (1882-1951) owes his vast, lively, and vigorous rendering of Bach (Bach, EMI, 1999), Brahms (Bach and Brahms, 1935, 1936, Pearl), and Beethoven (Beethoven Piano Concertos, Pearl, 3 CD Set, 1993) to calm immense silence pervading all over. His performances of Mozart and Schubert are strangely stunted/stodgy; no silence is there. Jascha Heifetz (1001-1987) relies unsteadily on silence he is suspected of using to manipulate the listener. He schemes so much that the listener cannot breathe. By the way, individual performers were mentioned, not orchestras or conductors because it is harder to talk about many musicians making music together, although what is said here about singular musicians holds for orchestral playing. 232 Cf. the multivolume Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, London: Routledge, 1999, etc.
CONCLUSION MUSIC AND STORYTELLING We must now consider what musical storytelling should be and how it should proceed, and how much silent music storytelling must perform on life that swings freely as wind. Silence, music, and storytelling-hearing, they naturally join as the life of nature. When in silence we hear music, dwelling in music we hear stories, and hearing stories we are fulfilled, living out our lives integrally, melodiously, meaningfully,1 and happily as the world comes alive in our living. In all this, with silence as basis, background, and atmosphere, music and storytelling come unified naturally, silently alive. Nothing is deader than dull silence going nowhere, while nothing spreads like wordlessness alive and meaningful. Its rhythm spreads the heaven and earth that echoes to 2 3 make sense. We call it ―music.‖ Music is wordless story as story is worded music—ideally ; both music and story are sensed silence, an art evolving timely and in time, an art that echoes everywhere that responds. This is how the music in story and the story in music grow inside 4 and out, develop and spread. 5 The being-power naturally be-ings; it is ―virtue that stands itself 立德,‖ ―birthing, unceasing 生生不息‖ in waves of primal vibration as ―wavicles,‖ particles in waves, beings 6 ―breathing ch‘i 氣,‖ the exhaling, inhaling ―breath flooding 浩然之氣‖ Heaven and Earth. Breathing is life rhythmic, as weather is literally seasonal ―breaths of the Heavens 天氣.‖ Nature is thus alive. Such nature-rhythm of being, the virtue-power of being, cannot help but spread, to ―stand achieved 立功.‖ Watching all this, existence coming about in rhythmic vibration of being, in nature and in society, we cannot help but jump in to chime in with its being-music, written to convey our excitement, and notable ―words‖ come to ―stand 立言‖ out for rehearsal and reenactment in 1 I pondered on ―meaning‖ at this primordial life-level, toward the end of Butterfly, op. cit., pp. 364-373. 2 Painting is music in colors, drama is music in words and action, and both are poetry, worded music, in rhythmic cadence, verbal or not. 3 When misfired, music goes nowhere, and the story stays senseless, bogged down ―nowhere.‖ This is why music is an art, not to be taken lightly. Likewise is storytelling. All this is story-thinking eyond logic. 4 Intuitively Aristotle caught it and called the essence of art ―mímēsis, imitation‖; it is yet a rather clumsy designation loaded with extraneous and irrelevant connotations, zestfully drawn out by admiring commentators later. 5 Both ―virtue‖ and ―te 德‖ mean the manhood of a man, the existence-power of the human as such. 6 Oxford English Dictionary (1991) cites ―chhi [ch‘i]‖ in the entry of ―wavicle‖ (XX: 8). The quotations there are worth pondering.
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history to result in world concord. ―Government by music‖ came to be a common notion in 7 China throughout its history. These Three Incorruptibles 三不朽—virtued, achieved, worded 立德, 立功, 立言—in 8 China express nature in us and around us, celebrated since ancient days; it is the story-music of the entire culture resounding through its history. The celebration is no less than about the being-power rhythmically growing intoning from inside out, from the Virtue 德 of the individuals vibrating to echo the Tao 道 of the society and Nature, as ―government by 9 music‖ everywhere every-when. Chuang Tzu jumps up into this nature-music of heaven, earth, and humans, one in three, three in one. He overhears all this strain of Nature, the heavenly piping, continually naturing 10 as earthly piping in wind blowing, in birds chirping. We humans echo in the music of our 11 beings and intone earthly piping, and nature sounds forth human piping. Lao Tzu would have said that heavenly piping is Tao 道 in action, earthly piping is what is as it is, the Self-so 自然, and human piping is Te 德, our human being-power of virtue. ―People pattern after Earth, Earth patterns after Heaven, Heaven patterns after Tao, Tao patterns after Self-So,‖ poetizes Lao Tzu (25). ―Rhythm‖ is at the center here flowing out continuously, with patterns to compose a ―river‖; we are the river of beings. Confucius sighed there at its continuous flow, and Mencius after Confucius, flowing from him, saw the riverflow bubbling the Spring of the Being-River to make the sage. Likewise, Lao Tzu took Tao to be as water, and Chuang Tzu wrote a whole chapter on 12 the flooding river spreading out to converge back into a single river of its story, ―rhetoric,‖ word-flow in being-flow, not as ―art of persuasion‖ word-trick, but as integral word-music. ―Music‖ is enjoyable; ―enjoyment‖ musical is natural inter-flow of senses in the homograph, ―樂‖ as music and enjoyment. 7 See, e.g., the famous Preface to the Shih Ching 詩序, and a very good ―On Music‖ 樂論篇, Hsün Tzu 荀子 (Burton Watson translated it well in Hsün Tzu: Basic Writings, NY: Columbia University Press, 1963, pp. 112-120. Ssu-ma Ch‘ien‘s (145-90 BC) History Records (史記 Shih Chi), has in Volume 24 ―On Music‖ (樂紀 Yüeh Chi). Liu Hsieh‘s 劉勰 (465-520) Literary Mind, Carving Dragons (文心雕龍 Wen-hsin Tiaolung) has Chapters 7 (music in poetry, 樂府 Yüeh Fu) and 48 (musical understanding, 知音 Chih Yin). 8 See Ch‟un-ch‟iu Tso Chuan, Duke Hsiang, 24th year 春秋左傳, 襄公二十四年, summed up in Wing-tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, Princeton University Press, 1963, p. 13, but its gist and thrust is flattened. 9 Lin Yutang has delightfully commented on this notion somewhere, but I have lost its reference. Actually this is a popular common sense throughout Chinese history. See, among others, Ssu-ma Ch‘ien‘s, Shih Chi (史記, 臺北: 建宏出版社, 1995, 卷二十四, 樂書第二, 一段, II.146-147, et passim) and the long ―仲夏紀第五‖ in 呂氏春秋 (The Spring and Autumn Annals of Mr. Lü), 臺北: 三民書局, 1995, I.195-243. 10 Chuang Tzu (2/3-9) overheard ―music‖ in the howling wind. Lang Elliott‘s beautiful Music of the Birds: A Celebration of Bird Song, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999, makes us think. The title is so naturally attractive, and yet do birds make ―music‖ as we do? Yes and No, we answer, and our excited puzzlement is compounded by having word-music, poetry, accompany bird-―music‖ in the book. Earthly piping sings in this ambiguity of the ―music‖ of the birds. Likewise, listening to Elliott‘s CD, ―Songbird Portraits,‖ Ithaca, NY: NatureSound Studio, 1999, calms, cools, soothes, and puts us at home, as listening to human music does us— and in fact, human music is mere faint echoes of the birds‘ real ―music.‖ Listening to birds‘ music evokes birds‘ petit elegant shapes, and gazing at their colorful shapes (even pure black is so fresh, alive, and glistening) enables us to hear their invincible twitters, chirps, and honks that put us at ease, at home in nature. In birds‘ music, the birds‘ shapes and sounds are one, and one with human music of human shapes and sounds. 11 See my meditations on what the multifarious ―piping‖ means, sounding out of the hollows, in my Butterfly, op. cit., pp. 495 (index on ―earthly piping‖), 497 (index on ―heavenly piping‖), 498 (index on ―human piping‖), and 503 (index on ―piping‖). 12 Analects 9/17, Mencius 4A18, Tao Te Ching 8, 78, and Chuang Tzu, Chapter 17.
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Confucius (6/23) chanted, ―The humane enjoy 樂 hills; the wise enjoy 樂 water‖; the humane and the wise enjoy nature. Water forms a steady river as hill is steady, flowing in 13 time as the river. Impressed with this existence-river, Hesse concludes his story of Siddhartha with a story of a stone that is a ―river‖ flowing to be soil, to become plants and animals, praised by Siddhartha‘s story of this stone-river. Happy 樂 are those who rejoice 樂, singing with the flowing music 樂 of the hill and the steady music 樂 of water. ―Nature‖ the ―self-so‖ (自然) is a being-homograph alive in 14 humans and in nature. We grow from listening to music to live well, to living well to listen 15 to music, happily homographic with hills and rivers, with heaven and earth, thanks to symphonic being-music, rhythm-flowing self-so in things everywhere. Let us retrace ourselves. Socrates‘ knowledge of ignorance says that ignorance may be worthless but to realize my ignorance is not, for my realization turns my ignorance into powerful self-knowledge, as Pascal‘s ―thinking reed‖ is no longer a simple bruised reed. Likewise with Mr. Thompson‘s sad indifference and Macbeth‘s sad mumble, or rather, our learning from them, for although their sad situations are sad, to realize so is infinitely worthwhile, for they are wiser knowing so than we are who do not. They say we try to ―find a needle in a haystack‖; here the very haystack of life we find is the needle we want. Here Chuang Tzu‘s scum of the ancients‘ words, such as Socrates‘, turn precious, their footprints on the sands of time stay, stay as erased. Here is the music of the music of ancients, and the music of music is no longer music but silence. Here is no sound, no silence; here is music ineffable. We forget words to word with word-forgetter, making silent music together. Those hear 16 no music think us mad, as the happy pals, Han Shan and Shih Te 寒山拾得, were thought mad. No wonder, Chuang Tzu (Chapter Five) pointed to ―mad people‖ as saints whose ―virtue fills their tarries 德充符‖ their lives; sage Confucius met them. Macbeth, Mr. Thompson, and that beloved young man of depression are all here. Thus we have just sounded and heard the music-stories of mad happy sages. Is all this ―silence‖? Music is wordless eloquence in nature and among humans—in resonance with the rhythm of ―wavicles‖ of existence, primal particles as cosmic waves, and who would prevent us from listening to these waves as the Music of the Spheres, Heavenly Piping? Music is all things speechlessly storytelling, silently flowing, alive. We tell its story as we listen to it, to the waves of the river of beings as Heraclitus, Confucius, and Siddhartha did, to come alive ourselves, flowing without ceasing in gales of silence. Here are speechless rhythms of wisdom of life pulsating in the skies and the fields, storyresonating throughout the broad clouds, vast mountains, deep valleys, boundless oceans, and endless rippling rivers. Our storytelling of Human Piping is its mumbling echo, rumbling rivulets here and there, and at their utmost they are pregnant silence as we mature in silence. 13 Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (NY: Bantam Books, 1971), pp. 144-146. 14 Both Confucius (Analects 8/8, 9/15, 11/1, 13/3, and 16/5) and Plato (Republic 398c-400c) saw the educative power of music to tune/tone/shape human character. Cf. 蔣義斌‘s instructive essays, ―<樂記>的禮樂合論,‖ (東方宗教研究, 1991-10) and ―朱熹的樂論‖ (中央研究院, 1993年五月). Piero Weiss and Richard Taruskin, eds., Music in the Western World: a History in documents, NY: Macmillan, 1984, pp. 6-10. 15 See my happy meditations on how living relates to music in Butterfly, op. cit., p. 186. 16 Both were legendary; they were happy good friends, quite poverty-stricken, during the T‘ang Dynasty. Both lived in a T‘ien-t‘ai temple 天臺寺, and were believed to be the incarnations of Bodhisattva Manjusri 文珠菩薩, the ―god‖ of wisdom.
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Remember the growing baby, who sleeps all the time to coo, cry, and smile ceaselessly for no reason; ―for no reason‖ is silence. The story of Tao is silent music, birthing, growing unceasing, wordlessly. Chuang Tzu quietly forgets himself, letting go of things naturally. Heavenly let-go (天放), people in the Realm of Ultimate Virtues wiggle as insects to inter-help and don‘t know human inter-giving, solid and don‘t know human loyalty, moving as deer and ―(people) above‖ are just tree branches.17 All my words so far undulate, swing, and twirl to present silent music; these words are waves hushed, musical. There is naturalism and there is naturalism. Naturalism of Emerson and Thoreau is vocal, vigorous, and masculine, with no mysterious nature-metaphysics of Lao Tzu, no calm selfforgetting in nature of Chuang Tzu. In short, the West‘s nature is human and contrived, while China‘s is nature pure and simple. The West is vociferous and clever; China sings quiet with birds chirping. The Cogito is Descartes‘ time-travel story of how he came to find, to realize, himself as the pivot of his thinking. It is a highly self-conscious story self-centered. Curiously, he did not continue to consider what this ―himself‖ is; his story tacitly shows that Cogitoconsciousness cannot probe oneself the bulwark of spontaneity. The Cogito is the haunts of phenomenology that describes things only as appearing to consciousness; few phenomenologists consider spontaneity. Spontaneity as cognitive cul-de-sac also tells the story of the failure of phenomenology as ―pure description,‖ and also tells the story of the failure of direct elucidation of spontaneity, and the necessity of its description to turn ―indirect.‖ Thinking as philosophical reflection is expressed in discourse, discourse is description that is storytelling, and storytelling at its basics expresses spontaneity in silence. To redeem the above unkind treatment of Descartes, and show how universal spontaneity is, let us consider it in a considered mode, as with artwork and religious meditation. What personally pleases me as beautiful can be shared with others. People flock to concert halls and art museums to enjoy beauty. The more, the merrier in the realm of spontaneous Beauty. If spontaneity is taken as ―from the self,‖ Descartes‘ ―I think, therefore I am‖ amounts to spontaneous thinking from the self to the self, to gain a solid base to his personal thinking, and thereby gains for us all a universal base of all thinking. Spontaneity can thus be universalized, however unwittingly, in the realm of Truth. Spontaneity in Goodness is more complex. For Hume, what all people approve of as goodness obtains when I personally feel something to be good or an act to be right. Mencius wants personally felt unbearable sensitivity to people‘s pain to spread from my family to all others. But how about Hitler‘s personally felt obligation to commit genocide? How about the Golden Rule of ―Do to others what you want to be done by‖ that imposes my favorites on people who dislike them? Socrates could come in to help us out. His ―unexamined life‖ is not worth living, and the lack of self-examination harvests the tragedies of Hitler and the Golden Rule. We condemn Hitler18 in our spines; Confucius considered a negative Golden Rule; Mencius urged Duke Hsüan to consider acting in line with his felt pain on others‘ pain. The spontaneity of self-so (自然) combined with self-examination (自省) thus universalizes spontaneity in the realm of 17 Chuang Tzu 9/7, 12/80-84, cf. 9/9-12, 10/29-32, 16/5-17, and 20/9-28. 18 Whether Hitler relented before committing suicide is not clear, but we certainly feel revulsion.
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Goodness. The Cartesian Cogito is such combination in the realm of Truth, and an artwork is such in the realm of Beauty. These combinations are human goodness so natural in Nature. My little boy Mark whispered, ―It‘s quieter when birdies sing, isn‘t it, Dad?‖ His still small voice opened my ears to how nature-silence goes. When distraught Elijah came out of the cave of himself, he was enwrapped with a ―still small voice‖19 that was ―the call (phōnē) of a gentle breeze,‖20 ―a sound of sheer silence‖21 announced by the mount-shattering wind, earthquake, and fire. Then and there, Elijah came to himself refreshed, wrapped in divine silence, and received a fresh mission. For Chuang Tzu, the mysterious yet all-too-natural Heavenly Piping softly breezes through the noisy Human Piping and Earthy Piping, natural sounds of wind, earthquake, and fire, insects, frogs and birds, waves and waterfalls, brooks and breezes. Nature and naturalness intone heavenly stillness. Naturalness is quiet, attuned as a tuned-up machine softly whirling. We are natural when attuned to nature; it is ―spontaneity.‖ Spontaneity is so peculiar that no Western philosopher mentions it, for good reasons. On one hand, it is unthinkable, cannot even be mentioned, for ―mentioning‖ and ―thinking‖ are self-aware while spontaneity is not. On the other hand, spontaneity is how we are, and so we cannot but mention/consider it. We are forced to mention the unmentionable and think the unthinkable, somehow, and we fail, being pulled in opposite directions. Spontaneity is how we are situated as how and what we are, and can only be undergone to understand. Wang Kuo-wei 王國維 distinguished ―self-ed realm 有我之境‖ from ―no-self realm 無我之境,‖ but this self-ed realm of spontaneity is not self-conscious, i.e., has no-self. Some examples may help. Being ―cute‖ cannot be made aware without vanishing. We undergo being cute, to express it spontaneously, caught by others; we ourselves do not realize it and cannot reflect on it. The title ―princely man 君子‖ Confucius denied deserving of, and that is the reason why he deserved it. We attain virtues unawares; ―Look at me, how humble I am!‖ dissipates humility in obtrusive self-push. ―Time‖ is another example that Augustine and Chu Tzu-ch‘ing22 confessed they do not know. Time can only be captured in its story called ―history,‖ and history is not the ―rabbit‖ of time but its ―trap.‖ These examples—being ―cute,‖ ―princely man,‖ and time—of spontaneity can only be caught through words wordlessly; it is realized indescribably, via description that must vanish.
19 1Kings 19:12 in the King James Version. 20 The same 1Kings 19:12 in the Septuagint Version. 21 The same 1Kings 19:12 in the New Revised Standard Version. This rendering takes this ―silence‖ as Chuang Tzu‘s Heavenly Piping 天籟. This and the Septuagint interpretations are better than all others that I know of, which sadly lean toward a sort of ―voice‖ or verbal revelation. Sadly, also, a commentator implicitly questions this NRSV (The HarperCollins Study Bible, ed. Wayne A. Meeks, 1993, p. 551). 22 Ricoeur devoted the entire first Chapter to Augustine‘s query (only query!) on ―time‖ in Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Volume One, (1983), The University of Chicago Press, 1984, pp. 5-30. Chu Tzu-ch‘ing 朱自清 expressed his deep puzzlement on time in his disarmingly unanswerable question, ―Dear Smart alec, tell me, why our days, once gone, return no more?‖ explicitly (in ―Ts‘ung Ts‘ung 匆匆, Hurrying-by Unawares‖) and implicitly (in many charming short essays) (朱自清全集, 臺南市文國書局, 1996, pp. 128-129, et al.) A Smart alec, me, tried to answer him in Appendix: Mr. Chu on ―Our Days Not Returning‖ and History, in Part III of my Chinese Wisdom Alive: Vignettes of Life-Thinking, Nova Science Publishers, 2010, pp. 415-420.
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The reason is simple. We must discourse on everything, however, and so indirect description is how we capture spontaneity. Spontaneity is hit without hitting, and such strange description is storytelling. Chuang Tzu the champion of spontaneity is a great storyteller, with a wink. He always tells a story negatively, telling us something as he wipes it away. He is a dragonfly whose tail dots without dotting the life-pond. He is serious when hilarious, and hilarious when profound. ―Of course, I don‘t mean it,‖ says he, ―it is not this, it is not not-this,‖ as he compresses what he means in ―wu wei 無為,‖ that is, ―(doing) no-do,‖ and often describes sensible-seeming nonsense23; he describes no-description. This is why silly nursery rhymes are popular, for they evoke kids‘ spontaneity we all love to live. Chuang Tzu as many thoughtful persons treasured kids. Nature is not dead wordless so deafening, disturbing, and distracting. Nature sounds variously in insect songs and frog drones, morning doves and night owls, gulls and geese, waves and waterfalls, brooks and breezes. They are so irresistible that we make many recordings of these ―nature songs,‖ in poetry and in literature and in history—as we do on CDs and DVDs. ―Why are they irresistible?‖ All sounds in Nature blend into stillness, inviting us to blend in, to calm us, to put us at ease, at home. Here sounds pave the grass singing still for singing kids yelling, whining, hopping, skipping, and jumping for no reason, just to be there, in themselves. Even when smile-less, or in sleep, they spread smiles all over, always, and all this while grass is still, fresh. Stillness of Nature breezes in sounds of things natural, and Heavenly Piping shows through Earthly Piping that includes Human Piping. The Psalmist chants, ―The Heavens declare; day unto day utters speech; there is no speech; their voice is gone out into all the earth.‖ The heavens declare in wordless speech, in still sound, all around. This soundless speech of Nature softly leads us to the Word that wordlessly shines forth life in all things.24 Music among people, the melodious Human Piping, can and should be tuned to natural stillness of Nature to embrace us and tune us into it. Let‘s repeat. When exhausted, Kreisler goes out into the forest. He is just there hearing and overhearing Nature, to be nourished and filled, and his music is now as still as it is natural, nestling us. Schubert‘s songs, vocal (―Der Wanderer,‖ ―Winterreise,‖ and over 600 songs) and instrumental (―The Trout Quintet,‖ The ―Death and the Maiden‖ Quartet, and symphonies) are all songs of Nature calmly singing the world, and those who try to shape them make a fool of themselves.25 All great composers and performers hug silence, and surround us with Nature-silence, whispering to us speechless stories, to enrich us into ourselves in Nature, naturally. Stillness and storytelling blend here in nature. We are in paradise of Tao of Self-So. When I look up at the whole bunch of trees, what do I look at? Nothing; I just want to be in the green. What is the green? It is something that makes me. Green is my silence, me in nature, and I do not know what I am saying, though I know what it is I am saying. I am in the sun warmth, and I hear lawnmowers here and there, as I also mow me prim and trim. The lawnmowers are noisy around me as my silent milieu of walking to self-trim.
23 Beginning with the opening story of an incredible Fish turned an incredible Phoenix, Chuang Tzu gives us all sorts of stories that seem so profound as to make us scratch our heads on whatever they could mean at all! Zen masters do so quite often. ―What is the essence of the Buddha?‖ ―This shit-wiping stick!‖ 24 Psalm 19:1-4 (Septuagint, abbreviated), John 1:1, 5. 25 We remember the Emerson Quartet, struggling so sonorously, shaping so foolishly.
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I am walking but I really do no walk; I just inscribe me in silence on the road that could not care less about me. Don‘t I walk day in and night out? I am silence in the rhythm of life in nature. Silence is here. I am silent while eating; I am silent while eating chirping of the birds, blossoming of so many flowers, all basking in the warm sun. My silence feeds me so full, full of the Heaven and Earth. ―Tao Always‖ does not tao, talk, or lead, as ―Name Always‖ does not name a universal. It no-does, it simply walks it and forms. Thousand-mile walk begins underfoot here now. Universal is a transversal walking life out silently, and later generations tell it as the story of history. Transversal inter-verses, walking to weave a heavenly net, vast, coarse-meshed, 26 leaking nothing; it is now silent Tao. Everything is morning-fresh, translucent, and Self-So. All thinking begins at demonstratives—here, now, etc.—that in turn begin at the ―I.‖ I am embodied active as thinking. ―I am thinking‖ means ―I am body-thinking.‖ Thinking is situated as ―I‖ as I am body-active-as-thinking. All this thinking makes sense of/to things. Now, what does I-think in the concrete mean? Isn‘t it I-as-body telling stories? Isn‘t storytelling how the body is continually constituted, as ―I‖? Thus I-as-body constantly developing and growing in storytelling makes a system-alive, ever open to any things that come. Such an open system is/makes the lifeworld; the world is thus sung and danced out—in story-thinking storytelling. Storytelling is the how of ―I‖; ―I‖ is the what of storytelling. Words of mouth originate in the body wording its life-stories, in story-thinking, as story-thinking. I-as-body words forth via its silent ways of being-behaving. No word, no silence; it is storytelling word-forgotten, it is the body-I joining the flow of Heaven and Earth. Thus thanks to body-thinking actively story-thinking, the I composes many I‘s, single self develops into the great Self of the lifeworld, and I am born with Heaven and Earth—singing silence of myriad things. The Africans are our primal forefathers from whom we learn much. Their lives tell us that every object is a musical instrument performing the silence of music of that thing. And of course all performers play their own respective silences. We are all performers of our lives our own musical silences. We perform silence of life-music in storytelling, story-thinking in our different ways. Music in its silence infuses our story-thinking life. Silence sings in music celebrating it. In musical story-thinking in silent storytelling—and hearing and adding—our living irresistibly resounds the Heaven and Earth, intoning life-music, dancing silence unceasing, in tears and laughs, and often between them, come what may, one day at a time. Poetry is packed stories, inviting us to unpack into stories. This invitation is poetics. Story-thinking tells of poetics. This volume tells the stories of poetics chanting aloud the sound of the music of things‘ senses, chanting and telling it to the hills and the rivers, shouting, ―the lifeworld is the ponds various, alive!‖ Story does metaphoring music into New Heaven and New Earth. Metaphor literally ferries us over to the new, and we enter the new world anew again, with a new language and a new climate of far-reaching connections unsuspected. Here is the same world yet different, to surprise and fascinate us, positively and negatively. Music is here singing all over the world. Thus music, storytelling, and poetry pervade to renovate the lifeworld. The world turns new thanks to inter-metaphoring of storytelling with poetry and music. 26 Tao Te Ching 1, 37, Chuang Tzu 2/33, , 64, 73 天網, Chuang Tzu 6/41, 朝徹.
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Storytelling lets things random cohere into the sense of a world. ―Letting things cohere‖ consummates in story-hearing of the world of facts, and we become part of this fact-world, part of its story, part of history. In this world, we storytellers and story-hearers enter silence to become the sense of the world, for ―becoming fact‖ is silent. All this is shown in the story of music suffusing silence singing nature, where things are as they are, fulfilled in natural silence. After all, music is a singing fact of the Spheres, and so music sings world silence. It is time to take stock. Here is a bombshell repeatedly presented in previous pages. Logically impossible to parse yet routinely happening daily, such contingent actuality can be captured only in stories and collected into history that makes some extra-logical sense. Two examples quite concrete are here, the baby and the life‘s why. ONE: Have we noticed it? Infantility infatuates us, as no one minds baby immaturity. We are all pulled into the bare baby here, misshaped, clumsy, wobbly, helpless, in all her imperfections refreshing, inviting. The baby so childish charms us into caring for her; we keep serving her at the side, ever apologizing to her for not serving her enough. We never mind baby imperfections in our eternal adoration of her, even of her asleep. Logic cannot help but wonder, ―How could imperfection be adored?‖ Baby pulls off such logical stunt on us. We can never win, we don‘t even want to win; we are completely won over precisely by baby immaturity. In fact, a ―perfect baby‖ is a logical contradiction, yet she is actually perfect in all her imperfections. To such ―perfect‖ baby belongs the Kingdom of 27 Perfection. Such illogical actuality is incarnate in a refreshing baby! Logic is thus dissolved in the baby softly alive, with her irresistible imperfections. The absence of their imperfections devastates all our logic, scholarship, and research. 李贄‘s (1527-1602) ―童心說‖ says that ―童心 infant heart‖ is ―真心 true heart‖ at the base of all 28
scholarship. It says the infant-heart is the true heart, our sheer root authenticity that is the dynamo of all sages and all scholarship. Without infant-authenticity all our life-activities collapse into a farce. What is authenticity? It is baby-tautology exhibited in Example Two here as follows. TWO: ―Why do I write?‖ reflects back on itself. This is because ―why write?‖ is answered by writing, and so the question forever stands unanswered. The question hushes all answers; it is hushed unanswerable. Writing is thus a performative tautology. Writing is full as life that also cannot be questioned, for asking life, ―Why live?,‖ asks life, not death. Asking life on life asks itself, and life answering life answers no life. The question is its answer; the question echoes itself. The echo expresses a tautology; writing, talking, and thinking are life expressing life, and so questioning them—Why write? Why talk? Why think?—echoes itself, reflects itself, reenacts itself, and re-incarnates itself. Asking them hits itself, to bounce back to answer itself. All this amounts to saying, writing is present as absent, in absence of craft, of time; writing is just there stretching itself, silent so loud writing on, absent so fully present. It expresses me absent to myself so fully present that I cannot say, ―I am normal,‖ or 27 Jesus‘ declaration, ―To such as these [immature, imperfect] children—kids of all ages—belongs the Kingdom of God,‖ is so stunning as to ring through all three Gospels to begin the New Testament. Matthew 19:14 is Mark 10:14 that repeats Luke 18:16. ―To such as these children‖ stresses the child by inviting us all ―such as these‖ in, kids of all ages gather to ha-ha together in the Kingdom of Perfection that is theirs. 28 ―童心說,‖ in 李贄文集，北京社會科學文獻出版社，2000, I:91-93. He missed the fact that the child‘s rootauthenticity lies precisely in her imperfections, so as to confront this fact head on, as we are doing now.
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29
―abnormal.‖ The joy of self-presence is so full in joy-absence, a joy no-joy. It is an ultimate joy overflowing joy. Writing is joy of expressing my presence absent to myself, as I cannot write writing. I just write and writing appears of itself, as I just am, and I am present as absent to myself appearing to others. Whatever I do is supported by my rock-bottom spontaneity unawares. It is shown by my 30 inability to complete self-description; I am self-elusive. Even Socrates‘ self-examination stays itself unexamined, supported by his Daimon unexamined. To be aware of this rockbottom spontaneity unawares is life‘s bliss, the baby tells us, at home in this rock support. Aristotle‘s wonder as dynamo of metaphysics glances sideways at this baby. This is why the child is the ideal of us adults. In all, ―I am‖ is my baby wobbly irresistible, unawares; ―I am‖ is my existential tautology expressed in ―I write, I talk, I think,‖ all self-reflective tautologies so meaningful a presence self-absent. In logic, tautology is meaning-empty; tautology in existence, in self-existence, is in contrast so sense-full as to express itself in self-contradictions in all self-engagements. Baby in all her immaturity is irresistible because she is self-tautology fully present selfabsent. We adults, attracted to the baby, are babies (to us) after all. Three points wrap up our relation to the child. One: What about the child‘s immaturity? Baby immaturity (a) attracts us to (b) serve her, to show (c) we are also immature, to show us (d) how to deal with immaturity, as they respect someone more mature, playing fully in the now while disliking the now. We have said so in the above paragraphs on the baby. ―But you said of our attitude to immaturity, not immaturity itself.‖ Well, then, we must say not immaturity itself but our attitude to it is good or bad, and kids have the right attitude to their immaturity. ―But how could baby immaturity be perfection?‖ Now, is it ―perfection‖ if it is so perfect that it needs nothing else? Such self-imprisoned perfection is no perfection, which must be dynamic, and so the real perfection in real life is what grows, and that is kidimmaturity. Real Perfection belongs to kid-imperfection, not any other imperfection. Two: ―Why does the child grow to lose its precious kid‘s heart 童心 as true heart 真心?‖ Growth loses the sap of youth to go dry. We must replenish our baby-youth, as Mencius also says, ―The Great Ones are those who lose none of their baby-heart‖ (4B12). Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu adore the child. Jesus even says that the Kingdom of God belongs to the children 31 of all ages. All this is why we adore the child. Three: Our adult adoration of the child is not the child, our identification with the child does not make the child of us, and child-incarnated adult is not the child. What does logic say about this ―not‖? The answer is simple but slippery. This ―not‖ exists and does not exist. This ―not‖ exists, obviously because adults are not the child. For all this, though, this ―not‖ cannot exist, for if it does, it destroys our identification with the child. Thus this ―not‖ is logical (obviously exists) and beyond logic (cannot exist).
29 To confidently assert, ―I‘m normal,‖ shows I‘m abnormal; few would confidently assert, ―I‘m abnormal,‖ but if it is asserted at all, no one would know what to do with that fellow. Thus Socrates‘ self-examination and Jesus‘ demand of repentance are problematic. All these oddities came from the fact that self-sayings split the self, and self-split destroys the self that is self-full, self-identical, self-tautological, ―I am what I am,‖ unawares. 30 Gilbert Ryle, ―the systematic elusiveness of ‗I‘,‖ The Concept of Mind, London: Hutchinson, 1949, pp. 195-198. 31 To repeat, this declaration is so extraordinary that it was recorded in all three Gospels that begin the NT; Matthew 19:14 is the same as Mark 10:14 that repeats Luke 18:16.
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In all, baby-tautology and writing-tautology perform ―living self‖ in living self-tautology. All this is beyond logic; stories are just told to express it. Story-thinking is beyond logicthinking and uses logic to express itself, to express self-tautologies that are concrete thinking. Story-thinking is concrete beyond logic-thinking, and uses logic to express itself as concrete thinking on the concrete. Story-thinking is life-thinking, quite life-logical beyond logicthinking—in baby-existential self-tautology.
CODA: STORY-THINKING CHINA Let us place this volume in the context of my publication to make sense of this Coda. My Chinese Wisdom Alive was just out in June 2010, and this volume is its sequel on two counts. Chinese Wisdom Alive shouts for China as China, on what China is, and this volume is its methodology, its how. Chinese Wisdom Alive shouts for China-West interculture, and this volume is its ―sneak preview.‖ To do all this, how China story-thinks must be portrayed. This Coda is the portrayal. Besides, lest people think that all the above pages are sheer fictive pieces of imagination, we cannot overstress the importance of noting that there exists in the world today a culture that has been living and thriving for millennia on this storytelling, this story-thinking. This culture is China. It is not that other cultures have no elements of story-logic, for how could they be without such root thinking basic to human nature? It is rather that there exists today no civilized culture that lives centrally and explicitly on story-thinking, except China. In primordial eras, everyone thought in storytelling. Today, some primordial cultures are story-infused, and now many cultures, Indian, European, Latin American, and Japanese, have gone on to mix storytelling, add to story-logic, with many other sorts of thinking, legal, mathematical, religious, scientific, and objective. China alone goes on, becomes sophisticated, progressed and civilized, within storythinking. No one dares say China is primitive, yet no one dares to deny China is without story-thinking—in literature, history, sociopolitical living, and style of living. China is the only culture in the world today that is not primitive, still vigorously thriving, and centrally story-thinking. So, at the cost of slight repetition of the foregoing pages, here is a vignette of China in story-thinking; repetition here links the pages above to show how story-thinking validated in historical facts in/of China.32 Actually, in our cultural meditation on storytelling above, China has often been cited and explained. This is quite justified, for China is one culture in our human world that actualizes storytelling and story-reading in its entire history, as it practices story-thinking, story-logic, and even story-writing (the writing system, characters as ideograms) in life. Chinese characters are sense-portrayals on the move as things while their senses shift and move, alive—as storytelling. Such is how China goes by story-thinking. ―Story‖ is actually a verb. Story links elements irrelevant, even inter-opposed. We first sum up how China storythinks, then answer Dr. Ruth Chao‘s critique of my interpersonal reflections on psychology our study of the human core. Story-thinking is related to relativism that links pragmatism; we
32
All my writings concern this fact. E.g., see my On Chinese Body Thinking: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 1997, pp. 22-79, 108-113, 441, et passim.
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see how easily China can relate to Rorty‘s ―pragmatism,‖ ―relativism‖-in-praxis, to sum-up the world as ponds alive countless. Then we see ―Chinese body-thinking‖ in Professor Gongsun‘s story about Wu Kuangming, edited and added here. Finally, a small aside, revolutionary, on Taiwan as the gem of the world rounds up our story-thinking. In all this, China in story-logic that naturally joins is a natural matrix for interculturalism, its story-thinking in global interculture. In all, this Coda has seven miscellaneous themes to show how fecund story-thinking in China is: a. Chinese philosophy and story-thinking; b. outside looking in: a review of Starr‘s Understanding China; c. Dr. Wu‘s intersubjective psychology (Ruth Chao) and Wu‘s response; d. Rorty, China, and world relativism; e. various ponds alive; f. ―Chinese body thinking‖: Dr. Wu‘s world interculture; and g. Taiwan the world‘s gem. These story-thinking themes illuminate the world via China, as they illuminate China in the world.
A. CHINESE PHILOSOPHY AND STORY-THINKING33 At the risk of slight repetition, here is a summary of all that have gone before, with silence as music. This section shows that storytelling and -reading as story-thinking has been going on for ages in one of the world‘s longest cultures, China. We test a pie by tasting it, not just looking at it. Story-thinking is not just a beautiful pie in the sky (for it is beautiful in the heavens of ideals and enjoyment) but is also a solid, historic, and powerful antidote to analytical thinking today, to save the world from over-logicizing. We know that Chinese people think by stories, but not yet what such thinking is. They think story-way by storytelling, by story-reading, and by both performing silence. One, China thinks by storytelling. Logical analysis is coherent and self-closed, cannot ―move,‖ to miss key-data, and tears a story into unintelligible bits. In contrast, storytelling is coherent and open, trailing actual ongoing to move with it intelligibly. Two, China thinks by story-reading on four levels, (a) textual, (b) exegetical, (c) expository, and (d) hermeneutic. They form a hermeneutic circle to understand life events. Missing (d), Fingarette missed Confucius, Richards did Mencius, Hansen did China, as Black did Wittgenstein. They did not sensitively read the stories of those people and culture. Three, telling and reading stories unite to perform silence, self-negating to tell life and nature, as did Wittgenstein, Confucius, Socrates, Lao Tzu, and Chuang Tzu. We have told a story of story-thinking. We are now to explain all this by telling its stories. Chinese people reflect on life in chronicles, journals, analects, and literature; even ―logical terms‖ in Mo Pien, Hsün Tzu, Hui Shih, and Kung-sun Lung Tzu, and other Name Scholars, are concrete names, notions, and mini-stories. ―Chinese philosophy‖ is ―storyphilosophy‖ that (i) thinks, argues, and understands affairs by telling and reading their stories, and even (ii) extends itself to considering reading and thinking in stories, story-way.34
33 This section is refurbished from my article by the title in Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, Summer 2005, pp. 217-234. 34 This rough description of ―story-philosophy‖ will be tightened, pulling together these two senses of storyphilosophy, connecting it to philosophy, storytelling, and story-reading.
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Story-philosophy thus thinks story-way35 with life-reason. It story-thinks as it tells stories of history, journals, or literature, and it story-thinks by story-considering storytelling and story-reading. Or the stress can self-reverse to shift the sense-milieu with story-thinking itself. Such freedom is distinctive of story-thinking, for it does not logicize, analyze, and prove coercively, Western philosophy way.36 Plato/Aristotle proposed an interesting logical pair, collection (sunagoge) and division (diairesis)37; both must join to make an assertion. We say, a division-collection of assertions are made by a story. Storytelling has a grammar, syntax, or logic38 of story-thinking in four levels, the first two (textual and exegetical 考證訓詁) belong to division, the latter two (expository and hermeneutic 釋義闡釋) belong to collection. These levels describe two desiderata of story-thinking in its morphology and its methodology. Its morphology is that story-thinking has these four levels, textual, exegetical, expository, and hermeneutic. Its methodology is that all these four levels must be engaged, and that these four levels must mutually involve to maintain its self-recursive hermeneutic circle that is lifethinking in story-thinking. The present essay engages such story-philosophy; it tells the story by thinking it,39 reads it, for philosophy is thinking that ―reads‖ actuality. This amounts to telling the story of not telling stories by logicizing them. The present essay thinks thinking by telling and reading stories, and shows how essential such engagement is to life, how missing it misses Chinese thinking.40 This showing is bitingly relevant to today‘s ―Chinese philosophy‖ and philosophy in general. Philosophy ―reads‖ a situation that appears in stories,41 so story-thinking intimately joins philosophy in ―storyphilosophy.‖ To philosophize is to ―read‖ the story of a situation manifest in historical chronicle, daily news, biography, and journal. Storytelling and reading is more significant and complex than we may assume. 35 Cf. my On Metaphoring: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 2001, Indexes on Chinese characters (p. 662), on story (p. 670-671), and on story-notions (p. 671). My Chinese Wisdom Alive, op. cit., elaborates on all this. 36 Arthur Wright denied (1959) that China has ―philosophy‖ (as logical analysis of Stanford where he dwelt). David S. Nivison in Stanford agreed. H. G. Creel criticized them. Henry Rosemont, Jr. denied (1983) that China has ―ethics‖ of Aristotle‘s systematic sort. Wing-tsit Chan criticized him. They all manifest the two aspects of ―Chinese philosophy,‖ not ―philosophy‖ in the Western sense (as Wright, Nivison, Rosemont asserted), ―philosophy‖ not in the sense unknown in the West (as Chan and perhaps Creel sensed). Sadly, in all this wrangling, what ―Chinese philosophy‖ is (not just as convention or thought in China) remains unclear. I reacted to them all in On Chinese Body Thinking, pp. 207-208 and On the “Logic” of Togetherness: A Cultural Hermeneutic, same press, 1998, pp. 304, 305, 435. Here I continue my reply. 37 On ―collection‖ or ―conclusion‖ (sunagoge) see Aristotle‘s Metaphysics 1042a3, etc. On ―division‖ (diairesis) see Plato‘s Phaedrus 266b and Airstotle‘s Analytica Priora 46a31. 38 Interestingly, all these words, grammar, syntax, and logic, connote systematic collection. ―Logic‖ originally meant ―collecting logs‖ (see my On Metaphoring, op. cit., pp. 10 [note 23], 54-58). ―Grammar,‖ collected letters, is methodological studies of literature, i.e., textual/historical criticism (level-a), aesthetic criticism (level-b), and explanation of allusions (level-c). (cf. Oxford English Dictionary VI: 742); our ―grammar of storytelling‖ must add one more hermeneutic level. ―Syntax‖ is orderly/systematic arrangement of elements, a connected order/system of things; ―suntassō‖ means ―put together in order‖ (Liddell and Scott, Greek-English Lexicon, Oxford, 1996, p. 1725). So ―syntax‖ is arrangement of words to show their relation to sentence; this meaning is widened into the ―logic of formal syntax of language‖ (Oxford English Dictionary, XVII: 487), and this is what we mean by the ―syntax of storytelling.‖ 39 We will see that in so thinking we unwittingly tell a story of story-thinking, where to think is to tell stories. 40 All my ―culture hermeneutic‖-trilogy concern ―story-philosophy‖ (though the term is not used). E.g., On the “Logic” of Togetherness, op. cit., pp. 294-385, describes how distinct story-philosophy is. 41 A ―story‖ presents a situation, actual or imagined; logical analysis tears a situation apart into unintelligible pieces. We have no story without a situation, which remains unknown without a story. How a story presents a situation by coherent open-ended synthesis is our story.
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It is all four-leveled story-thinking that makes the all-out pragmatic impact in lifeexpression. To show how it is so, let us rehearse story-reading. Sensitive textual exposition ((a), (b)) would breed interpretation ((c)), which yet requires caution. Exposition (b) must lead us out of the text (a) into what it means, as its exposition (c) must leads us into what the saying peculiarly says (d) to make sense of (a), (b), and (c); (b) leads out of (a) as (c) leads into (d), for (a) without (b) is dead as (c) without (d) is off the mark. Now, after all has been considered about story-philosophy as story-thinking in storytelling-reading, let us ask self-referentially, Where is this essay itself? It is a philosophy, all right,42 but is it ―philosophy‖ in Western traditional mode, or is it ―story-thinking‖ in China?43 What is it, then? It is neither, because it is both. Let us see first how it is neither. This book-essay is neither quite Chinese philosophy nor quite Western. First, this essay is not a part of Western traditional philosophy that argues and analyzes; this essay sensitively describes, understands, and presents, but not argue, or it ―argues‖ only story-way. This essay does not quite belong to Western philosophy. This book-essay is not in a purely Chinese mode of thinking, either, for it considers story-thinking in telling/hearing stories. Chinese thinkers do not tell and think of their thinking; they think by telling stories. This essay describes story-thinking by considering how distinctive it is of China. This essay is not quite a traditional thinking of Chinese thinkers. So this essay is neither straightly Chinese nor Western. At the same time, precisely in not belonging totally to China or the West, our essay shares the ways of China and of the West, for the essay describes in Chinese way and explicitly understands in Western manner. It story-understands story-thinking as China does, and reasonably arranges and explicates story-philosophy in a manner palatable to Western philosophers. It story-philosophizes beyond plain story-thinking. This essay can then be said to be a meta-story-philosophy, a descriptive phenomenology of story-thinking. It is a story-phenomenology, fully aware that ―phenomenology‖ is a fancy name for story-thinking-philosophy. It is a story-thinking on story-thinking, a storyphilosophy on story-philosophy; it puts a story-spin on philosophy reflecting on telling/reading stories, as it reflects on the significance of China‘s story-philosophy, on how essential it is to life, socially, cosmically. So it is a story of the phenomenon of story-thinking, telling a story of silent storyreasoning in storytelling-reading—both to China and to the West—as we hear Theresa, Dickens, Lao Tzu, and Mencius softly chime in one with another. It thus secretly hopes to usher in a ―world philosophy of intercultural concord‖ in our small Global Village today. Storytelling is one quite effective way toward world interculture.44 In sum, we humans have two sorts of reasoning. One is logical reasoning in mathematical analysis. Another is story-reasoning of historical hermeneutics. One is clear, another is concrete; both should gather. Here ―should‖ needs logical thinking, to ―gather‖ needs story perception. Both sorts of reasoning make for an understanding and management of actuality 42 This is a philosophical consideration on story-philosophy, a sort of meta-philosophy that is also philosophy. 43 Leo Tolstoy‘s ―What is Art?‖ (1898), 王國維‘s 人間詞話, (Wang Kuo-wei, ―Comments on words among people,‖ 1908-1909) and Brand Blanshard‘s On Philosophical Style (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1954) are literature, not philosophy. Philosophers Nietzsche, Whitehead, Russell, Santayana, Sartre, and Quine are stylists, but they reflect on no style. Our intercultural reflection on Chinese story-philosophy in English here is perhaps unique in the history of human thinking. 44 Another way is elaborated in my On Metaphoring: A Cultural Hermeneutic (Leiden: Brill, 2001) that intimately relates to storytelling this volume elaborates. A future volume could be written on the unity of both.
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from past to future of world togetherness.45 To do so, let us first look at China from outside (now in Starr‘s book), and then look at China from inside (later in Dr. Gongsun‘s introduction to Wu‘s thinking-exploration).
B. OUTSIDE LOOKING IN: A REVIEW OF STARR’S UNDERSTANDING CHINA46 Starr‘s volume is coherent, informative, and absorbing. Its author, John Bryan Starr, served as president of both the Yale-China Association and the China Institute in New York City, and as managing director of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform in Providence, Rhode Island. He is now Executive Director of the Tri-State Consortium. He also served as Adjunct Lecturer in the Department of Education in Brown University. This is his succinct volume on China‘s background historical, geographical, demographic, sociopolitical, and economic, and China‘s overwhelming crises today and tomorrow. Starr attends to political complexities of China since Deng Xiaoping died, its influence in American politics, its efforts to acquire advanced technology from foreign powers, relations with Taiwan and Tibet, the transfer of Hong Kong to Chinese rule, nuclear weapons program, and its environmental and human rights records. All this shows our urgency to understand China. This book came from 17 years of Yale seminar on ―issues in contemporary China.‖ It has Introduction, 17 Tables, 8 Maps, Chapters on Geographical Inequalities; Patterns from the Past; Political System; Economy; The Armed Forces; Sources of Rural Discontent; Cities; The Centrifugal Forces of Regionalism; Han and Non-Han; Environmental Degradation; One Billion Plus; Human Rights and the Rule of Law; Intellectual Freedom and Education; Artistic Freedom; Hong Kong and Macao; Democratization in Taiwan; Foreign Relations, Conclusion, Bibliography (20 pages) and Index. The volume stresses that we must undergo a China-experience to understand China radically different from the West. To undergo China today we must experience it in its historical context; China must be understood by looking into its history as weight and guide. Ancient history puts a stamp of distinctness; modern history shows how such features fare today. China‘s history sets up a system of ―world family,‖ whose Head, ―Heavenly Son‖ the ―Parent of the People,‖ single-handedly ruled people ―within Four Seas,‖ to harvest unspeakable miseries with a glorious culture, ―China.‖ China‘s time-honored autocratic system has collapsed under the weight of modern incursions of the West, and its culture has been undergoing a series of profound ―cultural revolutions‖ since Opium War and May Fourth Movement far beyond Mao‘s disastrous ―Cultural Revolution.‖ China‘s cultural revolutions unceasingly search for an alternative sociopolitical economy system. What Mao tried in his private version and vision to demolish Confucianism had failed, and the Confucian Renaissance is on the rise in new clothes as New Neo-Confucianism. 45 The notion of togetherness is considered in my On the “Logic” of Togetherness: A Cultural Hermeneutic (Leiden: Brill, 1998). Do we need a volume unifying storytelling, metaphoring, and togetherness? Does this volume perhaps fill the bill? 46 John Bryan Starr‘s Understanding China (1999) Revised and Expanded, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001.
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The West has also undergone a revolution of humanistic Renaissance, but China‘s is more tragic and its impact felt no less worldwide, in its ongoing nationwide upheaval, still trying to rise from the ashes. And, to think of it, why did people all over the world have to begin with autocracy? China is an enigma, for it has no one-God religion to set up theocracy with, as the West did, and so China is a strategic place to ponder on why people had to rally to the autocratic ruler and, after beginning with autocracy, why people have to change it. Starr did not answer such big questions but offered much on the turmoil in China today, in the context of its history. His information may furnish suggestions on its future. The importance of the past is underscored by Starr‘s observation that, in China, what has passed is expressed as ―a long way in front of me 很久以前‖ (p. 40),47 not behind us. English language also has ―forefathers,‖ not ―hind-fathers,‖ and ―what has gone before,‖ not ―gone behind.‖48 It takes Starr a sensitive Westerner to discern this fact while studying a foreign culture, China. Interculturalism is needed to alert us to universal human conditions, and Starr‘s volume is one instance of world interculturalism. Sadly, after noting this ―past‖ as ―before,‖ Starr then incoherently mumbled away into other issues; we must go our own way to discern its significance. We think of it this way. A Chinese expression on the past, ―the mirror of the cart in-front 前車之鑑‖ may give a clue. Perhaps the past is in front of us now by continuing to alert us on (successes and) failures (前車之覆!) of our forefathers‘, their project similar to ours, as an important reference map to chart and pick our way now with care. At the same time, the past has disappeared, to show we have no obstruction to free decision; we are free to ignore it, even at our own risk. Still, the past does turn into our weight, as in China today. To notice this fact is important to understanding China. In short, the past is in front yet nowhere, as the best teacher is a dead one (Kierkegaard); it is important to go back to the past before us in order to understand the present and chart the future. It is time to take stock. We begin with praising Starr. Most history books tend to be so long, loose, and tortuous to exhaust reader‘s patience. Starr‘s is in contrast concise and precise, clear and apt, never lost in details; many eye-catching maps and skillfully designed charts clinch at a glance the points explained. His slender volume covers the same amount as do a massive one of, e.g., Jonathan Spence‘s. Starr‘s is stark, shrewd, and often surprising guide to understanding China today in its historical context, as it ominously confronts the world. His Introduction (3-18) is a gem. Indeed, there are those who predict that at its current rate of growth, China will be the world‘s largest economy by 2040, surpassing Japan‘s and the United States‘. . . . Economic success has made the Chinese government . . . much less malleable and easy to deal with than it once was. . . . It demands full membership in the world economy but balks at playing by the rules(, evidencing) a new dangerous military expansionism.‖ (3-4) The purpose of this book is 47
Starr quoted, ―henduo yiqian,‖ and said it ―suggests a very different sense of the direction one faces to look at the past from the one we are accustomed to. It calls to mind the image of a Chinese historian seated beside the stream of events looking toward its source, while behind him the stream runs on into the future‖ (40). This description, together with that of Chinese ―myth‖ of their history and their view of it as ―cyclical‖ (49), are themselves woven with fact and fiction, and appear rather foreign to the Chinese people. His linguistic observation still stands perceptive, however. 48 English has, however, ―it is now behind us‖ that is not Chinese; the Chinese language would have said, ―what is gone, days gone by, what is passed and gone (已往, 往日, 過去).‖
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Then a succinct penetrating story of 14 grave problems today follows, at home and abroad. They are: state-owned enterprises in serious financial strait, banking system collapsing, unemployment and underemployment severe, workers from rural to urban areas in ex-urban shantytowns; workers needed who tend to violent crimes. Urban and rural income gap is great. Excessive rural taxation simply supplies local officials with ostentatious expenditures, no cash flow to farmers. Lack of autonomy incites ethnic tensions in border regions. It is difficult to control population growth. Grain production cannot be increased more. The environment in China is extensively polluted. Administrative problems in Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan gnaw China at the root. Problems linger on in relations with USA and neighboring nations. Besides, added to these grave issues, the Chinese government is itself thoroughly corrupt, and lacks the desiderata of efficiency, grand vision, and popular credibility. Its future is bleak indeed. Now, this scenario raises at once the following two puzzlements. First, in the face of these well-nigh insurmountable challenges, why and how is China managing a spectacular growth in economy? What are the factors responsible for the growth? Can these factors be channeled to solve the problems mentioned here? Secondly, China is a culture of long history, boasting many brilliant ideas to solve problems, persuasive arguments for great humane governance, and effective measures to prosper the nation. Besides, China today has unprecedented scientific-technological advances, e.g., nuclear industry and space programs. Can‘t China use its vast cultural resources to resolve its problems? Starr is almost silent on both these, just stressing China‘s socio-politics and economy, not its scientific and humanistic achievements, such as Kao Hsing-chien 高行健 the Nobel laureate. We ask, ―Why is China still cumbered with these 14 problems, all familiar in Chinese history? Why/how is it that so high and powerful a culture as China is so powerless before these problems, historically so familiar?‖ Starr just describes, touching no today-past relations on the problem. Taiwan the geo-politically strategic island is simply assumed as part of China 49 (―nominally a province of China‖ (275)), culturally, politically. Starr‘s astute external observation, his long story on Lee Teng-hui‘s achievements (279-294), lacks an equal amount of sympathetic attention to both sides, Taiwan, the mainland, of controversies on the explosive issue of ―One China.‖ Nor did his totally sociopolitical and economic description attend to Taiwan‘s complex cultural mix, more than simple Chinese culture or Japanese, but can only be called 49 Starr did say, ―Only during the decade 1885-1895 and in the three years immediately after the end of World War II was Taiwan governed as a province of China. At all other times, Taiwan has been largely independent of the control of a mainland Chinese government.‖ (276). Then he rightly rehearsed the history of it being ―‗discovered‘ . . . by Portuguese explorers, who named it Formosa.‖ And so on.
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―Taiwanese‖ that is behind all bold political moves he approvingly told of. China‘s critical role in international geopolitics is unsatisfactorily dealt with. Similar complaints can be registered on Tibet. The book reads incredible to Chinese persons. ―Is this my China I know in my bones?‖ Besides, the dynamics of history as weight vs. guide is not obvious in the book, but it is 50 central in China today. Starr‘s future prognostication of China is buried in a benign exhortation to the West to pay close attention to China. He did dream of ―Taiwanization‖ of China, as gradual ―democratization‖ of China as Taiwan has undergone (298-299), though he 51 admits it to be unlikely in China today (320). That is courageous of Starr among most Sinologists and historians who tend to neglect Taiwan. In all, this book is the best of external reportage on China. The uninitiated can be introduced to a region with an objective explanation of its geography, population, history, socio-politics, and demography. The region can also be presented with a personal experiential story of its daily life and its peculiar air redolent all over, with an eye of a sensitive fictionwriter. We yearn after a joining of the two, an indispensable ideal to be approximated asymptotically. Starr‘s volume may well have furnished us with an impressive first step toward fulfilling this historic ideal.
C. DR. WU’S INTER-SUBJECTIVE PSYCHOLOGY (RUTH CHAO) AND WU’S RESPONSE52 Few people realize how much we can learn from Dr. Wu‘s novel incisive reflections on psychology. His pages of various reflections on psychology can easily collect into a substantial volume. As philosopher, Wu pays close attention to psychology. As with his deep reflections on things religious, Wu has published no article on psychology, while his novel reflections on things psychological are strewn throughout all his volumes. His Chuang Tzu: World Philosopher at Play (1982) has a long section on self, inter-self, and friends. Butterfly (1990) critically mentions three psychologists, Freud, James, and Merleau-Ponty. History, Thinking, and Literature in Chinese Philosophy (1991) begins with comments and examples furnished by neuro-psychologist Oliver Sacks. His ―body thinking‖ (1997) and ―logic‖ of togetherness (1998) are a twofold magnificent philosophical psychology of thinking, where ―psychology‖ appears conspicuously. ―Blind Spots in Brain Research‖ in Metaphoring (2001) shreds objective empiricism in psychology to pieces. Nonsense (2003, 565 pp.) and Storytelling (2010, Nova, 686 pp.) often examine psychology to reshape it as inter-cultural inter-mothering. 50 Starr did report that China sees ―history‖ as both enrichment and imprisonment (53). He did not elaborate, much less sympathetically weave these contradictory views of history into his story of China that remains a naive external reportage, though he is better and more intimate than most histories on China. 51 Starr envisions a more likely scenario of sudden or gradual collapse of the Chinese government system, for the army to take over, however temporarily (320-323). His vague benign conclusion on the last page is a letdown, but his admonition to learn from history, including the history of how the West has been viewing China, is a wise counsel. The conclusion is thus full of miscellanies. 52 This section is refurbished from Dr. Ruth C. Chao‘s ―Counseling as Inter-culture: Another ‗Cultural Hermeneutic‘‖ (110-126), and Wu‘s response (290-292) in China-West Interculture: Toward the Philosophy of World Integration: Essays on Wu Kuang-ming‟s Thinking, ed. Jay Goulding, NY: Global Scholarly Publications, 2008.
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The following themes are noteworthy, some insistently recurring: ―face as inter-facing‖ (1998, 2001), ―togetherness‖ (1998), the self as inter-self (1997), ―culture as internal‖ (all volumes), ―story therapy‖ (1998, 2009), ―other‖ (all volumes), ―writing therapy‖ (2010), ―brain research‖ (2001), ‖inter-mothering‖ (2010), ―inter-personal interculturalism‖ (2010, 2009), and the list goes on. All this is not surprising because, for him, human reflection is that of the human self, we always think from the perspective of the self (1998: 304), and psychology studies the self. Psychologists are spontaneous thinkers, and some have turned philosophers, such as Freud, Jaspers, James, and Merleau-Ponty. Of course, Dr. Wu is aware of this fact, and would wish that all psychologists be much more carefully self-reflective than they are now, never to be trapped in scientism but serve as leaders of scientists. Crucially, Wu is convinced that thinking must adopt the mode appropriate to things thought about. We must consider inanimate objects objectively, and human subjects intersubjectively. Wu is thus (1) upset at today‘s psychology as predominantly objective, quantitative, taking persons as stones, and (2) proposes an inter-subjective approach he calls inter-mothering, to studying the human self, (3) with intercultural implications. Now I will briefly sum up these three points that Dr. Wu raised, and conclude with Final critical Remarks on ―precision‖ in the human science.
1. “Blind Spots in Brain Research” and Critique of Psychological bjectivism Dr. Wu cited an unsuspected negative example with devastating critiques. He wryly cited ―brain research‖ because psychology goes after the brain, studying how brain functions as central clues to human attitudes/behavior, in fact, as their real mechanism. Psychology tends to brain physiology. Such ―biopsychology‖ is now the ―hard science‖ of psychology, more respectable than counseling psychology a ―soft science.‖ This trend is shown in psychologists‘ writing style and their demand of statistical confirmation, both patterned after physics and mathematics. Sadly, the ivy-league institutions lead this trend. Wu pokes fun at a human brain studying a human brain, much as a confident blind man leading another blind man to proudly fall into a ditch of no one knows what, while they do not even know that they fall. Experimental psychology studies pigeons and guinea pigs so as to study humans; it falls under the same pitfall as taking the person as a physiological brain, as study of animals assumes human persons as identical with objects to be objectively studied. So, demolishing ―brain research‖ demolishes all such experiments. Wu raised no less than five ―blind spots‖ in such research, and then evaluates objectivism in the science called ―psychology‖ (2001). Wu begins by citing five blind spots one by one. Blind-spot One is that researchers are not aware that they use the unknown to study the unknown, for they use their brains to study the brain-the-unknown. Such ―research‖ goes nowhere. Blind-spot Two is that they assume that mind is brain as they assume ―yellow‖ as ―yellow-wavelengths,‖ unaware that ―yellow‖ means our experience, not wavelengths accompanying the experience. Likewise, brain accompanies mind, and is not mind. They bark up the wrong tree. Blind-spot Three is this. A damaged brain cannot think, while mind controls brain waves; this parity of mind-brain mutuality is missed in brain-study. Blind-spot Four is this. The partwhole relation is more than coherence; adherence to coherence cuts mind away, for behavior
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can be coherently explained by brain alone. ―Scientific objectivity‖ for coherence is not objective enough to follow facts beyond coherence. Blind-spot Five is this. Researchers are blind to materialism‘s need of non-matter such as ―difference,‖ ―perception,‖ ―assertion,‖ ―identification of electric sparks as brain‘s activities.‖ But these non-matter notions are needed to operate materialism. Being blind to these nonmaterial matters prevents materialism from being ―materialism‖ at all. What do all these ―blind spots‖ amount to? On finding that a client‘s depression came from midlife crisis, a health insurance company stopped paying for later counseling sessions to enable him to find a truly satisfactory job, on the ground that the case was not a medical disease but a matter of personal growth. Whereupon Dr. Wu rose to the occasion, saying that this was a case of materialist myopia. Treating depression without treating its cause, midlife crisis, is as disastrous as treating fever without treating its cause, tuberculosis. Besides, counseling treats the growth theme, midlife crisis, as pediatrics treats growth matters, for which these child-doctors are paid. We must attend to personal healing and holistic growth, not pharmacology or ridding the clients of mere symptoms without healing their causes. Here, in this case, themes on growth and causes of depression are one. It is true scientific objectivity to follow the whole integrity of what is objectively there, which is beyond our preset perspective of materialism. Materialism is wrong because it claims, not that matter matters, but that only matter matters. What is objectively there is the other facing us, ever beyond our materialism-perspective, and we must allow the other facing us to shape us, our perspective beyond set materialism, objectivism.
2. “Inter-Mothering” We said above, ―we must allow the other facing us to shape us.‖ The other person in 53 psychology is affected in counseling as she affects counselors. Counseling must allow the other person to shape me, and the ―other person‖ is as much the client as it is the counselor. Counseling is inter-allowing to inter-shape, says Dr. Wu. He calls this inter-shaping ―inter-mothering‖ that is true counseling. Scientific objectivity above on objects now spontaneously translates into inter-mothering counseling. We must see how Wu‘s insight here functions in inter-personal interaction. How is interpersonal intermothering ―objective‖ beyond objectivism? Wu‘s Nonsense (2003: 296-307) portrays his ideal counselor this way. All psychologists from Freud through Jung, Skinner, Fromm, and Burns have agendas, programs, and techniques ―that work.‖ Even existentialist counselors have techniques, rock-climbing ropes (Frankl) for the client to hang on to, to climb up to a preset mountaintop of healing. The Taoist counselor in contrast has no ropes or techniques, but no-does (wu wei). He just sits with the client, fully there fully accepting the client. Both mutually ask, talk, and quest for no one knows what, in complete spontaneity. Spontaneity is the natural sign of life and health, not of disease. Being mutually helped to become spontaneous, then, is true healing in natural course. 53 ―Psychotherapy‖ may be a wider and more proper designation than ―counseling,‖ but as a layman, Dr. Wu wants to put things in a stark light. For him, psychology culminates in psychotherapy; it is a controversial claim but not without some basis, for otherwise what is the point of psychology?
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Thus the counselor need not be ―healthy‖ to be effective. Instead, counselors and clients allow and accept ―being sick‖ by inter-mothering with empathic cooperation. Techniques of empathy may be needed, of course, to slip into warm womb where one can be as one is, however ―unhealthy,‖ to allow oneself to change, to grow. Relaxed motherly rooming heals. Healing here is inscrutable, however, for geniuses are ―insane‖ to be creative. ―No risky mischief, no creation,‖ although every insane person is not creative genius. After all, it takes courage to stay sick suffering in ―my hole‖ alone; I don‘t like it. Here I dare to moan over my spilled milk with someone I may resent being with, who tries to protect me from hurting myself. Counselor as mother allows me to cry, resent, suffer; I am counselor to my ―counselor,‖ to let him cry, whine, and resent me, too. All this heals ―me‖ and him who is a 54 ―me,‖ unawares. His personal despair is our communal ill, so his healing occurs also by our being-with him. We must show the person that he is not alone, and assure that his ―abyss-situation‖ is not final, that his despair-milieu is embraced in our communal inter-motherly heartfelt copresence where he is at home in simple unspoken comfort. We are just here with him as his ―given,‖ with no pat conventional phrases. He is just here independent, as he is, with us, not alone. This heartfelt co-presence, a mothering nursing ―home,‖ heals wordlessly, in intermothering co-presence. This situation is ―objective.‖ A Chinese character, ―ch‘ing 情,‖ portrays objective reality (ch‘ing shih 情實) and subjective feeling (ch‘ing kan 情感), to describe the reality of heartfelt co-presence as an objective integrity of inter-subjectivity, to nurture subjective integrity all around. When our heartfelt presence really presents this objective situation, a miracle of mutual healing, of making everyone whole, takes place. Today, psychology is popularly identified with counseling, which in turn is identified with what works. Both these identifications are questionable, for psychology is not counseling, nor is counseling just for what works toward preset goals; it is pure objectivism, not objectivity of intersubjectivity. For example, a female client came to ask to be desensitized to her husband‘s infidelity. Her counselor does have several techniques to comply, such as cognitive behavioral therapy, behavioral conditioning, and/or drugs psychopharmacological. But should it be done? Why is it all right to do it? Do we have a better alternative to simple desensitizing? Do we feel the specter of the dictator who ―corrects‖ political dissidents in ―psychiatric ward‖? Here is the realm of ethics that is part and parcel of human psychology, without which humanity ceases to be human. Psychotherapy as soul-healing does not make us ―feel good‖ but makes-whole our existence. To ex-ist is to stand-out of the surrounding as uniquely itself and no other, and such unique out-standing creates things fresh and outstanding. ―Healing‖ makes whole our existence for its maximum creativity. This story of healing allows geniuses to be eccentric, to facilitate all defects to be part of creativity. Psychologists would have freed Van Gogh‘s moods to enter his fabulous paintings and let Beethoven be freely deaf toward his Ninth Symphony and Moonlight Sonata. How? Well, a style of performance relates to a personal biography. If we can chart how a specific musical excellence is related to a specific personality, then we can relate Beethoven‘s 54 See Chao, R. (in press). ―Integrating Taoism and Western therapeutic approaches in the treatment of anxiety,‖ D. S. Sandhu, ed., Alternative approaches to counseling and psychotherapy, Nova Science Publisher.
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biographical thrust to him to enhance his musical creativity, and design ―Beethoven-therapy‖ for Beethoven, similarly ―Van Gogh-therapy‖ for Van Gogh, ―philosophical therapy‖ for Kurt Gödel, etc. Dr. Wu has more examples but these samples are enough to show his cherished psychology and psychotherapy.
3. Psychological Counseling as “Intercultural” Here, human creativity appreciates what is common, and what is common is an ordinary communal lifestyle, ―culture,‖ our constant perspective, mind-frame, and behavior pattern, so counseling is intercultural, mutuality of cultural adjustment between counselor and client. Such cultural inter-adaptations maximize living; counseling is intercultural interaction that inter-heals to inter-accomplish life. This fact is dramatically lived out in the multicultural USA where counseling originated and prospers. Culture cultivates character, ―good sense.‖ Culture educates via journalism and TV to keep us mentally fit and forwarding, private and public inter-stimulating. Far from closing us into a set mold, culture keeps various options ever open, by skeptical journalism, to choose one appropriate to the ―situation now.‖ This is ―creativity,‖ mental health in counseling at its natural social best. Multicultural society such as USA gives an opportunity to inter-learning inter-counseling. It should conduct drastic ―civil disobedience‖ when license, social, political, and private, offends the ―good sense‖ cultivated by our inner sense and social history. Socio-cultural psychotherapy takes place here. Which side is right, the status quo or the rebellious conscience? Continuous gathering in respectful disagreement alone eventually ―judges,‖ as history does. Again, it is creativity in cultural ―psychotherapy.‖ In this interpersonal intercultural psychology, scientific objective empiricism has no place; or rather, it is only an assistant to understand the situation. Objectivism appropriate to inanimate objects is inappropriate to soul-healing among persons in society. Individual psychology is social psychology, executing interculturalism to make everyone whole, to spread social healing all over. This is Dr. Wu‘s Togetherness (1998), his favorite theme in all his later volumes of 2001, 2003, 2010. As his son Peter said, ―Dad, I have three names, me, myself, and I,‖ oneself is more than ―another‖ (Ricoeur) but ―three in one,‖ a community of togetherness, as literally everything is. Persons have faces invisible to themselves, to ―face‖ the other who alone can see one‘s face to confirm and acknowledge it (1998, 2001); togetherness is radical interdependence of respective independences. This ubiquitous fact of inter-versal truth means that making oneself whole takes place only in communal interaction, in oneself among communal selves, in intent ―listening‖ as a slave swineherd did to Odysseus, as Hesse‘s boatman did to Siddhartha, who both did to the vast ocean of beings. Psychology is an art of listening (Fromm); a counselor is a devoted listener. Healing takes place as we inter-listen, intently, unconditionally, to inter-confess in heartfelt self-pouring with all one‘s injuries. It is here that one is made whole, solid, intact, and creative. Such inter-self healing takes place when counselor urges counselee to write out her inner self, to pour herself onto paper, counselor-to-counselee and counselee-to-herself, interculturing. When one culture writes out another, as China written in English, both cultures
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inter-reveal to inter-enrich, to describe world concord (2010). Psychology as world interculturalism has its cosmic metaphysical principle of oneself as community, as cosmic togetherness concentrated. Indeed, the body-self and its thinking (1997), its psychology, is one of the strange cosmic circles with centers everywhere and circumferences nowhere, ever dotting the pond of the world to inter-blend, dotting to inter-blend (2003: 459, 2010). It is a system (2001) that rounds up four sorts of being systematic (2003), forever birthing, birthing, without ceasing.
Final Critical Remarks Chao‘s query: What can a psychologist say to all these fabulous overflows of inter-subjective reflections on psychology? We are of course overwhelmed and enlightened—even ―counseled‖ on the true meaning and goal of our vocation. We wish to ask Wu what we should pursue as scientists of human consciousness and behavior. He gives exhortation on our humanistic goal, but science is charged with mission to predictable rigor and clear methods to ―listen‖ and to ―inter-mother.‖ Wu gave us a philosophical psychology. We must pursue rigorous scientific methodology, with his cautions on the crucial difference between objectivism and objectivity, humanistic sensitivity and understanding, and aspiration to world interculturalism through inter-mothering. To complain as above bespeaks difficulty of pursuing psychology as a ―rigorous science‖; psychology is the most problematic of sciences (Nishida). Husserl the mathematician worried about exactitude in humanistic sciences, but died before yielding a tangible harvest. As the ―human science,‖ psychology must infuse mathematical rigor with human sensitivity, predictable methodology with unpredictable trailing of interpersonal empathy. Dr. Wu has given us a human side of this precious coin called ―psychology.‖ We must pursue the other scientific side. Wu‘s Response: In deep gratitude to Dr. Chao, I make one point. Psychology is counseling that originally means to ―deliberate together‖ in open interpersonal meeting to induce new directions, as Confucius did (循循善誘 (9/11)), not behavioral chemical engineering, not pills and injections. Psychic disorders express tensions between cultural stresses and personal vulnerabilities; counseling releases our inner resources by sensitive delivery of personalcultural ideals. I agree that psychology as science must heed rigorous methodology. I urge psychologists to probe human rigor, sensitized methods, to pursue human inter-person sensitivity with human rigor and methods. A lady requests to be desensitized to her husband‘s involvement with another woman. Counselors can do as she requests, but should they? What humanistic methods can guide us all on what to do here? Rigor and sensitivity should not clash but inter-infuse. It seems difficult, but it is the most natural and human. When Mom binds her baby‘s wound she is a human love and rigorous scientist. Rigor should be humanized, as sensitivity should be made rigorous, in ―psychology‖ that is an inter-mothering science.
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The psychologists‘ mission is this joining to show all scientists that their mission is the same. The scientists who forget their human base, milieu, and purpose are not humans, animals, or even rocks; they are mechanical monsters. Such ―scientific objectivity‖ amounts to a Platonic monster concocted by misguided objectivism. Psychology is the norm natural and legitimate to all sciences as objective, fair, and human-cosmic. My proposal, mind you, is so modest as to be tautological: ―Let services to human health be human.‖ Less than such, commits suicide. As early as in 1975, a book titled, Humanizing Health Care, (edited by Drs. Howard and Strauss) horrified me; for it proclaims that health care is no longer human. Sadder still is that we are yet to propose ―humanizing mental health care‖ since Pavlov and Skinner. They say cleaning babies too much kills them. Turning soft psychology into as hard a science as physics on hard stones stiffens psychology into a physics of stones and water. No single person is here, for physical psychology has cleared away all soft sensitivity. It is a mistake to think that rigor is a monopoly of stony physics. ―Rigor‖ is inevitable sensitivity among human sentiments never to be mocked, as all literatures and poetry exhibit. Human rigor is yet to be formalized because it is much more subtle and complex than stonerigor that is already quite complex in hard sciences. I am happy that Dr. Chao agrees on what and what for of psychology; we all struggle together on how to achieve human rigor. It turns out that the how is mired in situational relativism toward world interculture. We must consider this big theme.
D. RORTY, CHINA, AND WORLD RELATIVISM55 It is claimed here that both Rorty and China are permeated with the spirit of relativism, and these two versions of relativism do well to relate to compose world relativism. First (1) we explain that relativism is not assertion of a definite view but unfinishable élan of thinking, resolutely open to adapt/adjust to what comes from actuality in ideas, in conversation, and in 56 history. Relativism is thus a life-pulsation of thinking. Then we explain (2) how both Rorty‘s thinking and China‘s fit such relativism, each in its way. We elaborate (3) on how their relativism-thrusts proceed—one formally, analytically, logically, and cumulatively, the other subtly, tacitly, perceptively, in storytelling way, so they do well to relate. The result (4) is ―world relativism‖ that relates both versions of relativism into world concord.
1. What Relativism is/does Far from a heresy, relativism is a vital élan in pursuit of insights in open linkage; it is not a noun, an assertion of a thesis, but a verb in life-process. Previous pages describe relativism as a nisus that challenges assertive absolutism, to critically sifts through various views one by 55 This section is refurbished from my ―Rorty, Confucius, and Intercultural Relativism‖ in Rorty, Pragmatism, and Confucianism, ed. Yong Huang, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009, pp. 21-44. 56 Cf. Paul Feyerabend‘s vigorous élan of relativism in philosophy of science in Against Method, Third Edition, London: Verso, 1993 (tr. into Chinese). His view of relativism (pp. 268-272) slightly differs from mine.
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one. Goals of relativism grow as situations grow, as relativism describes actuality to show matters in situ, to let facts argue. Nothing is more powerful than descriptive argument from fact as relativism does. Thus, relativism opposes absolutely asserting ―the truth.‖57 Opposing logical/analytical necessity,58 relativism thinks in pragmatic coherence (Rorty) and story-description (China). Opposing automatic ―mirroring,‖59 relativism facilitates friendly conversations. Opposing fixation, relativism goes through ideas in contradiction. Opposing reason that tries to shape history, relativism in story-description becomes history. Thus relativism revolutionizes thinking to ruthlessly trail actual situations for which Rorty argues in his way.60
2. Rorty’s Relativism, China’s Relativism Now let us see how three traits of relativism fit Rorty and China, to see how naturally both do well to gather into inter-thriving world relativism. To begin, we said that relativism is a threefold life-nisus. One, it challenges absolutist fixation. Two, in the challenge it resolutely opens to shifting actuality of ideas, people, and situations. Three, both these points relate to conversations and history. Such dynamic relativism shows Rorty and China that can naturally 61 relate as ―relativism of relativism,‖ world relativism. We consider Rorty, then China. Richard Rorty fulfills all three traits of relativism. One, by historical description in his first volume (1967) to link ideas, he challenges ―autonomous necessity‖ in analytical language, then destroys (1979) the dogmatic assumption, naïve realism that takes philosophical assertions to mirror ―nature,‖ i.e., what is the case. His deconstruction is relativism negatively achieved. Two, Rorty pleads for our thinking, ―philosophy,‖ to serve as ―a cultural . . . voice in the 62 conversation of mankind‖ (1979: 264), whose various ideas dovetail into a historical montage. ―Conversation‖ among ideas, in history and in various fields, inter-learns to inter63 enrich. This is a radical openness to actuality in space and time. He even takes his own
57 An absolute assertion of the final truth plays god in thinking. This is anti-human, anti-life, and cuts thinking from concrete life-actuality, as Plato did. Rorty may or may not have thought about this point. 58 Rorty may have opposed logical/analytical necessity for its being autonomous (1967), cut from actual necessity that it assumes it mirrors (1979). 59 Rorty 1979, 1991. 60 Rorty 1979: 377-379. 61 Someone objects that having the thrust of relativism may not qualify someone as a ―relativist,‖ any more than having idealist or pragmatist streaks would qualify one as an idealist or pragmatist. I agree. Still, Rorty and the Chinese who are found to have all three traits of ―relativism‖ can be called ―relativists‖—even though their tenors may differ. That is what will be claimed here. 62 Marcel confessed to observing ―the inner plurality‖ in his self-dialogue that is the root of both his dramas and his philosophy (Schlipp 1984: 176), to echo Socrates (Theaetetus 189e) saying that thinking is a dialogue of the self with the self. Thinking begins at self-self dialogue to spread to fellow thinkers in conversation. 63 ―Instead, [Rorty says,] philosophers should admit that they were involved not with a quest for truth . . . and would be more illuminating if they attended to those conversations of a moral and literary sort that had more surprises and—in Kuhnian terms—more revolutionary [than] natural scientists.‖ ―His [Rorty‘s] ability to bring in so many philosophers into his own conversational development contributed to his striking influence among . . . theorists, whether or not in the discipline of philosophy.‖ ―For him [Rorty] the literary critic had replaced the philosopher in the ‗conversation of the west.‘‖ (Kuklick 2001: 278, 279, 280).
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thinking not as privileged but as ―just another of potential infinity of vocabularies‖ in history 64 ―in relativist sense.‖ All this amounts to, three, Rorty persistently relating to history (1998: 247-273), to other scholars in ―conversations,‖ and to the actual situation in his ―pragmatism‖ the centerpiece of 65 his writings. Denying noun-relativism, he affirms ―pragmatism‖ that is a positive task of 66 ―relativism‖ to form history. Significantly, he puts ―objectivity‖ and ―solidarity‖ together in the only volume that I 67 68 know of whose title has ―relativism‖ (1991). We can say that since we cannot jump out of our skin (subjectivity), naïve realism of ―objectively‖ to mirror what is the case is a senseless impossibility. The so-called ―objectivity‖ is actually a ―progress‖ in ―solidarity‖ of a community of inquirers comparing notes to mutually ―correct‖ toward conscientious 69 consensus. ―Solidarity‖ is human linkage, social relativism; ―progress‖ is human timelinkage, historical relativism. All this solidarity-in-progress is relativism at work. That is ―science‖ Kuhn (1996), 70 Feyerabend (1993), and Polanyi (1946) expounded, and we are not surprised when critics 71 72 dubbed Kuhn a ―relativist.‖ Relativism is Kuhn‘s ―structure of scientific revolution.‖ It can be claimed that Rorty shares with them the nisus of such relativism as their major thrust, 73 74 albeit few have admitted it, including Rorty himself. Besides Rorty, USA today has many philosophers who are analytically cautious. Rorty stands out for his daring vast ―linguistic turn‖ toward cultural ―pragmatism.‖ He can be said to embody the thrust of relativism in all its three aspects described here, refusal to close off pursuit, resolute openness to whatever comes from actuality, and commitment to ongoing 75 ―free and open encounters of opinions‖ (Rorty 1991: 1) among conscientious inquirers. We must now push Rorty‘s élan of relativism further in line with his thrust. He may not have anticipated the radical result of his deconstructive challenge to the philosophy of the West. After demolishing the ―spectatorial‖ account of knowledge as ―pointless‖ in his first major volume, he proclaimed, ―the vocabulary in which they (essays in The Linguistic Turn) 64 Rorty 1979: 367. 65 All Rorty 1999a is ―pragmatism‖ in practice in USA; it describes relativism in our sense. 66 Rorty (1999a: xxiii-xxiv, xxv-xxvi, et passim) has more or less plausible piles-up that describe ―pragmatism.‖ 67Rorty 1998: 43-83 has ―relativism‖ in its essay titles, but nowhere does 1998 (or 1991) explicitly discuss ―relativism‖ (nowhere in Indexes). Does this situation indicate again relativism‘s tacit ubiquitous influence? 68 Rorty 1991 explicitly explains no relativism (though see 1979, 1999a). He commented (1991: 203-210) on antianti-ethnocentrism as self-reflective, a hallmark of relativism performatively uttered, as 1999a did. (Fundamentalists is not liberals in that the latter self-reflect but the former do not, we claim.) Relativism haunts Rorty‘s ―pragmatism.‖ 69 Rorty says (1999a: xxv) ―the purpose of inquiry is to achieve consensus among human beings.‖ Cf. Wu 2001: 668 (index on ―objectivity‖). Cf. his interesting description of ―consensus‖ in 5/22/2002: p. 7. 70 Rorty 1979: 225, 227, 328 (n. 12). 71 Rorty said (1999a: 175), ―Kuhn was one of my idols,‖ a friend in thought/person, a conversant in resonance. 72 Rorty 1999a: xvi-xvii, 35, (105), 176. Kuklick 2001: 277, 278, 289 compared Kuhn to Rorty, and mentioned ―relativism‖ in connection with Rorty (278, et passim). 73 Kuklick 2001 is one of the very few. 74 Rorty (1999a: xv) says, ―relativism is a bugbear.‖ Among the vast number of publications by and on Rorty ( lists 3336), I found only two slender volumes (each -80 pages, and expensive) that treat ―relativism‖ related to him. Van den House (1994) takes Rorty to avoid relativism, and Tolland (1991) considers epistemological relativism, hardly Rorty‘s major concern. Few thinkers (including Rorty) take Rorty as a glorious relativist with a persistent élan of open quest as this essay does. 75 ―Edifying philosophy‖ (1979: 377-379) is ―reactive,‖ refusing to close off discussion; it describes relativism.
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are written will be obsolete‖ (1967: 39). The ―linguistic turn‖ turns obsolete the vocabulary of 76 77 analytical philosophy! If so, why does Rorty still talk/think in such mode? Can anyone complain that something is wrong and still stay in it? Rorty‘s ―irony‖ applies to him. As using metaphysical language to extricate from it collapses into it, as Heidegger did, so clinging to analytical language to make it obsolete collapses into it. Can we complain an apple not sweet as melon and want an apple-that-is-melon-sweet? It would be a contorted garble. An apple is an apple, a melon, melon, and we must give this strange fruit a new name other than ―apple.‖ No wonder Rorty turns turgid in ―analytical exactitude.‖ He should have given his thinking against Western philosophy a new name, not analytical ―pragmatism‖ 78 haunted by the ghosts of ―Western philosophy‖ he revolutionizes. In fact, we can see how inevitably related the self-contained ―analytical necessity‖ is to 79 an objective spectator stance, to make for an assumption of mirroring correspondence in traditional Western philosophy; the whole enterprise now floats in Platonic midair. It is well 80 that Rorty exposed ―necessity‖ in 1967 and ―mirroring‖ in 1979. But then, doesn‘t he later 81 contradict himself, after doing so, by continuing in the traditional mode of thinking? How so? First, he said it is wrong of Western philosophy to mirror nature, but doesn‘t his ―pragmatism,‖ his ―antirepresentationalism,‖ also mirror nature ―as a matter of acquiring habits of action to cope with reality‖ (1979: 319, 1991: 1)? Likewise, two, after deconstructing the logical-analytical necessity of philosophical language, he continues to argue in such language-mode. All this is senseless if he stays in the linguistic-thinking mode he indicted as illegitimate. 82 It is senseless unless his ―mirroring‖ is not cognitive but pragmatic, and unless his saying is 83 not one that just analytically poses to pose to practice —but adopts another mode of saying and thinking that aptly, sinuously, expresses thinking-in-practice. Only after he thus pragmatically proclaims the ―end of philosophy‖ in the West, and 84 really goes ahead to ―transform‖ it, would his non-traditional philosophy pragmatically 76 Cf. Kuklick 2001: 276. 77 Rorty‘s essay on metaphor (1991: 162-172), e.g., analytically examines Davidson/Black‘s metaphysical backbones, not considering metaphor itself. Rorty sticks to an analytical approach to everything. 78 The same criticism applies, mutatis mutandis, to Heidegger. I observed (Wu 1998: 313-342) that the West arguing for pragmatism is as odd as Kierkegaard‘s example of a man with the sandwich-boards saying, ―I‘m normal,‖ China‘s is simply pragmatic, silent, and not sufficiently reflective, and so the West and China need to come together. 79 We suspect that Platonic dualism—attended with mirroring representationalism—Rorty opposed has much to do with analytical thinking that divides. All thinkers Rorty finds congenial—Nietzsche, Dewey, Heidegger, Sartre—are not analytical in sentiment as Rorty is. This is not to propose anti-analyticity but to urge freely moving in and out of it. 80 For Rorty (1999a: 95), his new pragmatism differs from the old version in stressing language and lacking in scientific method. 81 This ―contradiction‖ is actually Rorty‘s strength, as will be seen in 4. World Relativism. 82 In fact, to think is to reflect on the situation, to mirror the mirroring conversations between the self and the milieu and among the con-versants that include oneself and ―coping.‖ 83 This happens, e.g., when Rorty (1991: 2-17) vigorously argues that ―liberalism‖ can fall into ―ethnocentrism‖ but ―antirepresentationalism‖ can pull it out into the open to encounters with other actual or potential cultures, and so on. All this may be a very good theoretical frame. How actually does such a frame work in actual encounters with actual cultures other than USA, such as China? We wish he had some outlook at least in outline. He did none when he visited China. 84 Rorty 11/10/1999b. Baynes, 1987.
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match the ―reality‖ of nature and be imbued with pragmatic necessity, not an analytical one. 85 And, in the end, doesn‘t such pragmatic match make relativism? From here it is only a short step toward literary narration, the reasoning-mode suited to 86 human situation. Such actual story-thinking, not theoretical ―pragmatism‖ China practices for millennia; it is the ―philosophy‖ that is not traditionally Western, and thoroughly ―relativistic‖ in its life-practice. Rorty who deconstructs Western philosophy toward 87 literature would do well to push himself into a new practical relativism (not just theoretical 88 pragmatism) that can benefit from relativism-thinking in China, and benefit China. All this leads to considering thinking-in-China. First, we would call thinking in China 89 ―story thinking,‖ that collects what is given (data, facts) to depict the situation. It is thinking in storytelling, as with ―thinking‖ in Victor Hugo‘s Les Miserables, not analytical one. Such story-thinking is relativism-thinking with all its three features mentioned above. One, analytical thinking is coherent and closed; story-thinking is coherent and, two, open sinuously to whatever is in actuality. Story-thinking challenges analytical thinking by not mirroring things but pointing tacitly to them as finger points to the moon beyond. Storytelling has no dogma of analytical necessity but makes sense of things as they happen, ever ready to revise the story to fit the shifting senses of things. Three, storytelling thus relates things that come to us for us to narrate/relate them to 90 story-hearers and time-change; ―history‖ is by nature story-in-time. For all this, storythinking in China is not as clear, coherent, and explicit as Rorty‘s of the West. Story-thinking in China has much to learn from Rorty. We have thus told a story of relativism in Rorty of the West, and then a story of relativism in China. They must come together in the ―conversation of mankind‖ (Rorty) to compose world relativism. We have just considered why Western relativism and Chinese should come together. How they can do so remains to be considered.
3. How the Two Versions of Relativism Come Together To see how both versions of relativism can gather, we must first see how both respectively operate; to do so, we must focus on what relativism does. Defying fixation in assertive absolutism, relativism freely relates. ―Pragmatism‖ that describes both Rorty and
85Cf. Baynes 1987: 11, 22. 86 Baynes, 1987: 14. 87 For Rorty, ―The core area in which to look for wisdom was literature—‗plays, poems, and, especially, novels‘.‖ (Kuklick, 2001: 280). 88 Both ―Achievement of America‖ (1999) and ―Social Hope‖ (1999a) have been strictly within the frame/mode of Western thinking. Despite his visit to South Africa and dialogues with an Indian scholar (Balslev, 1999), Rorty has had no structural contact with Asian cultures toward foundational inter-transformation. It is now overdue for such inter-beneficial contact, to which we look forward in 4. World Relativism. 89 Thinking is logicizing, the logos–activity that collects-the-logs of actuality, as we will see soon. Logicizing is literally collection of actual things given us by actuality, for us to order them. 90 Rorty is interested in the history of philosophy more than most analytic philosophers; he wrote on its history (1967, 1998: 247-273). But history is that in which we think; it is what we are. Thinking about history is not thinking historically. His thinking-mode is mainly analytical but his pragmatic conversation approaches a historical mode of thinking.
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Chinese thinkers relates to actuality, and relates among inquiries and inquirers of all times. Such relating activity is relativism. How does relativism concretely relate? Rorty relates inquiries by accumulating arguments into a set that persuades, and relates inquirers in conversation of humankind, in various fields and in history. China relates inquiries by accumulating words into one story after another to freely move among noteworthy ideas and facts, and relates inquirers freely to follow the situation to compose a history of various aspects of mankind. China thus learns from storytellers and stories told in time past. Let‘s take Rorty first. Rorty innocently describes to relate what happened in history of philosophy, then subjects the description to unsuspected analysis, i.e., to re-describe, to lead the reader into an unsuspected thesis, moving ―from technical argumentation to cultural commentary‖; it goes so smoothly that ―Rorty‘s style leaves the reader . . . with a quirky feeling that one has been 91 seduced (and) talked into Rorty‘s perspective. . . .‖ 92 Whitehead said, ―There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil‖ of absolutism; instead, relativism relates many ―half truths.‖ Rorty‘s historical description, in cumulative converging of narratives as arguments relates various ideas to make his case. How is this linking accumulation of ideas accomplished? Wittgenstein‘s understanding of a ―universal‖ tells how.93 A ―universal‖ is a ―thread‖ woven out of many short idea-fibres. No one fibre goes through the whole thread; each is entwined with the other, crisscrossing to weave a ―universal‖-thread. A ―name‖ that covers many instances often has no single feature among them, but has ―family resemblance‖ sometimes hard to see, as with ―game.‖94 This insight applies to Socrates, as follows. Socrates complained that Euthyphro‘s ―definition‖ of piety as ―what all gods love‖ amounts to a contradiction, ―what is loved by the gods and hated by them‖ (8a) in conflict. Euthyphro could have responded that this is by the nature of the case. Socrates‘ complaint holds only if a definition of ―piety‖ is set, identically universal, which is absurd. ―Piety‖ is an offer to each divinity what is due to it. There is no single ―generic gift‖ that pleases everyone; the same gift one loves, another can hate. Gifting is person-specific and cannot be uniform, much less arbitrary; the definition of piety could be amended as ―piety is what is loved by each god,‖ which rejects a universal offering of an identical gift to many gods, a contradiction. All this is no ―definition‖ but a relativistic description. Euthyphro‘s definition thus turns out to be accurate as ―piety‖ is situation-sensitive, milieu-relative as gifting is recipient-specific. Socrates‘ failed quest for a single universal, a definition of ―piety‖ brings out the failure of a search for definitive universals, so much so that Plato had to flee to the Never Land of Ideas/Forms beyond actuality. To Schrag, universals are ―transversals‖95 traversing different ideas. This traversing move is relativism
91 West 1989: 197. 92 Whitehead 1954: Prologue. 93 Wittgenstein (1953: 32e) is cited because he has influenced Rorty. 94 I showed how a ―good person‖ family-relates to a ―good blow‖; the family name of ―good‖ covers both instances whose family-connection seems unlikely (Wu 2001: 18-19). 95 See Wu 1998: 469 (index on ―transversals‖) and Wu, 2001: 671 (indexes on ―transversals‖ and ―universals‖). They are important notions in the West, but alien to China that is situation-sensitive.
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linking ―half truths‖ (Whitehead) as threads of idea-fibers (Wittgenstein) in a ―conversation of mankind‖ (Rorty). After all, thinking is logos-―gathering‖96 Heidegger exploited. Logos takes account of matters, and accounts for them; ―account‖ can be formal-analytically computing97 or recounting-telling concrete stories. Both ways to gather relate things to correlate them by logical-analytical accounting (the West) and/or narrating (China). Relativism is at work here. Philosophy in the West typified in Rorty sets the necessity and frame of pragmatic relativism, while thinking in China shows how actually it proceeds in storytelling relativism. Thinking in China is story-thinking,98 thinking by telling one mini-story after another, as stories link/relate life-matters, to relate our thinking to them. China ―story-argues‖ to refute anti-life approaches, to rally to the pro-life posture, to compose history that tells the triumphs of pro-life story-ideas (Confucianism, Taoism) as it confesses to the tragic anti-life practices in time.99 We now tell the stories of China‘s pro-life arguments.100 Confucius‘ three story-infused sighs of joy begin his Analects. He first praises the joy of learning and its daily practice to relate to life, then the joy of relating to friends in co-learning, and finally the calm joy of remaining composed when ignored. These instances exemplify how a person is to be rightly related to the actual world; being situation-appropriate (宜 yi2) is being-right (義 yi4) in the world; any notion is a concrete mini-story of being situation-proper. Story-notions are freely citable from life‘s ongoing. When Confucius told his disciple Tseng Tzu to thread his Tao with ―one,‖ Tseng Tzu cited ―loyalty‖ and ―considerateness‖ (4/15), but ―filiality‖ and ―brotherliness‖ (1/2) could as well be cited as the ―root of humanity‖ that Confucius would have favored, as well as ―humanity‖ itself. Jullien (1999) cited the ―propensity of things‖ as a central notion in China, but many other familiar notions could be cited as equally pivotal. Such is free relativism in Confucian story-thinking. Confucian relativism is a circle of actuality with many centers freely floating in time and space; it is a circle of history whose circumference expands everywhere. Taoism fully agrees with this concrete story-sentiment, albeit approaching life in ways so relaxed, roomy, and accommodating, that it is dubbed ―relativists in China.‖ Taoists live noninterference with things that are ―self-so,‖ naturally as they are, now up, now down, going their Tao-ways un-tao-able, no-joy as the ultimate joy. We must do without doing, be with it without being with it; such is life truly lived. Chuang Tzu is radical in such life-relativism. Cut away vast useless spaces that surround the small space our soles occupy, and we would not even be able to stand, much less walk (26/31-33). So, something useless is ―useful‖ in enabling something else to be useful, and so use and useless are inter-relative. Life likewise goes with knowledge and ignorance, being and nothing. We must dwell in their ―pivot‖ to gain both. The Pivot is at work in relativism. It sounds spooky. Chuang Tzu‘s concrete story helps us here. Chuang Tzu and his disciples met a useless gnarled tree that survived, immune from the woodcutter‘s ax, and then met a goose butchered for meal because it could not cackle; useless tree survives and useless goose is killed. So we must be at the midpoint between use and 96 Wu 1998: 162 (note 198) and 467 (index on ―logic‖); Wu 2001: 10 (note 23), 54-58, et passim. 97 Logical counting can be of two kinds, exclusive either-or logic and inductive fuzzy logic of more-or-less. The latter kind is open-ended and closer to storytelling logic. 98 Wu 2005. 99 Cf. Wu 2003. 100 I treated pro-life and anti-life stories in a more balanced way, and pleaded for their coming together (Wu 2002).
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useless, the Pivot that gathers the opposites, now dragon-up soaring, now snake slitheringdown, matching the situational shift (Chuang Tzu 20/1-5, Wu 2001: 135, 148-149). Be a transversal to traverse life‘s changing opposites in the dynamics of life-relativism. Chuang Tzu‘s is not a selfish opportunism but a selfless relativism to co-thriving, trailing closely in harmony with constant turns of the situation. Taoist relativism matches Rorty‘s circle with centers freely expanding everywhere every-when, center-less selves socializing in conversations to converge, to advancing history. All these descriptions are logically unstable, that is, quite beyond our analytical mind to pin down definitely, for all this amounts to being with the situation without being stuck in it, being useful without being fixed as ―useful,‖ doing without doing. They describe how our beloved toddlers behave. One moment they are perfect angels; the next moment we wonder, and must return them to Mom who knows how to handle them, angelic or not. Mom is their Pivot to naturally come home; Mom is our Pivot to return them home. Thus, we all must rally to the Pivot of Mother Nature to nurture life. Our situation is the toddling weather. If we don‘t like it, we wait a minute; if we do, we must prepare for the next moment. We tarry as birds in this branch and that, not staying in any. We are not cynical or selfish but simple, shrewd, and skillful at weathering life vicissitudes. All thinking in Taoism and Confucianism is thus life-relativism, while Legalism is a truncated relativism of brutal sociopolitical realism. All stories in China tell relativism as our adept relatedness to life‘s ongoing in which to survive/thrive. All living should be subtle/adaptive but not complex; it is ineffably natural and straight, adroit at living on abundantly without mind-twisting. Both Rorty and China tell stories. In storytelling, both dramatically meet as mutually distinct. To see how distinct they are, we look at three functions of stories. We can use stories as dispensable decoration, as dog‘s saliva at a bell sound illustrates Skinner‘s theory of conditioning. This is Story1. We can also manipulate stories for Rorty‘s pre-designed arguments. This is why Mr. West thought he was cheated. This is Story2. We can finally follow story to think; argument goes as story goes, story as argument, Story3. China is here. Story1 and Story2 are used for argument; if story is pulled out, argument still stands. Story3 argues as it proceeds; pull the story out, and argument vanishes. Story3 is haunted by thing‘s sense, going through things ambiguously; it is history in literature shimmering thinking, not yet thinking-pure-and-proper, clarifying needed. Rorty can help here. Story2 and Story1 have an armory of clear logic, neatly pretending praxis, shouting pragmatism while trapped in it as ism. Its breakthrough comes from Sory3 that does not use stories but thinks story-way. China can help here. We have thus described two sorts of thinking. Western thinking typified in Rorty has conceptual frames; Chinese thinking typified in Confucianism and Taoism has perceptual contents. To borrow Kant, then, the West without China is as empty as China without the West is blind.101 Both must gather, as ―logos‖-thinking gathers matters of life and of thinking. Relativism is its modus operandi, inter-relating, inter-enriching. Rorty can learn from China to be story-perceptive; China can learn from Rorty to be clearer and lucid. Both continue to think in thought-experiments with concrete examples and counter-examples from life. Both inter-learn, inter-transform, and inter-enrich, and these 101 I have considered similar differences in ―pragmatism‖ that both the West and China share. My conclusion was similar but slightly different from the one reached here. See Wu 1998: 313-342.
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―inter‖-activities are relativism at work. This is relativism of relativism. All these West-China interrelations result in ―world relativism,‖ another name for world concord.
4. World Relativism a. Relativism We saw how relativism is not an assertion of a definite thesis but being agilely, perceptively life-relative, a verb, a dynamics of life-process with negative and positive thrusts. Negatively, relativism challenges fixation, refusing closure of investigation, ever defying definitive assertion of any view as the ―final whole truth.‖ Positively, relativism is ever open to whatever actually comes, patiently sifting through each view in continuous conversations of critical interchanges, to inter-learn among conscientious co-inquirers. These two thrusts are our life-pulses to keep reasoning and letting rational sanity thrive worldwide. Such interactive relativism is crucial in democracy today that celebrates individualism, and who does not want individualism? Sadly, mere individualism asserts rights of many individuals as inviolable truths, and these many ―final truths‖ pit against one other to seed bloody confrontations, unless individualists somehow gather. This ―somehow‖ is relativism cherishing all individuals as ―half truths‖ to collect into ―whole truths‖ of social togetherness, on pain of tragic senseless combats. Some examples could elucidate this point. Woman‘s right to abortion is one half of the interpersonal truth, the fetus‘ right to life is another, and both must interrelate to fit a situation that comes differing from others. Palestinians and Israelis are brethren sharing similar aspirations religious, political, and territorial; there is no reason why they cannot negotiate for mutual benefits, on pain of interbutchery. National security is one half and individual freedom is another of ―national sovereignty,‖ each supporting the other on pain of destroying both. Free trade pitted against outsourcing contributes to economic tragedies. These opposites breed insoluble disasters when one or the other arrogates itself to the whole truth, inter-fighting into senseless bloodshed. These half-truths must join. Relativism is here, for one to meet others, sometimes stressing one, sometimes another, ever keeping an eye on the ―other‖ side, for diversity-love to balance off universality-justice (cf. Rorty 1991: 206). Relativism joins ―what it is‖ to ―how it works,‖ correlating ideas in conflict as above. The West says contradictions turn complements; China says Yin relates Yang, internecine, internascent. This agile relativism has two versions, Rorty‘s logical-analytical pragmatism and China‘s concrete storytelling circle, ever expanding history. China perceives to join various perceptions; Rorty argues for the necessity of joining, forming frames, then treats themes formally, analytically. Mo Tzu, Hui Tzu, and Kung-sun Lung treat logical themes, even tell their mini-stories. Here distinction is not of formal versus concrete themes but of how they are thought. The two modes of relativism, logical-formal102 and perceptive-storytelling, must inter-relate into a ―relativism of relativism‖ worldwide. Rorty‘s visit to China initiates this world-interrelation to compose ―world relativism.‖ 102 ―Why would someone who spent most of his career cogitating over Quine, Sellars, and Heidegger, and who wrote on social and political life as if it derived from this cogitation, be able to speak about this life? No matter what philosophy claimed the importance of practice, it remained an enterprise that favored not the lived world but the seminar room, yet still assumed that the latter could tell us of the former.‖ (Kuklick 2001: 281)
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b. World Relativism Here is a ―sneak preview‖ of future world relativism. We remember ―relativism‖ refuses to be final but keeps going to relate ideas into polyphonic transversals in a fugue-like montage of bits of insights. Watch Pascal‘s ―Pensées,‖ Kierkegaard‘s fragments, Marcel‘s journal, Weiss‘s philosophy in process, Wittgenstein‘s ―tractatus‖ or discussion, Rorty‘s philosophical papers, and Confucius‘ analects, Lao Tzu‘s classic, and ―Mencius,‖ ―Chuang Tzu,‖ etc. In all this, relativism refuses to systematize, kicking the ladder it climbed up on (Wittgenstein), denying to tao the Tao (Lao Tzu), the self forgetting the self (Chuang Tzu), and not helping growth (Mencius). Relativism wipes itself away. Its critics laugh at selfwiping as self-defeating; it vaunts it. Logically, denying a denial denies nothing to defeat itself; in practice, anti-anti-Communism (anti-McCarthyism) endorses no Communism (Wu 2001: 343). See Rorty‘s anti-anti-ethnocentrism (1991: 203-210). Climbing the ladder to kick it, again and again, is history.103 We have just told a story of world-conversation of relativism. On one hand, in thus describing how relativism describes to demonstrate, we have described relativism as storytelling. Isn‘t storytelling sinuously alive as relativism, as alert, empathetic, and judicious to life, in a word, as realistic and formative as relativism? On the other hand, doesn‘t relativism point to the story-way of story-formation, first appearing in oral conversation, then written down, and then revised, rewritten?104 Isn‘t history itself such a relativism-growth of storytelling? To be is to create and have our be-ing. It is storytelling in relativism-way, the Tao of life. The Tao cannot be tao-ed, ―it is walked and forms‖105; life is lived, formed, by narrating, relating, as it refutes itself.106 Now, doesn‘t this story of relativism ―self-defeat,‖ the feature so ridiculed by its opponents? Doesn‘t ―self-refutation‖ now take on a new significance of going up from the ground only to come down to the same ground as Whitehead said?107 The true method of discovery is like the flight of an aeroplane. It starts from the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation.
He may not have realized that this thinking-airplane can fly up because it takes off from the ground down here and ―lands‖ back down here. The ground enables the flight up and down, and it is the ground, the no-flight, that enables the odd flight where thinking thrives in ―inconsistency,‖ a word that appears right after the above quotation. It says, ―It (thinking) can even play with inconsistency; and can thus throw light on the consistent, and persistent, elements in experience by comparison with what in imagination is inconsistent with them.‖ As the ground is non-existent during the flight to enable the flight, so, being non-existent, the influence of relativism is felt in thinking everywhere. This strange situation shows as self-
103 Rorty took the ladder climbing-kicking differently (5/22/2002: 7-8) but would agree that the activities make history. 104 No wonder, Rorty came to opt for the priority of literature over philosophy. 105 Chuang Tzu 2/33. 106 Marcel has life-dramas of ―yes-but‖ without intellectual imperialism of a system as ―mine‖ (Schilpp 1984: 455). I wish Rorty did so oftener, since Rorty opposes such imperialism. 107 Whitehead 1978: 5. See Wu 2001: 254.
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effacing, self-defeating, so subtle, and so impressive. It appears in Wittgenstein, then in Chuang Tzu and Lao Tzu, as follows. Wittgenstein performed self-effacing inconsistency by concluding Tractatus, oraclelike,108 6.54: My sentences are illuminating in the following way: to understand me you must recognize my sentences—once you have climbed out through them, on them, over them—as senseless. (You must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after you have climbed up on it.) You must climb out through my sentences; then you will see the world correctly.
Philosophical thinking is ―senseless‖; we ―climb up on the ladder‖ of thinking only to ―throw it away,‖ to climb ―out through‖ their sentences to ―see the world correctly.‖ This is the negative thrust of relativism, as Rorty practiced it in deconstructing Western philosophy. Still, Wittgenstein and Rorty philosophized and wrote all this down, and we must understand them before we can climb out through them, climb up on the ladder before we kick it. Climbing the ladder follows its rungs, its rule, and kicking it also follows some rules to avoid getting hurt. So, aren‘t the ladder-kicking rules the ladder-climbing rules (Max Black109)? Thus the rules are the ladder. Where is the kicking, then? Wittgenstein and Rorty defeat themselves,110 and we must senselessly live it, and this living is enabled by relativism‘s refusal of the final say. Wittgenstein‘s another saying puts it positively. ―Don‘t worry about what you have already written. Just keep on beginning to think afresh as if nothing at all had happened yet.‖111 So, Rorty continues to think logically after turning analytical necessity obsolete (1967) and abolishing it (1979), then kicks the ethnocentrism-ladder to reach anti-antiethnocentrism (1991: 203-210); his is neither culturally bigoted ethnocentrism nor culturally bigoted anti-ethnocentrism.112 The ladder is now our past thought that is not here; the ladder now is to be kicked into our past, our launch pad to tomorrow. Thinking is life‘s relentless process from past to present; process ever begins. Relativism is kids ever beginning at the beginning, learning from the past and from the now pushed into the past, to begin afresh on one‘s own. Learning is an imitation that kicks the original, for ―imitation‖ is now creation, not copying.113 In this milieu, no neat packaging is possible. One must pick as many insights as one can, insights big and small, relevant and irrelevant. These messy ―adventures of ideas‖ (Whitehead) describe the scattered character of seminal revolutionary writings. This is why the dotted feature114 of the journal-making of Pascal, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Marcel, Buber,
108 Kolak 1998: 49. I quoted from this most recent translation I know of. An earliest translation I know of is Ogden 1922: 189 that has a slightly different rendering, albeit with basically the same sentiment. 109 Significantly, Black (―Is the ‗Tractatus‘ self-defeating?‖ in 1966: 378-386) rehearses our process of understanding mathematical ―infinity‖ and metaphysical concepts by extending ordinary notions, to defend Wittgenstein against the criticism that Wittgenstein falls into total senselessness. 110 Sadly, Rorty did not say so. 111 Wittgenstein 1961: 30 (6), quoted by Black, 1966: 2. 112 Geertz‘ spirited ―anti anti-relativism‖ kicks noun-relativism to launch into verb-relativism of which he is ignorant; his ―argument‖ is a mere collection of quotations. See Wu 2001: 342-344. 113 For Aristotle (Poetics, 48b4-14, Barnes, 1984), learning occurs via imitation that he never took as an exact copying. Cf. Wu 1998a. 114 On ―dotted pragmatics‖ see Wu 2001: 387-395.
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and even Paul Weiss,115 among many others in the history of human thinking, such as Chinese, is significant.116 This explains Rorty‘s almost journalistic style, how he talks us into his way of thinking, for he is thinking aloud himself, ever inviting readers, even ―enticing‖ them to join in the quest, albeit in his typical analytical wording. Rorty with his teacher Weiss117 and others never yield to the temptation to universalize and conclude too quickly to seal themselves in a splendid consistency of a system, as relativism keeps warning against it.118 Instead, Rorty‘s ―philosophical papers‖ are pouring out into the market119 as ―journals.‖ His notional bits are Wittgenstein‘s ―fibres‖—analysis, solidarity, democracy, irony (i.e., no final vocabulary), social hope, and ―Dewey,‖ ―Heidegger,‖ ―Quine,‖ ―Wittgenstein,‖ ―Sellars,‖ ―Putnam,‖ ―Davidson,‖ ―Derrida,‖ ―Geertz,‖ ―Lyotard,‖ ―Whitman,‖ etc., conversing with them.120 Each idea-fiber overlaps the other, inter-crisscrossing into a journalistic collage of living thoughts Rorty-esque, faintly reflecting a web of contingencies, of life vicissitudes. Here an overlapping of familiar themes blunts no pleasure of savoring the resulted journals that continue to make an ever fresh impact on our life-quest. These bits subtly merge into a musical montage, whose leitmotifs spontaneously appear and reappear in fuguemodulations. The whole show is impressively free, forceful, original, and organic, to illuminate life-perplexities. It is a ladder to climb up on and kick away, that is, to provoke our pondering on lifeperplexities so as to revolutionize life itself. If this does not make up relativism at its most pungent and persuasive in world history, if this does not make for world relativism, what does? Let us now look closer to savor its proceeding. The history-ladder is to climb up on to kick away, only to come back for us to climb again and kick again. Chuang Tzu kept insisting that the past is useless because it is irrelevant to the present; to try to follow the past is to follow footprints, not the moving shoes, to revere the scum of old, not its life, or to push a boat on land, not a cart.121 Then, Chuang Tzu‘s insistence on the uselessness of the past itself turns into the past for us to kick away. History does not repeat itself; it rhymes. Our kicking is the way toward re-freshening our present as the past was the once present re-freshening the past at that time, but in the manner of that time, not ours. The life of the present consists in this continual renewed kicking. Our thought experiment keeps going that we will later throw away. Nietzsche told us to kill God; our true God is in fact our past we have killed, consciously or no. For Kierkegaard, our true teacher is the dead one; we add that she is our past who passes on in the hand of our present. 115 Cf. Weiss 1955-1989. Thinkers in the West are cited because all Chinese thinkers are journalistic. 116 This is why these writers are hard to summarize and their ―systematic progress‖ hard to chart. This phenomenon is typified by Lao Tzu and Johanson 1991, a bewilderingly superb book on mental healing based on Lao Tzu. 117 Rorty 1979: xiii; Kuklick 2001: 275; West 1989: 194. 118 ―But then are these thinkers ‗relativists‘?‖ Well, all thinkers are alive to the extent that they are ―relativistic.‖ This is less to say that all thinkers are relativists than that they are true thinkers so long as they sensitively heed the warning of relativism and embody its ruthless life-following thrust. 119 After his Linguistic Turn (1967) and opposition to the Mirror (1979), that is. 120 See e.g., Rorty 1985, 1989, 1991, 1991a, 1995, 1998, 1999, 1999a. Significantly, these journalistic bits include no China and its culture. Rorty‘s cultural conversations remain formally confined to the Western culture, as its analytic tone insinuates, for it is foreign to China. This essay nudges him to extend his ―cultural conversations‖ to China to fulfill his aspiration of world conversation, in the relativism-élan. 121 Waley 1982: 14-19, has a convenient collection of these stories (Chuang Tzu 13/68-74, 14/35, 74-78, etc.).
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This is the only way our life advances, and this is the modus operandi of relativism, a dynamic implosion of the past to explode forward, pulverizing the surrounding as it presses ahead, building ladders to explode them—and those pieces are themselves bits of dynamite to continue exploding. Innovation makes no boring system but provokes systems, as Socrates‘ early dialogues, Pascal‘s Pensées, Buber‘s I and Thou, Marcel‘s concentric expositions, Rorty‘s ―philosophical papers,‖ Confucius‘ ―analects,‖ Mencius‘ conversations, Lao Tzu‘s tantalizing sayings. Wittgenstein‘s formalistic ―fibres‖—short, aphoristic, overlapping and crisscrossing— match Lao Tzu‘s gnomic sayings, concrete, ambiguous and loosely piled. Both are less linear continual expositions than evocative invitations to exploration together. We look forward to Rorty in the spirit of Wittgenstein to turn perceptive as Lao Tzu; we look forward to a Lao Tzu today to learn from Rorty to clarify China‘s bits, concrete, scattered, to make coherent organic sense. Rorty‘s own logical ―linguistic turn‖ must turn pragmatic toward Chinese lifeperspicacity, which in turn must have some ―logical turn‖ to clarify itself. The result is again building, climbing, and kicking the ladder. The Tao Te Ching builds its own ladder, climbing it as it kicks it, an exercise in significant futility; ―Tao tao-able is no Abiding Tao,‖ it begins to go on ―tao-ing‖ out such an untao-able Tao to the end. Lao Tzu‘s entire volume begins advertising its own senselessness, as Wittgenstein‘s Tractatus ends with such announcement. Both self-destroy. ―Why bother to build a ladder and kick it?‖ This exercise gives life and its vibrant history. Its self-inconsistency makes Tao Te Ching and Tractatus alive, controversial, provoking re-interpretations by new generations to live on afresh.122 Thus the story of relativism tells in its serpentine way, the way history tells our life-story to shape us. We must live well to understand relativism, and must study relativism to understand our life and its ―logic of history,‖ its story argument. In relativism, story and history blend to cease to be irrational. Here life is not choked by a straightjacket of definitive deductive logic and absolutist assertions. Thus relativism spreads to silently support and push all sorts of thinking and writings. It is itself not a definitive topic in encyclopedias and dictionaries in the West, nor is it considered in China.
c. Rorty Joining China We have just told a story of relativism in Rorty joined to relativism in China, as befits relativism that relates. All this amounts to delightful ―world relativism‖ synonymous with world concord, and symphonic in the concord. It all begins at world-cultural relativism in ―conversation of mankind‖ of world cultures Rorty envisions, and fulfills China‘s ageless aspiration that ―within the Four Seas we are all brethren.‖ World concord is the music of life relativism. Music is a verb; it cannot sit still. Relativism is a process of co-making the music of life together, wherein the world composes as it performs its life-symphony of ―inter-resonating music 交響曲,‖ as a Chinese translation of ―symphony‖ aptly puts it.123 World inter-resonance keeps making this historical life122 ―Paradoxes‖ in religious scriptures also demand continual reinterpretations and re-translations. From our human perspective, the scriptures appear relativistic. 123 Symphony sums up all reflections above. Drama could have done so, as will be mentioned soon. Drama tends poetic as Shakespeare‘s dramas do to inspire so many composers. Here drama, symphony, and poetry unite, to
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symphony. It knows no finale as we in history know no end of history. Our ignorance is Socratic, pushing China learning and living rightly. Socrates‘ ignorance echoes Confucius‘ calm when ignored by men (1/1). This ignorance is deep and full. I once asked a little boy, ―How old are you?‖ he said, ―I don‘t know.‖ ―What‘s your name?‖ ―I forget; Mom knows!‖ His brother then proudly declared, ―He don‘t know nothin‘!‖ and then they joined hands, and ran away. I stood there, awed. (Wu 1997: 20) ―Mom knows‖ indicated how full his ignorance was, forever in Mother Nature. And that name-forgotten boy parents me awestruck. Simplicity cannot be learned; it can only be unlearned by daily lessening (Lao Tzu 48). An old shaman Black Elk of the Oglala Sioux played on all fours with toddlers, for ―They are just from Great Mystery; I‘m soon to return to It.‖124 History‘s goal is philosophy‘s end, to lessen complexity to begin as toddlers. Rorty the ―informed dilettante‖ now manages a ―hermeneutic salon,‖ a complex apex where complex Western philosophies converge and various transversals con-verse among various discourses. Here the historic great gather,125 to enjoy respect of members of all warring factions, Hundreds of Schools blossoming to thrive in ―multiple reflective equilibria‖ (Huang 2001).126 As later Heidegger turned to poetry, Rorty‘s ―salon‖ must have ―plays, poems, and especially novels‖ and comparative literature,127 to dramatize the truth that logic is dialogical, as humanity is inter-human. His analytical locution is about to turn literary-intercultural to relate to China‘s story-thinking, and both are ripe to reduce to toddler‘s simplicity128 in Lao Tzu. ―Great Ones are ones who lose none of their Baby-heart‖ (Mencius 4B12). The end of philosophy is endless; it begins to begin to simplify into Socratic ignorance that begins and begins as toddlers. All this ignorance-process ends philosophy and ever transforms it afresh, kicking ladders of thinking to fulfill Rorty‘s ―social hope,‖ the ―solidarity‖ of world ―democracy‖ in the ongoing ―conversations of mankind,‖ in a sinuous logic of life-drama. Here Confucius threads his Tao with so many bits, each as ―one.‖ Wittgenstein climbs and kicks the ladder. Lao Tzu describes the indescribable Tao. The old awesome shaman plays on all fours with toddlers. Later Heidegger self-effaces in poetry; we see him in Marcel‘s music and drama. Rorty complains about analytical necessity and stays in it, kicks mirror to mirror actuality. This sinuous drama unifies poetry and life into the symphony of history.
present life that goes on to compose history. History is thus literally rhymed, danced, dramatized, and sung forth together. 124 Smith 1991: 374. 125 ―More than most analysts, Rorty was interested in the history of philosophy‖ (Kuklick 2001: 276), to draw thinkers of all persuasions. 126 Dr. Yong Huang is the only serious Chinese disciple of Rorty I know of. His neat morphology, in the spirit of Rorty, of personal-interpersonal relations is my version of ―relativism‖ so elegant. Mine is a loose convergence of conversing ideas à la Rorty, extended to China. Rorty‘s shadow is over us both, stretching beyond his actual self. 127 His writings have been too analytical in tone to be classified as ―literary‖; English professors would hesitate to adopt them as texts in class (although 1979 and 1999a are beautiful) despite his having been in the Humanities and the Comparative Literature Departments. 128 Rorty (1999a: xxii) wants to unmake Platonic artificiality back to the simplicity of naturalism.
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Mr. West129 envisions ―prophetic pragmatism‖; Rorty is Hall‘s (1994) new pragmatic ―prophet and poet.‖ China‘s notional fibers weave-into (wen 文) a literary mirror of life-flow, history (shih 史). It is wen-shih, interweaving literature (wen) as history (shih), reflected in the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides reflected on by Aristotle (Jones, 1962), and in Shakespeare‘s and Chinese tragedies. The weaving converses in space/time into the drama of history, befriending the ancients and among world cultures today. Sinuous lifedrama is here. ―What drama is Rorty‘s?‖ Attending to locution (1967), he can attend to the locutionmode of his attending.130 Having demolished the mirror-assumption with its own argument for it and beat ―analyticity supreme‖ with analyticity (1979), he can now move freely in and out of analyticity. His cultural conversation can expand beyond the West, can be out ―of the West‖ (1979: 394), while staying in the West. If this is no relativism in situ, what is? The relativism-élan in his pragmatic conversation with diverse partners can stretch beyond the West. His pragmatism is yet to soften into literary warmth as the winter-sun smile at trees. English professors may still hesitate to assign Rorty‘s philosophical papers as required readings, but Rorty is working toward that stage. His 1999, 1999a, and unpublished 9/18/2001, 5/22/2002, 4/21/2003131 are turning persuasive, intercultural, and autobiographical in tone, not just in themes, and 4/12/2003a approaches China‘s historical thinking. This trend augurs well for his structural linkage to China. China, on its part, would benefit much from Rorty‘s careful clarifying and framing, while China itself is fully conversant with risks of analytical formalism. Now Rorty‘s cultural pragmatism begins to practice world relativism. Nothing more can be said. It must be done.
E. VARIOUS PONDS ALIVE Primeval pond, in constant sounds of primal silence so profound so disorderly! Thick vines are entwined with gnarled trees tall and short, each spreads to entwine the other, and another, until they inter-involve everywhere to weave out an eternal twilight of thick shades shimmering, flickering, dawns and dusks, imbibing rancid redolence of putrefied wet soil teeming with life in death, death in life. Nowhere is richer than the pond that is everywhere in the middle of nowhere. I am so obsessed with this pond alive, one yet so varied, so many, that I continue to collect books after books of their descriptions and photographs. Each volume is similar to any other, yet 132 how distinct each is, charming me without ceasing, without rhyme or reason! Wallace 133 Stevens says, 129 West 1989: 211-239. 130 ―We simply refuse to talk in a certain way, the Platonic way. The views we hope to persuade people to accept cannot be stated in Platonic terminology. So our efforts at persuasion must take the form of gradual inculcation of new ways of speaking, rather than straightforward argument within old ways of speaking.‖ (Rorty 1999a: xix) Did he realize that his analytical argumentation is itself a ―straightforward argument within old ways of speaking,‖ and its alternative is ―gradual inculcation‖ in, among others, storytelling-reading practiced for millennia in China? 131 The last essay was his history of Western philosophy, not philosophy in story-way to which he now comes close. 132 Les Line, ed., The National Audubon Society Speaking for Nature: A Century of Conservation, Hugh Lauter Levin Associates, 1999. Stewart L. Udall, America‟s Natural Treasures: National Nature Monuments and
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Kuang-ming Wu The poet has his own meaning for reality, and the painter has, and the musician has; and besides what it means to the intelligence and to the senses, it means something to everyone, so to speak. Notwithstanding this, the word in its general sense, which is the sense in which I have used it, adapts itself instantly. The subject-matter of poetry is not that ―collection of solid, static objects extended in space‖ but the life that is lived in the scene that it composes; and so reality is not that external scene but the life that is lived in it. Reality is things as they are. The general sense of the word proliferates its special senses. It is a jungle in itself.
The jungle of the ponds is where the sense is one jumping in and out of many, the general in particulars, crisscrossing, joining in droves to disperse, over and over again, making jungles of ponds, called ―alive‖ as kids hawk-soaring, fish-jumping, ever moving never tamed. Things are topsy-turvy here, ever dying to live on. Now, my friend, do not bewail over such primeval ponds vanishing, for they are all over nowhere in particular, called ―urban sprawls,‖ thick with noises and smells, dirt and risks, lives and deaths, highways and high-rises. Such urban sprawls jostle with stodgy rural expansions, among the prairie homes. These homes sprawl around ―Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average,‖ as Garrison Keillor tirelessly and timelessly tells us. Of course, the Lake and the prairie homes are nowhere everywhere; they are so common we never notice them until someone like Keillor picks them up for radio shows. The weekly shows have lasted for forty years, and the shows are still going strong. So, the ponds so varied are all around for you to live and choose. You want it? You will have it, poverty and profundity, histories and trinkets, economic boom and its bubble-bursts, fetishes and decays, music and museums, global warming and bitter winters. You name it, and it is there somewhere. Can we see any difference here from primeval ponds alive? They are all ―sound and fury, signifying nothing‖! Shakespeare said so, and his ―so‖ is now enshrined in literature signifying something we cherish, whatever ―so‖ or ―something‖ is. 134 Bergson wondered aloud why humanity with constant intelligence could have been attended with stubborn superstitions so foul and constant. We can express the same wonder about why humanity with constant intelligence could have constant dullards jostling with Einstein, holy sages with hobos and hoodlums, Thomas Edison and Mother Teresa with Al Capone and Adolf Hitler. Our lifeworld is the varied ponds alive, indeed, to take our breaths away, while we keep on breathing. Now, we do not realize. We are the ponds, and so the ponds never cease to exist. We are everywhere nowhere in particular, so the ponds are everywhere nowhere all around, teeming with life and death, profound and absurd, saintly insane. Here is the humus of humanity where all hustle and bustle jostles into our lifeworld. Various ponds alive are the origin of Seashores, Waukesha, WI: Country Beautiful Corp., 1971. Clay Anderson, et al., Life in Rural America (1974), Thomas B. Allen, et al., America‟s Outdoor Wonders: State Parks and Sanctuaries (1987), Merrill Windsor, America‟s Sunset Coast (1978), all published by National Geographic Society. Lynda DeWitt, Ocean Wildlife, NY: W. H. Smith Publishers, 1990. François Leydet, Grand Canyon: Time and the River Flowing, Sierra Club: Ballantine Books, 1964. Shifra Stein, selected, Speak to the Earth, Kansas City, MO: Hallmark Cards, 1972. And the list goes on. These volumes, so many, are timelessly beautiful as Nature is. I omit all volumes on the beauty of urban sprawls. 133 Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (Vintage, 1965), quoted in Modern Poetics, ed. James Scully, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1965, p. 139. 134 Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1935), Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co., 1954, pp. 102-103.
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themselves, the harvest of themselves, inter-entwined as causes and effects, one to the other, to and fro, back and forth. Such ponds, we must remember, are many and varied. Plurality displays varieties of riches. One culture and one language can keep scholars busy for life. Think of being bicultural, bilingual, what riches that entails! How about thrilling multilingual multiculturalism! They are so many countless ponds so variously alive, primeval and urban and rural! The thrill of travel to many different lands and regions lies here. So many places have so many worlds. ―Places change, things change,‖ says Japan.135 The world we live is bewilderingly pluralistic. Just watch any group of insects that never come alone; they all come in groups, and in various groups. Any plant bespeaks its species, cedar or oak or red maple. They are all beyond our tabulations, keeping us busy doing their taxonomy. Seasons vary also; each season of each year is all distinct from all others. No wonder, poems flourish beyond classification. Similarly, each walk of life has its own swing and charm, with its own headaches and thrills, as an infinite variety of journals and autobiographies constantly tell. Buddha proposed a leitmotif of the music of life we all compose and perform, birth, senescence, sickness, and death, and we all perform this life-music with infinite variations so distinct. Moreover, the world is made of countless varieties of such walks and music of lives, with countless fascinations and frustrations. The world is plural-single so rich, a collection of zillion miscellanies. Our lifeworld is usually taken as singular, ―the world,‖ but our universe is so rich as to better be taken as ―pluri-verse‖ as William James correctly intuited. The Christian monotheism takes God as Three in One. Is its God one or three? Whatever else it means, though, the description must mean that the Christian One is rich beyond our human understanding and imagination. Still, ―pluri-verse‖ or ―Trinity‖ is too awesomely far away to handle, and so we take the world as ―various ponds alive,‖ which is our theme here. The rich plurality of various ponds is alive, intimated by three incredible images in increasing complexity, the strange circles, the zillions of grains of sand, and inter-reflecting kaleidoscopes. The world as various ponds is alive in these three ways, circular, sandy, and kaleidoscopic, bewilderingly relativistic. Now, these features are entered one by one, quite fascinatingly, as follows.
One: Circles Centers Everywhere, Circumferences Nowhere The lifeworld ponds are circles whose centers are everywhere, whose circumferences nowhere. A circle with a center and an edge stays put as a circle. A circle of everywherecenter and nowhere-edge goes round and round, out and out. It cannot stay but swirls stunning us, for ―everywhere‖ is ―here and elsewhere,‖ ―nowhere‖ is ―ever expanding elsewhere from ‗here‘,‖ and ―elsewhere‖ moves somewhere ―else‖ not ―here‖-anywhere. This circle is then a moving coherence, a circle of many circles blending one into the other in waves, out and out. The world is made of such circles so many, bewilderingly interinvolving. Each goes out to include others that include it, interchanging to inter-change. Thus 136 Emerson writes, 135
「所變れば品變る」; the saying has tons of overtones in connotations. 136 The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, NY: The Modern Library, 2000, p. 252.
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Kuang-ming Wu The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher world. St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere, and its circumference nowhere .... Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon . . . .
―Without end‖ ciphers the beyond as ―every end a beginning‖ does my self gazing at the horizon, opening out. The circle‘s center everywhere is ―I‖ freely moving, as its circumference nowhere is I beyond me moving out. I am the Beyond in me, living on to accompany all things. No wonder, I am happy with flying birds above that hoard nothing, in songs of inter-thriving life that pulsate this world, singing the lifeworld. ―Those who hear not the music think the dancer mad‖; I am madly dancing my own music I hear to disappear into a community of beings beyond me, and the community keeps expanding as it dances with me, out and out. I am happy beyond joy and sorrow! ―Ultimate joy, no joy,‖ chimes in Chuang Tzu. All this describes the world as lively ponds ever dynamic, inter-involved, interexpanding. We cite only five circles, all ordinary and stunning: my daily ongoing, my living, my culture, interculture, and storytelling, and the list goes on; each describes a circle, a pond, and a world in plural. Obviously, these circle-ponds are my self interacting with my worlds to inter-dance our lifeworld. We are here dragonflies tail-dotting the pond without dotting it to produce circles expanding their centers all over, edges vanishing out and out. First, the ponds are ―my‖ daily ongoing combined into so many ―my‖ ongoings. Daily ongoing is both coherent as one day, and at the same time continues to open out into another day, for ―there is always a tomorrow,‖ as someone smiles and says when he has missed this last train to go for an engagement. My day is mine, centered as my day and myself, and yet my day is mine because it is not just mine but connects inexorably to the next, and to another ―me‖ with another ―my day.‖ My day centered goes on and on into an open tomorrow, forever, every-when, and goes into another person‘s day, influenced by that day to expand my day‘s circumference nowhere, going far invisible. And then this my day inevitably connects to other ―my days‖ into many ―my days.‖ Many ponds are right here as my daily ongoing into other daily ongoing. Secondly, the ponds are my living, combined with many ―my‖ livings. My living is a pond dotted with raindrops of many inspirations, joys, and sorrows, as portrayed in my diary, journal, and business portfolios. These raindrops of joys of inspiration and sorrows of disappointment are meaningful—coherent, centered—everyday, everywhere-centered, and keep expanding out and out. These ripples are each centered and coherent, moving on to blend with my other drips of today, then tomorrow, and blend with ripples of other people and ponds, and vanish, and even my memories of them fade, joyous and sorrowful, as days go on; their edges fade as they expand, into nowhere beyond. Thirdly, the ponds are my cultures, for all my life‘s ongoing and my living are encultured and culture-enfleshed, for without my culture no one, not even me, can understand my day, much less my joys and sorrows. My ongoing and my living make sense only in terms of my culture. My culture shapes me meaningful in my world.
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Mind you. My culture I do not make; it shapes me into myself. My culture is my center that goes with me everywhere showing me as ―me.‖ At the same time, as my culture carries me everywhere, I inadvertently change and reshape it, even while I speak my standard cultural language in my own accent, conduct my daily engagement my way and not your way, and my lifestyle I form and show a new culture, as it is fashioned by the fashion of the day. Besides, my very reshaping of my culture is also subtly influenced and shaped unawares by my neighbors‘ ways of shaping our common culture. In ―keeping up with the Jones‖ the Jones shape me as I shape the Jones—ad infinitum, that is, the edge of my culture turns into ours, and ―our culture‖ has the edge that goes vastly out and out, far out there nowhere. My culture is the ponds with everywhere-centers and nowhere-edges. Fourth, the ponds are interculture, for in today‘s small global village, no dog barking here, no cock crowing at dawn anywhere, is not heard elsewhere. A ―butterfly flaps its wings 137 in the Amazon and brings about a hurricane in southeastern England.‖ No fashion created in one culture is not carried over, blown up, modified, and reshaped, however unawares, by instant communication media. The medium is the message, and both the medium and the message here are cultural and interculture. In fact, the matter cuts much deeper and uncanny. Words are etymologically alive, with stories of actual situations as we, each in our specific cultural region, see them. The word ―nation‖ is so rigid that it has no ―inter-nation‖; instead we have ―internationalization‖ that can ominously connote cultural control if not conquest, in colonization, colonialism. Luckily we have ―culture‖ to ―interculture.‖ China-West interculture takes place in three dimensions. First, with Western logical sensitivity (trained by its logic, not its logic itself) we are amazed to appreciate the concrete subtlety of Chinese culture in historical depth. Then, conversely, with such Chinese lifesensitivity, we appreciate the lucid clarity of Western culture in precise analysis. Finally, we thereby catalyze both cultures to inter-acclimatize, to inter-enrich. These logical stages are dimensions of frame-comparison that involves frame-shift to inter-enrich, and frame-shift in turn involves breaking the original frame. Frame-breaking typifies pain, as described in previous sections. So, interculture as a dynamic framecomparison involves pain of frame-breaking similar to culture-shock, but this pain of cultureshock is the pain of growth comparable to baby‘s teething and teenager‘s hormone-change, often an excruciating pain. Intercultural pain involves shaking our basic frame of assumptions. Xenophobia is natural, to shrink into viewing alien culture in ―our culture-frame,‖ or totally collapsing ―our culture‖ into wholesale importation of alien culture-frame. The double risks attend all cultures in contact, and both risks are already materializing. The present volume emerges in response, to firmly insist on going through the growing pain of frame-breakage without shrinking or capitulation. It is a brave frame-change in frame-comparison, to achieve the harvest of the brave new riches of inter-culture. All this happens in the climate of ―culture.‖ Etymologically, climate is a region of 138 weather that blows wind, an atmosphere that is a vapor-sphere. So, culture is our lifeclimate, the way we live, our lifestyle-climate, the region of our weather where our sort of 137 This is a well-known adage freshly quoted by Niall Ferguson, ―Complexity and Collapse‖ (pp. 18-32), Foreign Affairs, March/April 2010, p. 22. We use it here in a slightly different context. 138 See Oxford English Dictionary (1991), 2001, for ―atmosphere‖ as vapor ball or sphere (I: 750) (cf. ―air‖ as affective atmosphere of a situation in I: 277, cf. 氣骨), ―climate‖ as slope, region, latitude, clime (III: 322), and ―weather‖ as storm, flood, wind, to blow (XX: 55).
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wind blows. As we go from one climate of culture to another, we breathe a different atmosphere, blown in a new sphere of vapor-wind. We must acclimatize against cultural ―hay-fever‖ to be a cultured cosmopolitan, not shrunk inside our original culture. Interrevolution in different climates inter-cultures to inter-enrich, inter-grow. Here in different culture-weathers we are weathered and strengthened to become cultured persons. Refusing to acclimatize in xenophobia against culture-shock, we will come to regard other culture as part of our own, and cultural chauvinistic colonialism follows. We now take culture-encounter as culture-war, and then our cultural colonialism destroys victim-culture, and then victor-culture vanishes for lack of contrast and inter-learning inter-growth. Interculture is actually deep in me. To be aware of my culture at all is already to go outside the immediacies of my ongoing of my living, to look at it in terms of cultures other than my own. Self-awareness is already intercultural. ―Myself‖ can appear to me as myself, which is other than my spontaneous self, only by being mirrored in my other, as I can look at my face only via another, and the more varied others I have to look at me, the better ideas I would have of me. Here, ―more varied others‖ describe others of more varied cultures other than mine. Existence is inter-existence to the core, and so I am interculture to become really me in Global Village. Interculture is inherently plural, many ponds. My pond appears as itself, only as intercultural ponds, many and various. I am many cultural others. Finally, the ponds are a various telling of many stories. All above is told in stories we must realize. Stories are various as their telling is variously manner-ed. Each story has its coherent center sensible, to enable understanding, and as such interblend with all others, vanishing into them as they mutually expand to blend into one another. All such storytelling begins at the basic simple level of words. Words are themselves alive, to tell their own stories of etymologies and histories and connotations, and these wordstories interblend to compose sentence-stories of my ongoing, my life, my culture, and my interculture, with all other selves‘ life-ongoing, cultures, and interculture. Storytelling facilitates and embodies various ponds alive interblending; storytelling is the structure of such many varies ponds alive with daily ongoing of living in cultures intercultural, exploding round and round, out and out. All these inter-involvements cipher various interactions between my self and my ponds. To begin, the world is a pond; we are a dragonfly hovering over it, the tail touching the watersurface without touching it, constantly making one circle after another, each expanding and vanishing into the others. Such freedom, so light and delightful, takes our breath away. The dragonfly hovers, flies as it touches the pond-water, touching the pond as it flies over, uniting the flying and the touching. ―Hills far/ mirrored/ in dragonfly‘s eyes,‖ Issa 139 Flying around moves around the hills and perspectives, moving even the ―reported.‖ canons of thinking, the thinking-style, and hovering and touching all over applies its shifting perspectives and thinking-styles, expanding to vanish nowhere, as they vanish into other circle-ripples of perspectives and thinking-styles. ―Do shifting styles and perspective really make so many ponds unlimited?‖
139 Sam Hamill renders it as ―The distant mountains/ are reflected in the eye/ of the dragonfly,‖ in The Little Book of Haiku (1995), NY: Barnes and Noble, 2002, tr. Sam Hamill, p. 83. Sadly, I could not find the original in 蕪村集一茶集，栗山理一等校注，譯，東京小學院, 1989.
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Let us watch again. Dragonfly flying is lived living thinking, expanding as it makes circle-ripples edgeless and pan-centered, constantly life-dotting over the pond of the lifeworld so many ponds. Flying expands moving to express thinking, never standing still on the solid bank of staid logical canons to deal with all moving things, including the dragonfly flying life hovering over the pond-waves constantly rippling, with breeze blowing wherever it wants. Now, this dragonfly is not alone but joined by countless others flying over countless ponds, hovering over countless lifeworlds. The touches move and fly to touch, and the ponds then turn alive and various, thanks to the touches flying-moving. We would not be surprised, then, if the ponds melt into the dragonflies, and both turn into one pond-dragonfly in its throbbing plurality showing things quite alive, beyond naming. The situation is breathtakingly beyond our imagination, stunning beyond our dreams! Ponds and dragonflies gather to hover and dance, singing the world, so many, symphonic.
Two: Zillion Sand-Grains, Zillion Worlds Zillions of grains of sand at the bottoms of various world-ponds also intimate ponds alive; suspending bits of sand in ponds turn the ponds so dirty and alive. The sands disperse and sway as waves stir the pond water, blown up and down by the wind. In each grain of sand 140 we see a world whole, as William Blake intones, as these zillions of sand-grains are alive, swirling, gathering, and dispersing as waves sway and winds blow, season after season, in rain and in snow, as breeze and as gale. Thus, zillions of grains of sand alive in seasonal hues and shapes mirror the lifeworld, as these sand-grains envision countless worlds of various ponds alive, as these sand-grains show an incredible variety of appearances to show an incredible variety of world-ponds alive, in four ways below, among many others. A grain of sand implies, one, to be one-ed is integrity; two, to be pure is to focus; three, simplicity is specialty; thus four, the small is the vast. The four points gather to describe how sand-grains mirror various ponds of the world alive, for ―alive‖ appears as variously varied in time and space. One, a sand-grain implies that to be one-ed is integrity. The logical law of identity, P is P, is concretized as the existential law of integrity, A is A. Truly one is one-ing one-ed, A A-ed, to promote the integrity of a thing, and the smaller a thing is, the easier it is to solidify its integrity; the smaller a thing is, the harder it is to penetrate it, much less pulverize it. Thus the smallness of a thing consolidates the natural law of integrity. Not accidentally, Jesus points us to the smallest of seeds, the mustard seed, what grows up the greatest of trees 141 for birds to come nest. Integrity is alive, and the small facilitates its life-integrity. It follows that the tiniest grain of sand is the stalwart of living integrity, as the smallest particles—sands of ―wavicles‖—wave to swing the vibration of the universe, the pond continually alive. Two, a sand-grain implies that to be pure is to focus, free of distraction, of dissipation buried in the crowd. Integrity induces the purity of focusing, and is synonymous with it. Once 140 ―To see a World in a Grain of Sand‖ begins the long poem, ―Auguries of Innocence,‖ in The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman, NY: Doubleday, 1988. pp. 490-496. What the poem‘s title means may intimate what is tried here, i.e., what innocently appears in the world augurs how things destine in irrevocable laws of nature, such as laws of retribution, laws of reaction to action, etc. 141 Matthew 13:31-32.
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having remembered a thing, a dunce never forgets, for he is pure enough to focus as no one else can. This is why the dunce would get ahead in scholarship where the shrewd is too smart 142 to stick to the silly rut of research. The dunce is just a grain of sand, so pure and focused. 143 ―Purity of heart is to will one thing.‖ Here what is crucial is ―one thing‖ that conduces to the purity that is in turn the source of clarity of vision, and a grain of sand betokens ―one thing‖ most clearly. Understanding this confirms that a grain of sand conduces most to seeing the whole world pure and whole. Three, a sand-grain implies that simplicity is specialty. A dullard mentioned above is simple and so quite apt to specialize. No astuteness of a shrewd merchant can patiently stay for long through a single track of research. In this light, we see that the simple digs the deepest, and nothing is simpler than a grain of sand, so we can best see a whole world in a tiniest grain of sand. Kids are as nothing as grains of sand, their simple purity is the root of specialty and scholarship, and they are the greatest in the kingdom of perfection that belongs to them. The great ones are those who lose none of their baby-heart. Thus, in the smallest common such as sand-grains, nothing joins everything and imperfection joins perfection; here things are let nodo, and not a thing is not done. What is no-do? Tommy shouts, ―I don‘ wanna‘ sleep!‖ He is ready for a nap he hates. Mom knows, so she says, ―OK, don‘t sleep; just sit here beside your pillow. I‘ll read your favorite story, OK?‖ Tommy nods. ―Once upon a time . . .‖ and he hits the pillow. Mom achieves her love-goal, and lets Tommy satisfy his need; not a thing is not done. She did not ―do‖ (push him into bed), not ―not do‖ (let him go), but did no-do. Tommy slept himself; people do their own ruling and the Mom-ruler wisely retires, as Lao Tzu ―reports‖ (2, 9, 17). People are a Tommy; they know only pushing others and smashing others. They are not 144 aware, and don‘t want to be aware, of the soft power of motherly pull to draw our opponents out to induce common humanity. Such soft power to gently draw other‘s human potentials is an application of no-do. No-do is simply to listen and let myriad all be, all listening to all, accepting all. Such a no-do does nothing but embracing things to encourage proliferation of things, to produce the plurality of ponds. Mom on her part, while caring for Tommy this no-do way, turns into Tommy‘s kid way that is also a no-do. Tommy goes out after nap, full of pep, to play with kids. They spin tops, one after another. Look how they yell and shout, as they twist their bodies and twirl up and down, hand-clapping, foot-stamping, whirling with their tops; they are tops until the tops stop, and they spin them with all their might all over again, and again!
142 One version of Strange Stories of Liao Studio begins with such a story of the community‘s laughing stock, a ―stupid‖ fellow winning the hand and heart of the most charming lady in town, ―A Pao,‖ and winning the First Rank in Royal Examination, the story of 「阿寶」 that begins 聊齋誌異，臺北市三民書局, 2009, pp. 1-13. 143 Søren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing, tr. Douglas V. Steere, NY: Harper and Row, 1948. 144 I am extending Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics, NY: PublicAffairs, 2004. It has an awesome cosmic potential to ―no-do.‖ See also Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Jr., ―Power and Interdependence in the Information Age,‖ Foreign Affairs, September/October 1998, pp. 81-94, and Nye, ―Get Smart: Combining Hard and Soft Power,‖ Foreign Affairs, July/August 2009, pp. 160-163. Nye is myopically obsessed with politics, without cultural basis of ―soft power,‖ and has to be forced by dominant hard power to ―combine‖ soft power with hard power into ―smart power.‖ ―Isn‘t the combined ‗smart power‘ a Yin-Yang Janus-faced approach?‖ Perhaps it is in abstract, but under the situation now of hard-power dominance, the combination amounts to a copout.
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For what purpose to they do such a stupid thing? For nothing! That is the fun; it is for nothing! Spinning tops is just fun! In their fun spinning tops they turn into tops spinning, for nothing! In their nothing-doing—no-do—stamping and twirling, they fulfill their common human selves that spin as tops with tops, spinning with the Heaven and Earth that spin as tops. I cannot keep my eyes off them! Neither can Mother Nature! Much less can Mom! Tommy is her boy, marvelously yelling, stamping, and twirling! He is spinning himself because he cannot spin a top yet! He is the top spinning! Such a ―child heart‖ unstoppable unconquerable is the fountain of true scholarship that is true wisdom (Li Chih); the child is the greatest to whom the Kingdom of God, Perfection, 145 belongs (Jesus), where the Great Ones lose none of their baby-heart (Mencius). Nature always top-natures, begins spinning at the beginning of creation as kids doing no-do, spinning tops for nothing, never forcing myriad all, and thereby achieves the goal of their being themselves. That is creation; that is creativity as kids, ever beginning to spin tops of the world, spinning as tops! Four, a sand-grain implies that the small is the vast. ―To see a world in a grain of sand,‖ chanted Blake instinctively. We cannot believe it on first hearing it, for how could a tiniest grain of sand allow us to see the world the vastest? Yet we soon somehow instinctively nod to it. We are now to see how it sounds incredible but that it is actually an inevitable truth. But how could it be? On first hearing ―to see a world in a grain of sand,‖ we simply cannot believe it because ―small‖ indicates a small range of vision of a frog in a well, and of a person confined to a small room without TV, magazine, telephone, computer, or visitor, and nothing is smaller than a grain of sand, much smaller than a well or a room, and so nothing is smaller in range of vision than that from a grain of sand. The tiniest sand betokens the tiniest vision, of course, we would say. But No! Blake asserts precisely the contrary to our prevailing common sense. It is quite incredible to say, ―In a grain of sand to see a world‖; it naturally piques our inquiry into what the matter is here. I remember the eye doctor often gave me a sheet of paper to look through one of its holes to improve on my vision at the vision test. A peep through a tiny hole improves my vision, perhaps because the hole cuts distraction to help me focus. Isn‘t the tiny sand the tiny hole through which to see the world clearly? ―Small‖ betokens focus and clarity of vision. Besides, concentration facilitated by smallness is power. Atomfission and atom-fusion produce atom-power, thanks to atom being the tiniest in the world of things we can handle. No wonder, powerful atomic microscopes and atomic telescopes are designed, manufactured, and used. Sand-grain is ―a-tom‖ that can not-cut any further, the smallest ever, and so the smallest sand is the vastest in clarity, in power, and in vision. Now, if a sole simple grain of sand implies such riches of implications, we can imagine what stunning riches zillions of grains of sand would yield. Such are the incredible riches of various ponds alive that constitute our lifeworld. The ponds are alive because the riches of implications of its zillion sand-grains cannot be definitively determined but sway and shift as
145 See Li Chih (1527-1602 李贄)‘s central thesis, 「童心說」, 李贄文集，北京社會科學文獻出版社, 2000, I:91-93. The child as the greatest to whom the Kingdom of God belongs is said by Jesus in Matthew 18:4, 19:13. Mencius (4B12) said that the Great Ones lose no baby-heart. Lao Tzu said (37) that the Tao no-does, and nothing is not done.
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the sand-grains gather to disperse, gather again to disperse again, in shapes and sizes beyond imagination. Sand-grains mirror various ponds alive in swaying waves, in blowing gales.
Three: Inter-Kaleidoscopes, Vacuous, Being-Nothing Inter-Involved Circles go out, sand looks out, but kaleidoscope inter-involves and inter-mirrors. The word ―mirror‖ has emerged spontaneously. The lifeworld is an inter-mirror, inter-mirroring in zillion manners beyond description. We cannot help but look into how such bewildering intermirroring of the various world-ponds alive transpires. Fortunately, we would have lost in words on how to describe it, were we to be devoid of the two age-old traditions, the Chinese Hwa-Yen Buddhism, and the Taoist Chuang Tzu‘s superb storytelling.
Vacuous Kaleidoscopes Here are the vacuous kaleidoscopes of lifeworld. Suppose I enter a huge room that has two huge mirrors facing each other, and a small candle-light between them. Upon entering the room, I am at once dizzied. The two mirrors are now zillion mirrors; the candle-light is now zillion lights. Here is a huge kaleidoscope of infinite reflections making countless kaleidoscopes, what we call the extraordinary ―various ponds.‖ These mirror-reflections are 146 usually described as ―causations‖ that are ―interdependent.‖ I am of course totally lost in all this huge brilliance. And then I realize. This brilliance is my knowledge, for without me there would have been no brilliance reflected in no mirror, as a falling tree in (faraway) no-man‘s-land is no tree, no falling. So I am lost here, while knowing I am lost. I am that strange tiny candlelight that knows I am lost in the infinity of mirroring, and so I am not lost while I am lost. This is more incredible than Pascal‘s ―thinking reed‖ that is so incredible. Besides, all is brilliant here because here is not a single speck of dust. In fact, nothing is here; ―here‖ is nowhere. ―Vanity of vanity, all is vanity‖ I mumble, knowing that my mumbling is also all-vacuous. The Judeo-Christian Bible said so in long face, utter and sober. I am not following the Bible, though. I am sober, too, but my sobriety is a strange lucid joy, a calm joy of no joy, ―joy‖ because I am lucidly in the know, ―no joy‖ because all is vacuous, my joy included. All this is of course a fool‘s paradise, giggling no giggle, where this fool knows he is a fool, so this fool‘s paradise is also no-fool‘s paradise. This realization makes this paradise a real paradise—of no-paradise, for all is vanity so vacuous, in all joy of vacuous joy. It is a nojoy joy of a blow-off of all, Nirvana, where the blow-off is brilliance, the knowledgebrilliance, of no-brilliance at all. So, this is the glorious world of brilliant multi-mirrors of nothing, for the multireflections are spotlessly brilliant because of spotlessness of all, complete vacuity, where even ―complete‖ and ―vacuity‖ are vacuous of meaning. I am so happy here nowhere, clean, rid even of happiness. This is the glorious Hwa Yen, the Flowery Splendor of Chinese
146 ―A Big Ocean, countless waves‖ can also be said here. The ―ocean-waves‖ parallels the ―room-mirrors.‖ They are identical, for they are both vacuous. Where are the sand, the waves, and the winds?
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Buddhism, the Buddhism peculiar to China alone, as seen in the Gandavyuha (Detailed 147 Description of Flowery Splendor).
Kaleidoscopes of the Common and of Life-Death Now, here are the kaleidoscopes telling us of depths in the common, and of unity-inopposition of life-and-death and being-and-nothing. To begin, here are five brief stories about the depths in the daily common (1) silence as deep, not silent, not wording, (2) Tao said as unsayable, (3) bull-butchery of suffering that feeds us, (4) fit snug in the things to self-forget that is ―right,‖ and (5) ancient words said to be scum by an ancient wheelwright. (1) Silence as deep, not silent, not wording: Take my talk that speaks in words. Why do I talk? I talk to capture what I intend, the meaning of the words I utter. So once my meaning is conveyed, I must forget my words, in the same way as when I get a rabbit, I must forget and discard the rabbit trap, lest I am trapped in the trap to lose the rabbit and the meaning. So, should I forget words and just keep me silent? No, my silence will fail to convey what I mean. Thus my words exist for my silent meaning, as my meaning needs my words to exist. Words are meaningful, not mere empty chatter, thanks to their meaning, and meaning must depend on words to convey, for without words meaning vanish. Words and silence (meaning) are inter-opposed (words are not silence, silent meaning is not sounded words) and interdependent (each must depend on the other to exist). I must thus live on, with words in silence. It is a tough world. Worse, I utter words to open out beyond me, to convey my message, my meaning silently intended, to my friends. Meanwhile, my friends must understand the above complex involvement between words and silence, before they can really understand me. Thus they must ―forget words to word with me.‖ So I yearn after such a word-forgotten one to word with. Are these involvements complex beyond us? Hey, it is just my talking, so common! Actually, the matter cuts deeper. I do not know what I mean until I say things out, articulate myself in words, while my words are shaped by what I mean. I mean through words as words express my meaning to shape it. Meaning and saying, silence and sounds, interpenetrate to inter-shape. Such awesome inter-creation of sound-existence and silence-noexistence, between silence meant and words sounding forth meaning, is awesome indeed! Thus we must mind our saying—no chatterbox—to utter our mind, again without chatterbox. We must say (sound) what we mean to mean (silence) what we say. Silence then speaks aloud as speech deepens silence, and the world shakes to shape up, by silent words wording silence, and silence worded in silence. Here there is neither words nor silence, but both interblending to inter-deepen, to inter-shape—to word with the one who forget words. (2) Tao said as unsayable: Chuang Tzu declares (2/59), ―Great Tao declares not.‖ We see five points here in this strange declaration. One, Tao does not declare but just goes on going, for ―Tao walks it and forms‖ (2/33). Tao is the way things go, thereby also things‘ going itself. How Tao goes is what Tao is; Tao-as-noun is Tao-as-verb. Two, Tao is commonly taken and defined as the Principle of things, which has two meanings. As the principle of things, Tao governs—―principle‖ governs—things beyond
147 Hwa Yen Buddhism is aptly and correctly, though dryly and insufficiently, summarized in Wing-tsit Chan, ed. and tr., A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, Princeton University Press, 1963, pp. 406-424. I have tried to put in verve and actuality to it.
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things, for Tao is over things. And yet, as principle of things, Tao belongs to things, and depends on things to form its self as what goes through things. Three, Tao declares as itself not-declaring. Declaration is worded; not-declaring is wordless, so declaring not-declaring is worded as wordless. ―Does Tao declare, then?‖ Yes and No. Four, Tao is this ―and,‖ all over things, all through sound and silence. Tao is an Awhatever and a not-A whatever denied, both ioined. Tao is negative Yin and positive Yang, Yin in Yang, Yin as Yang, and at the same time Yang in Yin, Yang as Yin, inter-involved. Five, Tao is thus a dynamic noun-verb, principle over things through things, somewhat similar to ―people-ruled as ruler.‖ Thus, ideally, people-rulership would not corrupt into harming people, due to the paradox of ruled-as-ruler. Tao as principle over things and through things would also not leave things for Platonic heavens, nor would it vanish in ups and downs of thing-contingencies. All this is due to the paradox of Tao in and out of things, ruling things and going through things. (3) Bull-butchery of suffering that feeds us: Such going-through is far from placid and eventless; it is full of the drama of paradox of mortal pain in creation, violence violating things in eruption of existence. Look at a kitchen-fellow butchering a bull, Chuang Tzu says 148 in his Chapter Three with a significant title, ―The Lord-principle Cultivating Life 養生主.‖ We see seven points here. One, the lowly kitchen fellow does not cut into the bull. His cleaver-knife just dances with the bull into the bull. The bull-dance is far from casual; the kitchen-fellow dances with the bull to the sacred music in the royal ritual. Two, the bull co-dancing is far from being butchered; it just dancing into loosening itself and falls quivering to the ground, entrusting itself to the ground of being, full of blood of life. Three, such dancing bloody butchery feeds life. That is what the kitchen fellow is for, after all; with his deathly knife he feeds the lives of royal family—that is all of us. Lowly kitchen fellow thus teaches us that death feeds life. Four, the bull in China is big and precious, and comes to signify a thing 物, as bull 牛 knifed out 刀 into a conspicuous bullthing 物. Thus the kitchen fellow knifes through the bull to show us the creation of myriad things among us. Five, still, knifing butchery remains bloody pain. Bull-butchery, danced out in the sacred music of creation of things, is mortal pain that feeds us to fulfill us. Feeding fulfillment is creation of existence attended with mortal pain. Six, bull-butchery thus unites an A opposing a not-A, death feeding life, pain felling existence in fulfilling existence of a thing. Thus violence dances to the sacred music of creation of existence. Such is the drama of existence standing out of ambiguity. Seven, this story has powerful cash value. Life is fed and fulfilled with life-killing; suffering is good, not evil. (4) Being fit snug in things, to self-forget, that is ―right‖: We in mortal suffering of life can go on happily by way of fitting ourselves in it, in fact, so fitting that we forget ourselves in the fit-in-the-world. ―Fit 適‖ in China also means nonchalantly happy. For their incredible connection, hear these beautiful chants of life-fitting Chuang Tzu (19/62-64) has produced for us in Chapter Nineteen significantly titled, ―Attaining Living 達生.‖
148 See Kuang-ming Wu, The Butterfly as Companion, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990, pp. 279-359.
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―Forgetting feet is the fit of the shoes. Forgetting waist is the fit of the belt. Forgetting things‘ Yes and No, right and wrong, is the fit of the mind and heart. Not changing inside, not following outside, is the fit with the events-meeting. Beginning at fitting, and now ever not without the fit, is the fit of forgetting the fit.‖ So incredibly deep! So pungently penetrating! Being fit and snug in things, beginning at my shoes and my belt, makes me feel so good as to forget even myself. Now whether Yes or No, right or wrong, I fit into things to forget my own mind now composed, in my heart now worry-free. I cease to change or follow, inside or out, in the midst of events meeting and dispersing; it is my fit care-free into ups and downs of all sorts of events in joy and in pain. Step by step, I come to so fit with myriad all, inside and out, that I forget even the fit of the fit! That is the perfect fit, isn‘t it? Here forgetting prevails, all things are let go, fit and happy. Daring to fit and be snug in things of brutal butchery as above seen, we are now lost ourselves lost in things. Things are part of us, we are part of them. We ―enter beasts, disturb 149 no lot; enter birds, disturb no line,‖ ―all living with birds, beasts, as family with myriads‖ ; we come and go, free among them. We are fit and snug in them; they are now our home. ―Fit and snug‖ is how we become ourselves in things, becoming whole, fulfilled in them; all things are full to climax us in them. In contrast, ―forgot and lost‖ tells of how we vanish, self-lost. Self-full and self-loss thus inter-exclude, yet, thanks to ―fit and snug,‖ such opposition melts into one so natural, for both vanish self-lost, and we are here lost and full in things. This oneness is ―right‖ beyond words beyond morality, the way we should be. What is right is the union and unity of matters mutually exclusive, all in the World of Ultimate Virtue. All this, told as stories, tells us among others to relax and refrain from do-good-ism, to impose ourselves into the way of what goes on by itself, bullying it. Do-good-ism is one of the roads to hell paved by goodwill. Never be ―holier than thou.‖ Never give advise that is worse than ―a dime a dozen.‖ These ―cash values‖—and there are more—originate in the paradox of the fit as self-loss, self-fulfillment as self-disappearance. Self-fit self-forgets. (5) The ancient words said to be scum by an ancient wheelwright: Ancient Chuang Tzu told us all above stories to enhance us. Should we follow him? Incredibly, he at once alarms us with another story, saying No! Hear this amazing story (13/68-74) to conclude Chapter Thirteen significantly titled ―Heaven‘s Tao 天道.‖ Lord Huan was reading a book in the hall above; a wheelwright was cutting a wheel down under. Setting aside his chisel, he went up to ask the lord, ‗Allow me, whose words are in the book my lord is reading?‘ Lord Huan said, ‗They are words of the sages.‘ ‗Are the sages here now?‘ ‗Already dead.‘ ‗If so, then, my lord is reading scum of ancient people.‘ ‗I‘m reading a book; how could a wheelwright say this and say that? You are ok if you have something to say; if you have none, you die.‘ Wheelwright said, ‗Your subject looks at the matter with the subject‘s own concerns. In cutting the wheel, if slow, then it catches and cannot go in, if fast, then it slips to skip over. Not slow, not fast, got in hand, caught in heart, mouth cannot say, yet it has its knack, the subject cannot instruct his own son, who cannot receive it from the subject. Thus I am 70 and still cutting wheels. People of ancient have died with what they could not convey. If so, then, what my lord is reading is scum of ancient people.‘ 149 「入獸不亂群，入鳥不亂行」 and 「夫至德之世，同與禽獸居，族與萬物並」 (Chuang Tzu 20/36, 9/910), both such fabulous poetic lines! My first line agrees with Akatzuka‘s take, 赤塚忠，莊子下，東京集英社，昭和五十二年，p. 175. Few note him.
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This is an incredible story, and is incoherent on six counts at least. First, a lowly wheelwright, perhaps illiterate, here teaches his lord deep in scholarship, not the other usual way around. Secondly, the lord ought to be wiser than the wheelwright, for the lord reads ancient words of the sages, and yet the wheelwright downgrades those words as scum, dead and useless. Thirdly, of course the lord is extremely incensed, demanding from him the rationale on pain of execution. Here the lord is quite unworthy of his scholarly wisdom. Fourth, the wheelwright draws on his lived professional experience to respond, for the dead ancients cannot transmit their experience, nor can they experience now. They are scum useless to experience that is all-important. The point is clear. Words must have the cash-value of experience that ancient words lack. So far we are impressed with the wheelwright‘s astuteness. We even see him paralleling Socrates (in Phaedrus 274-275) who downgrades writing for lively dialogue because written words cannot respond. But there are more surprises, beyond Socrates, in this story. Fifth, the wheelwright uses words to explain how dead and useless words as written are to the living at this moment here now. Words (lived) are used to downgrade words (written). Worse, he said, with words, he cannot even use his words-now to convey his professional experience, wordlessly ―hand-got, heart-caught,‖ to his own son. So, he uses words to cut down on words. If so, is he sure he can word-convey word-uselessness to his lord? ―Words are useless‖ means ―words are useless to experience.‖ So, word-uselessness belongs to experience-realm; he cannot word-convey word-uselessness as he cannot convey experience. Thus he cannot cut down on the effectiveness of even his own words, much less on the lord‘s. Isn‘t all this wordnegation, with words of his, an exercise in self-defeating futility? Sixth, this whole conversation is 2,400 years old, quite ancient. This story is part of those ―ancient words‖ that the wheelwright said are scum. Is this story ―scum‖ and useless, then? The answer is a paradoxical Yes and No. This ancient story negates itself as ―All Cretans are liars‖ said by a Cretan. So Yes, it is a paradox seemingly useless, and yet No, for this paradox is strangely not useless but quite useful to our living now, different from Cretan‘s paradox. This sort of scum is scum and no scum. ―What‘s going on here?‖ An A-whatever combined with a not-A its denial makes an unstable paradox, of course. We must note, however: there is paradox and there is paradox; all paradoxes are not created equal. Cretan‘s paradox is due to its self-reference, it goes nowhere, and we do not know what to do with it. But this wheelwright‘s paradox, also self-recursive, has its bite into living experience, for all responses of wheelwright‘s come from experience, based on experience, nothing but experience, to sober us to glue us to experience, not play with empty dead words. The Wheelwright is a Whitehead saying, ―There are no whole truths; all truths are half150 The saying is of truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.‖ course a logical splash over our sober common sense, to wit, ―Nothing is perfect.‖ And of course both these statements are a glorious self-contradiction; we are tempted to ask
150 Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1954), recorded by Lucien Price, Boston: David R. Godine, 2001, Prologue, p. 14, where Mrs. Whitehead said, ―His thinking is a prism. It must be seen . . . from all sides, then from underneath and overhead. To have seen it from one side only is not to have seen it,‖ as we have just done. This explanation of Whitehead‘s self-defeating wisdom is also a wonderful description of our various kaleidoscopic ponds as the lifeworld.
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Whitehead whether his saying is whole truth or half-truth, and either way he would be stuck in a logical cul-de-sac. Whitehead is a master logician in mathematics; he must have known the logical trouble, and still went ahead and said it anyway. It is this ―anyway‖ that saves his day and our days, for his saying so anyway forewarns us. To be forewarned is to be forearmed in our logical steps. Thus, self-referentially self-defeating as it is, Whitehead‘s saying quite benefits us. It is a useful paradox. And so we have two sorts of paradoxes. All paradoxes self-refer to defeat themselves, but one sort of paradoxes self-defeat uselessly, another sort self-defeat usefully. Paradox-1 is like ―All Cretans are liars‖ said by a Cretan, or ―What the other side says is true‖ written on one side of paper, and ―What the other side is false‖ written on another side of the same paper. They are all useless mind-teasers. In contrast, Paradox-2 is like Whitehead‘s quip on half-truths, a wonderful guide to rational experience. Another quip of his is also useful, ―The (logical) precision is a fake,‖ for 1+1=2 does not universally apply to actuality as logic demands—gunpowder and a spark do not make 2; Whitehead is a master logician cherishing precision, yet his precise argument trashes precision. It is his paradox, yet it is a useful exhortation to logic to advance to accepting incoherence in actuality, as Wittgenstein climbs up on his ladder of sayings to kick 151 it away, to understand the actual world. The Wheelwright‘s is Paradox-2 that guides our reading and saying. All Chuang Tzu‘s stories belong to Paradox-2, an advance in logic precisely because of illogical selfincoherence. Such ―paradox‖ expresses an unstable, and so dynamic, gathering (logic is a gathering) of incompatibilities to portray the variety of many-ness of the ponds, expressed by the bewildering kaleidoscopic circles centers-all-over, edge-nowhere, a paradoxical selfdefeating feature of a ―circle‖ to express its dynamics. Let us repeat. Paradox is thus another name for the kaleidoscopic circles all-centers and no-edge, both one and many, one in many, and many as one, composing various ponds alive. China is one of such strange yet common lakes, whose bottoms we can see clearly yet the bottoms withdraw from us, bottomless-ly. The various ponds are myriad things jostling, mutually excluding and jointly exploding ahead forward. Thus China is a Lake Wobegon whose bottom can clearly be seen, and yet as we go in to plumb the bottom, the bottom recedes, revealing itself to be unreachable. The lake is the heaven underneath where Thoreau sees calm wintry twilight of soft summer embracing the 152 fishes swimming in quiet composure. We marvel at his poetry of nature here: I cut my way first through a foot of snow, and then a foot of ice, and open a window under my feet, where, kneeling to drink, I look down into the quiet parlor of the fishes, pervaded by a softened light as through a window of ground glass, with its bright sanded floor the same as in summer; there a perennial waveless serenity reigns as in the amber twilight sky, corresponding to the cool and even temperament of the inhabitants. Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.
151 The quip appears in ―Immortality,‖ The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, ed. P. A; Schilpp, La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1951, pp. 682-700. Wittgenstein‘s famous quip concludes his Tractatus, 1922, to elucidate itself by kicking itself. 152 Henry D. Thoreau: Walden and Resistance to Civil Government, NY: W. W. Norton, 1992, p. 188.
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This lake is actually our ―heaven inside‖ beyond human, said Chuang Tzu (17/50), as it is actually beyond us in us. Such situation is quite ordinary, one kaleidoscope that is so many, one in many, many in one, an A adding to a not-A into a composition of no composition, intoning many kaleidoscopic ponds inter-shimmering, as our stories above describe, timelessly in time, everywhere nowhere, as if nothing were the matter. Let us just take one common example, an image of a person we entertain, say, ―Confucius.‖ ―Confucius‖ is identifiable as such yet is quite diverse,153 for my Confucius is not yours, nor is it hers. Still, we can easily identify our different Confucius‘s as ―Confucius,‖ a composite identifiable as such, as if nothing were the matter. ―Confucius‖ is then one kaleidoscope so many, for your Confucius is not mine or hers, and yet ―Confucius‖ is Confucius we see. All above five stories are of kaleidoscopes describing such depths in the common concrete. Now, these kaleidoscopes also describe fabulous four ordinary stories below of the unity 154 of life-and-death and of being-and-nothing, told extraordinarily by the Taoist Chuang Tzu (a) drumming lullaby to his wife‘s death, (b) a happy ending to the kidnapped Lady Beautiful, (c) Chuang Tzu‘s butterfly dream enjoyed, and (d) Chuang Tzu‘s pillow-talk with a roadside skull happily making seasons with Heaven and Earth. (a) Chang Tzu drummed lullaby to his wife‘s death: Chuang Tzu‘s wife died, and his friend the name-logician Hui Tzu went for condolence, who found him sitting cross-legged, tapping on a big empty bowl upside down as drum, singing beside the coffin. Shocked, Hui Tzu accused Chuang Tzu of such an outrageous indecency on an occasion of such ultimate sad seriousness. Chuang Tzu softly said that at first he was of course quite saddened at his beloved wife‘s death—and then realized. When the time came, the natural elements naturally collected themselves into his wife, for them both to live happily together. When the time came, the natural elements naturally dispersed, and his wife disappeared back into nature. It would be unnatural, indecent, and disturbing of his wife to wail; he should quietly sing lullaby to accompany his wife‘s sleep. (b) A happy ending to the kidnapped Lady Beautiful: In those rough days of fourth century BCE, kidnapping was routine. A Lady Beautiful of noble family was kidnapped by a barbarian chief. Her first long months were wrapped in her tear-drenched robe. But then, she slowly came to her sense. Daily entertained by sumptuous meals, nightly comforted in the square royal bed with soft-spoken chief, she now wondered why she wailed over her ―misfortune,‖ and repented of her tears. Now, we are all Lady Beautiful, one day to be kidnapped by a barbarian chief, Mr. Death. We may resent it at first, but who knows, we may repent of our tears, happily dying ever after. (c) Chuang Tzu‘s butterfly dream enjoyed: Chuang Tzu said he dreamed to be a butterfly happily fluttering from one flower to another, quite sure that he was a butterfly. Then he 153
Seven lives of Confucius in Chinese history are identified by Michael Nylan and Thomas Wilson, Lives of Confucius, NY: Dubleday, 2010. 154 The first and last stories are taken from Chapter Eighteen, titled significantly ―至樂 Ultimate Happiness,‖ and the middle two stories are taken from Chapter Two, also significantly titled ―齊物論 Taking All things Equal,‖ of the Book of Chuang Tzu. See Kuang-ming Wu, The Butterfly as Companion, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990.
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awoke, and found, quite surely, himself a man. On second thought, he was not sure. Was he a man having dreamed to be a butterfly? Or is he a butterfly dreaming now to be a man? Either situation makes sense, but any one would exclude the other, for both situations cannot be true at once. Such is the world in distinction among things interchanging. Now, ―butterfly‖ is a universal symbol of fluttering between life and death. We must be awakened to such ―dreams‖ happily fluttering between life and death. (d) Chuang Tzu‘s pillow-talk with a roadside skull happily making seasons with Heaven and Earth: Death without burial is a shame; dead, leaving just a skull, tossed on the roadside, is an unspeakable misery, the worst of shame no death can wipe out. Sadly, such worst misfortune was not uncommon in rough days of fourth century ancient China. Traveling, Chuang Tzu saw a dry skull on the roadside. He touched it with his staff, asking what wretched misfortune had befallen it to reduce it to such unspeakable predicament, and then slept on it as his pillow. That night, the skull appeared in his dream, laughing at his imbecility, for it has been enjoying joy unspeakable, making rounds of seasons with Heaven and Earth. Incredulous, Chuang Tzu asked if it wanted him to request the Things-Maker to restore it to former life with its family. Knotting its brows, the skull replied how it could at all discard such pure ultimate joy for the worldly cares of obsequiousness to boss and parents and worrisome cares for subordinates. Dead on the roadside, no one bothers, is the ultimate of happiness no one can rob of the dry skull. 155 Chuang Tzu would therefore smile in his stories as these. ―Messrs Oblation, Carriage, Plow and Come talked to one another, ‗Whoever takes nothing as his head, life as his spine, and death as his buttocks, whoever knows dying, living, existing, and perishing as one body? I will be friend with him.‘ The four mutually looked and smiled. Nothing was against their hearts-of-being, so they became friends. All too soon, Mr. Carriage fell ill. . . . Mr. Oblation asked, ‗Do you hate it?‘ He said, ‗No! Why should I? Soon (it) changes my left arm into a rooster, and I will seek (during) night-hours (to crow). Soon (it) changes my right arm into a pellet, and I will seek an owl to roast. Soon (it) changes my buttocks into wheels, and with my spirit I will ride it; why (then) need I change a carriage? Besides, to gain is timely, to lose is to follow; dwell in time, stay following, and no grief or joy can enter. This is what the ancient called ‗bonds loosened.‘ . . . Why should I hate it?‘ All too soon, Mr. Come fell ill, gasping, dying. His wife and children circled him and wept. Mr. Plow who went to visit him said, ‗Shoo! Out! Don‘t startle change!‘ Leaning on the door, he talked to him, ‗Great! Change molds! What will you make next? Where are you going? Will you make a rat liver? A bug‘s leg?‘ Mr. Come said, ‗A child under parents goes anywhere, only at their bidding. The Yin and Yang to us are not less than our parents. If they bring me near death and I do not listen, then I defy. What blame is there in them? Huge Clod loads me with a figure, labors me with life, eases me with age, and rests me with death. So what ‗goods‘ life is why it ‗goods‘ death. Now if as a great smith casts metal, it jumps and says, ‗I must become an Excalibur!‘ then the smith must think the metal inauspicious. If one who chanced to be shaped a man insists ‗Just a man, just a man!‘, then Change the Molder
155 Chuang Tzu 6/45-60; I tried to bring out the vigorous original. Apostle Paul also thought about not objecting to our Creator in Romans 9:19-21. Paul (not Chuang Tzu) has God as Love, but did not think (as Chuang Tzu did) on how we should behave—joyously—under the almighty Thing-Creator.
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Kuang-ming Wu must think him inauspicious. If the heaven and earth are a great forge, the Molder-Change a great Smith, where could I go and not be all right?‘‖
How ebullient is such looking forward to self-journey after death under Heaven! Truly 156 this is ultimate happiness without happiness, ―wu wei,‖ doing nothing adverse to life under Heaven. Storing all under heaven under all-under-heaven, and nothing gets lost (6/26), even after my death. Such is Chuang Tzu‘s revolution, putting upside down our common view of death and life. Let us return to the four stories above. These four stories are in joy-crescendo to death, from softly lullaby-ing the dead wife, through death-kidnap as perhaps a good fortune, fluttering pleasantly between life and death, to the ultimate joy of casual undisturbed death on the roadside. We are hopefully to be persuaded to love our death while casually living here now! Chuang Tzu‘s deep joy goes far beyond Albert Camus‘ sober final judgment over the 157 absurdity of life, ―One must imagine Sisyphus happy.‖ Now, we must note two crucial features in all these stories. One, these stories are all quite daily, common, and ordinary, and yet, staying ordinary as they are, they are quite surprising and extraordinary. These stories show us how stunningly unusual the usual routines of life and death are. All we need is just to open our eyes wide and watch and discern; there is no need to go out of this world, whatever that means, to see this world as out of this world. This last point deserves elaboration. Two, these stories tell us that this world natural and mundane, as ordinary as they are, always transcends this world. This-worldly is otherworldly. Is our lifeworld being or nothing? Is it life or death? Or are they both? But does it matter? What matters is to see that this world is uncanny in otherworldly way, and we constantly slither in and out of this world, unawares or not, isn‘t it? All this tells us how alive our ―various ponds‖ are, hovering between life and death, one day at a time. Thus the circle-ponds are the countless kaleidoscopes of changing patterns and colors of values, each interrelated with all others, interchanging, inter-changing. These countless kaleidoscopes are of two sorts, the non-being sort of the Hwa Yen vacuity-mirrors that interreflect, and the being-sort of Chuang Tzu the Taoist, ―nothing‖ interfusing with ―things,‖ to delightfully slither back and forth between life and death, making Heaven and Earth, season after season.
Four: Relativism Life-Worldly, Intercultural So, nothing is usual in our usual lifeworld. What is usual is always unexpected. We must expect all things as unexpected, so much so that even things we expect to be unexpected could happen anytime as expected. This situation makes us realize that there is no single ultimate truth anywhere, while so many things keep happening at once. Someone naturally says, ―Aha, this is relativism bred in uncertain plurality of things. Truth is certain, final, and single. Your view does not even show the path to truth; all this is sheer relativism.‖ ―Relativism‖ here is an abusive term; anything we dislike as wishy-washy 156 Chuang Tzu 18/11. 157 Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959, p. 91.
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we relegate to the wastebasket of ―relativism.‖ All right, then, let us probe what ―relativism‖ can really mean. People often think that just to discuss relativism sides with a ―heresy.‖ Nothing is farther from the truth. Relativism is really a vital élan in relentless pursuit of insights in their relentlessly open linkage. We must realize. ―Relativism‖ has two meanings, as a noun, an assertion of a thesis, and as a verb, describing life-process. This realization generates seven crucial points, as follows. (1) We often take relativism as an assertion of categorical terminal judgment to absolutely deny all absolutes. Put this way, relativism defeats itself; doesn‘t it assert its own denial? It is irresponsible; doesn‘t it take all views as equally valid depending on one‘s perspectives, cultural, ethical, or otherwise? Thinkers since Socrates (contra sophists) such as Kant (contra Hume), we thought, have fought and demolished relativism as we do heresies. Many questions are thus asked to relativists, ―Is there an absolute truth at all?‖ ―Are all views equally valid?‖ ―Is there a universal form of reasoning?‖ and ―Can we judge between two views?‖158 They are insoluble conundrums requiring acrobatic ingenuity159 to respond; relativism is cornered if we take it as an asserted view. But, then, this ―dead issue‖ of relativism mysteriously persists. We say relativism is dead wrong, but it is far from ―dead.‖ It keeps popping up everywhere in life, in thinking, and in history. No separate article, ―Relativism,‖ exists,160 yet indexes have ―relation,‖ ―situationism,‖ ―skepticism,‖ ―subjectivism,‖ ―anarchism,‖ all siblings to relativism if not its synonyms. Ubiquitous yet non-existent, relativism is a mystery if taken as a set view against absolutism, an asserted ism on an absolute par with absolutism. (2) Such impossible maze alive that refuses to leave us signals that relativism attends life and that it is wrong to take relativism as a noun, a static definitive view equal to absolutism. Relativism must instead be a verb challenging the absolutist approach to life-issues. Challenging an assertive approach, relativism cannot itself be as assertive and definitive as absolutism161 but stubbornly ―reactive‖ to it.162 How relativism does indicates what it is. Relativism must sinuously describe an actual situation, not judge, declare, and categorically assert a view but realistically points and 158 These are some of the typical questions raised in Martin Hollis and Steven Lukes, eds., Rationality and Relativism, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1986. 159 A self-proclaimed relativist Joseph Margolis (Truth About Relativism, Oxford: Blackwell, 1991) tackles these challenges head-on, rambunctiously stirring up turgid pages. We agree, relativism is as alive as he is spirited, yet we wonder if it is as unapproachably complex as he makes it out to be. We would not be surprised if his noisy turgidity came from his lack of appreciation of the pervasive élan of relativism, to miss relativism. 160 See, e.g., Paul Edwards, ed., The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Eight Volumes, NY: The Macmillan, 1967 and Philip P. Wiener, ed., Dictionary of the History of Ideas, Five Volumes, NY: Charles Scribner‘s Sons, 1973, two massive encyclopedias of thoughts. 161 Watch how risky A. N. Whitehead the mathematician‘s quip is, ―There are no whole truths; all truths are half truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.‖ (Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead [1953], Prologue) Now, isn‘t this statement the ―devil‖ that treats a half truth it asserts as a whole truth? Another of his quip comes to the rescue: ―The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won‘t keep. Something must be done about them.‖ (Ibid., Chapter 12, April 28, 1938). ―There are no whole truths‖ does not assert but urges ―adventures of ideas‖; asserting any idea (even ―no whole truths‖) as a ―whole truth‖ stops the ―adventure‖; the stoppage is ―the devil‖ that saps the ―vitality of thought.‖ The ―adventure‖ is Gotthold E. Lessing‘s ―ever moving pursuit (immer regen Trieb) after Truth‖ chosen over ―all Truth (alle Wahrheit)‖ (Wolfenbüttler Fragmente, in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 1966, p. 313). If this is not dynamic relativism we do not know what it is. 162 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton University Press, 1979, p. 377 describes his ―edifying philosophy‖ as ―reactive‖; its pp. 377-379 describes our relativism here.
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proposes, sifting, searching, ever on the go. Is this why Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu constantly tell stories of common living, alerting us to its unsuspected implications, and egging us on to reflect on them, yet proposing no definitive views? Is this how the Taoists came to be accused of committing relativistic life-withdrawal, vague, indecisive, and irresponsible? Relativism simply, unceasingly, tells stories of life, one after another, so that we can live through various views and attitudes to learn one after another to cultivate life. (3) Its interesting offshoot is on words ―better‖ and ―best‖ usually taken as mathematically exclusive ordinals; if A better than B, B is not good as A, if A is the best, nothing is good as A. We yet understand parents proclaiming their children as ―the best in the world,‖ spouses proud of their beloved as ―the world‘s greatest,‖ and children priding in their mothers as ―the most beautiful in the world.‖ Are we ―more blessed than others‖ with foods, free worship, and cash for rainy days? Yes, but those are ―blessed‖ also ―who weep.‖ (Jesus) So we use ―better‖ and ―best‖ as stories of a happy situation, where ―better‖ and ―best‖ are non-exclusive blessedness. In life, things can be each the ―best‖ without excluding others, ever changing as weather. Fuzzy and inductive logic try to capture such ―flukes‖ in actuality. Logical non-exclusion is the warmth of human relativism. (4) ―But relativism cannot blindly describe; it must describe how we should behave.‖ Yes, it does. Ever alert, empathic, and critical to events and views, relativism points to a proper life-posture. Relativism tells us that we are ―on the way,‖ and so must be ever ―on the way,‖ seeking, sifting, judiciously trailing the Tao of Nature forever naturing without ceasing. No view is perfect yet none is totally wrong, and we must carefully and patiently go through every view that comes, comparing, weighing, and integrating them, never pompously pronounce the final judgment. Relativism is the story of life-normative quest, ever turning anti-life postures toward pro-life ones.163 (5) ―But relativism cannot go aimless, it must have a goal.‖ Yes, but its goal is not fixed eternally in the Platonic heaven. Aristotle told us164 that ―happiness‖ is our common goal but differs as every life differs from every other, and differs as life grows. ―Is happiness one or many?‖ The answer is, of course, it is both one and many, and the question of ―or‖ is a wrong question of staid logic. Life differs as it grows; growth changes beyond definitive assertions to fix; life‘s goal changes, growing stage by stage. My son Johnny used to excitedly vow that he was going to be a garbage collector driving a big loud truck! I said, ―All right! Good for you, John!‖ Later, he vowed that he was growing up to be a milkman with a pencil on the ear! I said again, ―All right! Good for you, John!‖ He is now a violinist, music historian, and medical technologist. Nothing is wrong with changing interest as one grows and changes; ―all ends are endless‖ (Dewey) that is life-pragmatism. As life‘s goal varies endlessly, so relativism‘s shifting goal is unpredictable yet non-arbitrary for life—private or public.165
163 Here are Rorty‘s insistence on ―progress from‖ cruelty, and China‘s of pro-life posture. 164 Jonathan Barnes, ed., The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, Princeton University Press, 1984, II: 1729 (beginning of Nicomachean Ethics). Sadly, prosaic descriptive Aristotle never bothered to reflect on how problematic his report was, ―happiness‖ as a mix of one and many; he had no self-reflection, no self-examination Socrates wanted. 165 Privacy and the public join here; Rorty‘s private-public difference is not needed.
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(6) ―But we cannot just wander around. What is relativism‘s method?‖ Its method is careful discernment, going through each view from inside it, existentially.166 This is the truth hid in its ―laughing stocks,‖ ―all views are equally true,‖ ―relativism indiscriminately tolerates all things.‖ What relativism cannot tolerate is the intolerant finality of judgment that closes off lifeopenness to things that come. All views are not equally valid, nor is relativism all-tolerant, but its method of sifting them applies equally to all views, and cannot be canonized167; it has to sinuously trail each specific view as it emerges daily. (7) Here is a bombshell on argumentation. Relativism does not argue but simply storydescribes actuality, and thereby argues—as Socrates did powerfully when he described how he came to be indicted as an atheist corrupter of youth. He then described how, on the contrary, he improved their souls (no parents came to indict him) as he (not an atheist) followed the Delphic Oracle in total disregard of his own living, and his own life.168 His lifedescription demolished the indictment of ―impiety‖ and ―seducer and corrupter of youth.‖ Kierkegaard and Voltaire, Hugo and Tolstoy, kept telling stories, Western thinkers have been conducting ―thought experiments,‖ arguing with ―examples‖ and ―counterexamples‖ from life, and all Chinese thinkers have been tirelessly telling stories from history, actual or imagined. They in storytelling all ―argue.‖ ―Story-argument‖ is persuasive because it ruthlessly follows life itself that persuades living. They say facts are not opinions or value, nor are examples points, so relativism confuses description with demonstration. Such assertion commits false dichotomies on the high judgment seat of ―abstract thinking‖ (Marcel). Thinking should be concrete as life, being part of living as human; far from being a contradiction, ―concrete thinking‖ is the way of human life. Life forms history; it is an ongoing ―story argument‖ to which Chinese thinkers constantly appeal. So should the West with the rest of the world. In all, relativism opposes absolutely asserting ―the truth,‖169 in thinking, to become lifehistory among friends. Opposing logical/analytical necessity,170 relativism thinks in pragmatic coherence (Rorty) and story-description (China). Opposing ―mirroring,‖171 relativism facilitates friendly conversations. Opposing fixation, relativism goes through ideas in contradiction. Opposing reason that tries to shape history, relativism in story-description becomes history. Thus relativism revolutionizes thinking as it ruthlessly trails actual situations. Relativism spatially goes through various views, story-describing them, discerning what they respectively are, thereby appropriately criticize their appropriateness. Going through these 166 See Kuang-ming Wu, ―Existential Relativism,‖ Ph.D. thesis 1965, Yale University Philosophy Department, that elaborates on this point. 167 Rorty says that ―pragmatism‖ has no ―new philosophical method or strategy,‖ in Philosophy and Social Hope, USA: Penguin 1999, pp. xx-xxi. 168 See The Apology, Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, eds., Plato: The Collected Dialogues, Princeton University Press, 1961, pp. 20-24 et passim, . 169 An absolute assertion of the final truth plays god-in-thinking. This is anti-human, anti-life, and cuts thinking from concrete life-actuality, as Plato did. Rorty may or may not have thought about this point. 170 Rorty may have opposed logical/analytical necessity for its being autonomous (The Linguistic Turn: Recent Essays in Philosophical Methods, The University of Chicago, 1967), cut from actual necessity that it assumes it mirrors (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton University Press, 1979). 171 Rorty, ibid., 1979, and Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Volume 1: Philosophical Papers, Cambridge University Press, 1991.
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views critically, relativism makes history as it judiciously dialogues with the past views that in turn shape, straighten, and enrich the present situation. Spatially and historically, relativism goes through positions into so many kinds of world-ponds. In such dynamic ways, relativism as an élan of going-through countless positions, as they arise in space and in time, jibes with the dynamic circles all-centers and no-edge that go out and out, constantly expanding. Relativism is this everywhere-nowhere circle that moves into many circles, round and round, one into many going through many, making various ponds of lifeworld, one at a time forward. Everything is alive as such relativism-circles inter-depending, inter-reflecting, one kaleidoscope as many kaleidoscopes with countless shades and perspectives, swirling and waving, gathering and dispersing. All this describes the varied sorts of ponds alive in every grain of sand gathering as river into countless diverse rivers of the lifeworld. A pond is where a frog of life jumps in to make a sound, as a most famous Japanese haiku intones, ―Ancient pond; frog jumps in; sound of water.‖ Nothing noteworthy is here at the pond, and everything is here—pond-world, frog-life, activity-jumping, and sound that excites a bird. And then we see so many ponds that sound so many sounds of so many frogs jumping in. These worldly sounds make us realize: The pond is the frog, for here the pond appears as pond, thanks to the frog disturbing it. The pond-frog in turn is the sound made by the jumping in of the frog, for the sound lets appear the pond-frog that otherwise would have remained silent, nowhere, in the same way as a tree falling in no-man‘s-land is no tree, not falling. All in all, the pond-frog appears by the frog jumping-in, and the frog-pond sound echoes the cosmic silence all around, to spread the pond as many ponds of many circles everywherecentered and nowhere-edged. We go through everyday all these sounds of the do-nothing good-for-nothing frogs, jumping into the countless silent ponds of this lifeworld. The world is so many different ponds, each alive with fascinating details different everyday everywhere. It is relativism dynamic, inter-dancing with the zillion grains of sand at the bottoms of the ponds, each a fascinating kaleidoscope mirroring this whole world. In short, the world is various ponds thus fascinatingly alive.
History, Mistakes, Alive Always These ponds and lakes, varied and alive, exist everywhere nowhere in particular— always. Why always? It is because history has no end, nor does Nature, always. Life simply continues as history has no end. The goal of life is the goal of history. As life is always unfinished,172 so its goal is never finished, and history continues, not without goal, not without goal-less, always unfinished. How does history continue? History does not repeat; it rhymes itself, and rhymes never cease but spreads. History rhymes because people reenact the yesterday today, never repeat it,
172 Yehudi Menuhin has written down his unfinished life. Yehudi Menuhin: Unfinished Journey, NY: Alfred K. Knopf, 1977, and Unfinished Journey: Twenty Years Later, NY: Fromm International, 1999. No one did ―unfinished journey‖ twice; Menuhin is a kid, indeed, who begins anew every minute, always unfinished. Cf. Ruth St. Denis, An Unfinished Life: An Autobiography, NY: Harper and Brothers, 1939, as she danced her life forever unfinished.
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to enable understanding to reenact life, again today and again tomorrow, as the days keep coming anew afresh, again and again. Days dawn continually, renewing today once more, unceasing. All this makes history, as our days keep dawning and going by, as days come always to be made continually—as we say, ―You made my day‖—no end in sight. Or rather, in history ends are endless, and goals go beyond themselves, one replacing the other. History reenacts itself as we reenact yesterdays today for tomorrow to arrive well and vigorous—all the time, for time has no end, ever alive throbbing ahead, having no end in sight. The common saying, ―All is well that ends well,‖ so enamored Shakespeare that he made it into a comedy. The saying is fit to become a comedy because the endless history that we are has the unending hope to end well any today that we are in. History is thus always well, ending well without ending. This is because, to put it another way, history always judges looking back, and this process makes no mistakes, and so history makes no mistake. History keeps judging this way to abolish mistakes always, for afterthought is always better than all others; don‘t ask me why, it is just better, for otherwise history would criticize whatever is not better to make it better, and the process of making things better is itself better than anything there is. History thus always betters itself, continuing to correct mistakes judged mistaken. This process of finding and correcting mistakes is history, and this process makes no mistake, and so history makes no mistake, so that it makes ―all well that ends well‖ without ending. History keeps going this way to abolish mistakes always. Going always is going alive, ―going continually this way‖ makes no mistake, and so countless ponds all alive make no mistake by going ahead always as history. This is world-milieu in time in history to enable mistakes to be freely made, and then to be corrected to go ahead. All this describes countless ponds so various and alive, continuing to exist to go on variously as circles all-centers and noedge, going ahead bettering all, well-ending, well without end. Now, pain comes when things are judged in want of fulfilling the goal, and so mistakes betoken pain and poverty. The ponds and lakes are oceans of suffering, Buddhism says. It does not matter, for the oceans themselves suffer no pain, no poverty, for they have no mistake, i.e., no suffering, as history itself. So, history has no pain as it goes from yesterday to today, no mistake, no suffering but sliding on ahead. All is well ending well unending (Shakespeare), so day after day are good days (Zen Buddhism). Every today just dawns no matter what; each day is goal-directed (it dawns) without a goal (unending, for nothing), and judging is always goal-directed, and the judging fulfills the goal of judging, and so judging is self-goaled, never in pain of want, even as lived time we undergo is filled with pain. History has no pain as it has no mistake but is always judging mistakes and pain. The countless ponds alive full of pain cleanses itself of pain as their histories go on, and on, in sound and fury in utter silence (no one cares), slithering from life to death, from death to life, in pain in no pain. Alice in this Wonderland sees and undergoes things topsy-turvy and they somehow straightening themselves in the end. All this confusion unscrambling itself is portrayed by a mathematics professor in Oxford, Dr. Charles L. Dodgson, ―Lewis Carrol‖ for
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Alice. He chimes in with a great mathematician Whitehead quipping, ―The precision is a fake,‖ for 1+1=2 applies not to gunpowder plus a spark.173 Wonderland always explodes into bits and pieces, and portraying them somehow makes sense, for in each piece Alice sees a whole world, and so myriad pieces see myriad worlds, exploding round and round, out and out. A world is orderly, and myriad worlds are disorderly (myriad) orders (world), pain (full of mistakes) painless (as the whole world), and so making mistakes without making a single mistake. Lifeworld is such a strange ―wild, wild world‖ because it is so alive, always going ahead without ceasing. ―Mistakes without mistakes‖ can also be portrayed another way, like this. Nozick says, ―The word philosophy means the love of wisdom, but what philosophers really love is reasoning. They formulate theories and marshal reasons to support them, they consider objections and try to meet these, they construct arguments against other views. Even philosophers who proclaim the limitations of reason—the Greek skeptics, David Hume, doubters of the objectivity of science—all adduce reasons for their views and present difficulties for opposing ones.‖ The philosophers‘ love of reasoning and arguments comes from all Western philosophers being obsessed with finding and correcting mistakes, for that is why they keep arguing among themselves. Both Plato and Royce came to be interested in the problem of how mistake is possible.174 They are thus obsessed with mistakes. And so, we their observers can say, that what makes possible their arguments, judgments, and corrections, what keep them going, are precisely ―mistakes,‖ and so they put the cart before the horse, or rather, they mistake the bad cart for the good horse. Pain and suffering, i.e., mistakes, are what make possible philosophers, sages, and religions to flourish. Thanks to ―mistakes‖ and pain, the countless ponds come alive variously in lively arguments, and what is to be thanked for cannot be mistaken (no one thanks mistake, does he?), thus mistakes are without mistakes. This is another beautiful wild card that throws a monkey wrench (never mind mixed metaphors here) into the orderly logic about this lifeworld orderly disorderly and alive. The world is alive, thanks to death-making pain and mistakes. Oceans of suffering themselves do not suffer mistakes in all their waves of mortal mistakes. Countless ponds are alive, thanks to deadly mistakes continually erupting (disorder) for history to continually correct (order). Remember, the world without mistakes is dull and dead. Admirable loyal subjects and heroes thrive only in disastrous disorders; no shimmering crime, no shining police. This is what originated Han Fei‘s no-nonsense Legalistic Realpolitik in China175; it has worked, at least disastrously. Chuang Tzu blustered (10/16), ―Sage not decease, great thieves not cease,‖ to put ―sages‖ as mistaken. Mistakes it is that keep the lifeworld alive and exciting, in pain. Mistakes and pain interdepend on pleasure and well-doing. Let us put it another way. Countless various ponds alive are fountains of eternal youth whose elixir can be easily snatched from every grain of sand scraped from any lake-floor. Can you imagine? Chuang 173 This quip concludes his last published essay, ―Immortality,‖ in The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp, La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1951, pp. 682-700. 174 With this observation, Robert Nozick begins his ambitious book, The Nature of Rationality, Princeton University Press, 1993. The possibility of mistakes has fascinated Western thinkers since Plato (the Theaetetus). Josiah Royce built his idealism on it (The World and the Individual, 1900-1901). Western philosophy is a series of inter-pickings-apart of mistakes. 175 See 「難一」 in 韓非子，臺北市三民書局，民86，p. 547.
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Tzu (23/76-77) sees that the crippled people beyond praise and blame can throw away fancy clothing, and convicted criminals beyond life and death can climb to any height, and so they are ―men of heaven‖ so perfect, so heavenly. That is true humanity beyond all fear and shame, authentic virtue authoritative beyond all morality. It is thus that nothing is more precious and admirable than such, nothing more immortal, more alive always, exhibited among the ugly crippled and the heinous criminals. All this makes up the mad, wild world all over, its edge nowhere, always alive, no dull moment as naughty Tommy shouting, ―I don‘ wanna‘ sleep!‖ The lifeworld is various countless ponds profoundly alive, topsy-turvy, always going ahead of us, as if nothing were the matter, for all this is routine world alive, thanks to mistakes and pain. The world is wild and routine, always.
Cash Value of Various Ponds Alive ―All this is quite far out, wild, rambunctious, and boisterously unreal, out of this sober world. Does such incredible ‗insight‘ have any cash value to our real sober life?‖ Yes, of course, tremendously, tragicomically, cosmically, and historically. This realization that our lifeworld is stunningly varied, countless ponds topsy-turvy alive, gives the ultimate justification to all kids singing the world and dancing their lives, growing quite naughty and quite cosmic. These kids cannot be ridiculed as insane, thanks to our lifeworld being such stunning zillions of ponds alive. Let us take a ―crazy‖ kid-example. Andrew aged five wanted to change his birthday to get birthday gifts anytime he wants; his dad said he cannot change it, but he disagreed. O, how refreshing his demand is! None but kids alone can stunningly demand it! I his ―Gumpa Akong‖ was drawn in, and told him how to do it. This is how. He can forget his birthday, to begin all over again. Even if his Mom told him of his birthday (he whispered, ―February 26!‖), he can notbelieve it, and ask her to ―prove it!‖176 Mom is only a witness, albeit uniquely firsthand, to his birthday, and so she would have hard time proving it, for a fact is proved when it is repeated, and birthday is a fact only once-in-a-lifetime, incapable of repeating. Forgetting as Taoist and asking Mom to prove her information as Hume demands, change his birthday, you see. Now he can change his birthday, any day every time he demands it, if he wants to, for his ―birthday‖ is as good as what Mom tells him. After all, this is his birthday he is handling. He nodded in silence, in a strange sort of composure only he understands. I was going to tell his Mom how he can change his birthday, when he shouted me down, ―Don‘t tell! It‘s a secret!‖ I asked, ―Do you have secrets?‖ ―No,‖ he said. So this is his secret of no secret—his birthday change and how! Why is it a secret to Mom? The reason is simple; kids always have reasons simple and straight. Andrew‘s birthday-change is kid‘s magic, you see, and Mom must not know its secret, for telling her his magic of how he changes his birthday would ruin his changing it, as the magic is de-magicked by divulging the magic! O, how cute, how deep his secret Magic Land is where he has no secret! 176 David Hume is the kid here; he dares to disbelieve in any birthday! His so-called ―skepticism‖ is really kidasking in wonder, refusing to settle anywhere; it is kin to relativism. This is where the world is born. Skepticism, relativism, and birthday are sisters in the creation-family of kids, and ―this is a secret,‖ says Andrew the five-year-old!
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In fact, Andrew may not realize this, much less do I, that ―today‖ unrepeatable begins the rest of his life and mine, and his unique demand to change his birthday activates this truth, to make me and make him realize this every today as every birthday of his and of mine. So, his asking to change his birthday has already changed it; in the very asking, right now, his birthday of everything comes about, for his demand makes his today sparkle with the beginning of the rest of his life, for kid‘s demand sparkles things afresh, as he the kid is forever fresh, making everything fresh. He-asking-demanding is the delightful scandal of every particularity of ―birthday‖creation of everything, anything of the future. I cannot help but sing,177 Future comes One day at a time. My future is here, I must walk out to it. Morning fresh, Evening calm; Every day is a new day, The first day of my life. The squirrels are here Hopping with me. My future is my birthday today, one today at a time hopping with my Andrew hopping, hopping with our squirrels. This is the morning where/when I can do anything, as kids can do 178 anything. Andrew is the first morning of creation of all! Now, doesn‘t this story give all of us a smile? Even I laughed as I told you this stupendous story! Such open secret of Andrew‘s, such breathtaking smile he releases in us! This is many ponds alive changing their birthdays! This insight of kid‘s, unawares, into so ―many world ponds alive,‖ makes all of us kids, always growing irresistibly, illicitly, illimitably. We are naughty kids dancing the world when we are called ―poets‖ celebrating, and ―musicians‖ singing the romping mysteries of the world. We are also called ―scientists‖ as we release our kid-curiosity, forever exploring how the world of nature works. We are then called ―technologists‖ when we apply our ―scientific knowledge,‖ funknowledge, to manage the world as kids manage their games as they keep inventing new games.179 We are kids playing the management of such fun-ponds alive. We are called ―merchants‖ when we trade our products to make our living to fun-prosper continually, up and about, as kids make and trade their fun ―products‖ and fun things. 177 Kuang Wu, ―Future Comes One Day at a Time,‖ Timeless Voices, ed. Howard Ely, Owings Mills, MD: The International Library of Poetry, 2006, p. 1. Apropos of its theme, this poem is the first one to begin all in this book. 178 Andrew outshines Henry Bugbee‘s The Inward Morning: A Philosophical Exploration in Journal Form, State College, Penna.: Bald Eagle Press, 1958. 179 Remember Edison the kid-inventor? See Thomas Edison: The History Issue: Time, July 5, 2010.
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―Poets,‖ ―musicians,‖ ―scientists,‖ ―technologists,‖ and ―merchants‖—they are all nicknames for being playing ―kids.‖ These nicknames are our excuses for our living and acting as kids, singing the world and dancing the lifeworld as kids of all ages. Mind you. All this is enabled and justified by our lifeworld being the countless varieties of ponds alive, so that we ourselves melt into these ponds. Otherwise we would have been insanely boisterous, ―all in sound and fury, signifying nothing.‖ Now various ponds alive respond to Shakespeare‘s complaint on the senselessness of this world. Various ponds alive are the significance of all our life-activities through all histories and all cosmoses beyond imagination beyond all mistakes. It is the end of all that ends well, so all is well, unending. Nothing is more stunning, and nothing is more sober, than this enabling plurality of ponds alive that are our world and we our selves; all is well here, as kids ever beginning their birthdays. Have you ever seen any kid not doing well playing life? The whole point here is to go through to grow history-mature, ―sea worthy‖ of the countless ponds, one after another, scorching sunshine and dark rain, living and dying, come what may, always ready to dragon-fly one time in high honor, snake-slither another time in low unjust pain, useful in making it through and then retire without complaining, with calm composure as one cries quietly over spilled milk, and again retire as a good seasoned sailor through thick and thin, on highways of the ocean or in hidden dark coves. Such is to live in, and live through, countless ponds alive, losing ways and finding them again, in zillions of sand-kaleidoscopes in them, gone-on, passed-on, alive through death, joy in pain. Am I crazy mumbling all this? Of course I am crazy, sane in insane ponds alive, nodo and nothing not-done, nothing said, no word, no silence, bouncy in many slashes of wounds, surviving them all in silence without silence. Realizing to be in various ponds alive, I am now composed adapt to shifts of waves and winds to adapt them. I am a spinning top twirling calm, an agile dragonfly over ponds after ponds alive, in twilight dawn of thickets in primeval ponds rancid and raucous, ever beginning life through deaths as if nothing were the matter as Andrew. I am pain-proofed, joy-immune, and insane in life-sanity. Such is the whole point of pointing at various ponds alive so countless. Such is the cash value of this section delightfully insane, on stunning ponds alive so countless everywhere nowhere. Here I am, almost done, with something of interest to say remaining to say. I have been splashing in the ponds where my thoughts collect, when my thoughts are things‘ ponds. There is something of the pond to every person whose metaphor spews a new reality from the original that turns unreal, as every life grows. Growing is life; no growing, no life. Growth is metaphor that produces ponds after ponds proliferating in rancid air breathing death to breathe life unimaginable. Ponds are life in thoughts in metaphor growing more ponds, full of sound and fury, signifying without signifying; such busy calm! Description is an element, air and water, frogs in twilight pond, vanishing in daylight of ecological twilight. Lakes are crow-hooting frogsplashing, lapping waves. Here I let myself go, and I turn into the ponds so countless so alive for no rhyme, no reason. Such poetry of the ponds responds to our daily necessity of getting the world right. 180 ―Poetry is the gaiety (joy) of language‖ (Stevens ) in the ponds of life in death, death in life. 180 Wallace Stevens‘s ―Adagio‖ in Opus Posthumous, quoted in Modern Poetics, ed. James Scully, NY: McGrawHill, 1965, p. 150.
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Language of ponds that includes death is the music of joy over death. I feel better bathing in the ponds of life my poetry creates. I splash in the twilight of imagination beyond reality, all too real beyond actuality growing, turning ponds more numerous, moment by moment. This-world of ponds is out of 181 this world. Here I ―can never be born enough,‖ in ―embryonic omnipotence‖ (cummings ) of a naughty baby; each today comes, one at a time, as my birthday and my Andrew‘s, in ponds various alive. ―Where is China?‖ Hasn‘t it been here all this while as such story-ponds?
F. “CHINESE BODY THINKING”: WORLD INTERCULTURE OF DR. KUANG-MING WU BY GONGSUN CHOU182 Dr. Kuang-ming Wu issues a lone battle cry for China-independence in global interdependence. Dr. Wu is a solitary prophetic voice of life-thinking in the wilderness of stone-thinking, i.e., thinking all beings in an identical stone-perspective, a sterile scholarship called scientific thinking so precise in meticulous analysis. In contrast, Dr. Wu‘s ―life-thinking‖ thinks as life itself thinks as story-thinking ubiquitously human. Life-thinking as story-thinking thinks both both-and and either-or; logical thinking thinks either-or alone. Life-thinking is of course body-thinking in storythinking. China thinks life-thinking in body-thinking as story-thinking. Dr. Wu, trained at Yale in French existentialism and German phenomenology, is one of the world‘s very few cultural hermeneutists in systematic depth. He pursues world interculture radical and revolutionary, lucid, vast, and bottomlessly complex. Noteworthy it is that Wu does not play generalities with a ―world philosophy‖ but has as its focus, ―ChinaWest interculture,‖ shown clearly in the subtitle to his Brill trilogy, in the title of Professor Jay Goulding‘s edited volume dedicated to him, and in all his volumes since 1982 and still pouring out into academia today and tomorrow. Wu‘s writing pulses life; his pen moves up and down as he breathes in and out. He lives his writing as his writing ex-presses his heartbeat. Existence being inter-existence, writers naturally want readers; human self being self-reflective, writing to ―my satisfaction‖ satisfies me without reader, for I am my other, and ―I write to myself‖ as Thoreau did. So, Thoreau says that ―those authors are successful who . . . make their own taste and judgment their 183 audience. . . . It is enough if I please myself with writing; I am then sure of an audience.‖
181 These are e e cummings‘ phrases in Poems 1923-1954, quoted in Modern Poetics, op. cit., pp. 121, 122. 182 With gratitude, this essay is edited-expanded, to conveniently sum up China as story-thinking as body thinking. This section follows Professor Gongsun‘s pinyin system; please refer to pinyin-Wades-Giles conversion chart in Kuang-ming Wu, Butterfly as Companion, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990, p. 512, and Victor Mair, ed., The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature, NY: Columbia University Press, 1994, pp. 1321-1325. Wu agrees with Raymond Dawson saying, ―I have retained the more familiar WadeGiles system, which has been used for most English-language books on China, in preference to the new pinyin system introduced by the Chinese, which gives even less idea how the words are actually pronounced.‖ (Confucius, Oxford University Press, 1981, p. viii) 183 See Wu, ―World Interculturalism: China Written in English,‖ Taiwan Journal of East Asian Studies, June 2005, pp. 1-42. I to Myself: An Annotated Selection from Journal of Henry D. Thoreau, ed. Jeffrey S. Cramer, Yale University Press, 2007, p. 33.
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Wu thus keeps on writing, thinking of no reader or publisher, to suddenly get a publisher. Only recently, his two massive volumes (500pp, 450pp) are scheduled to publish in 2010 from Nova Science Publishers, and at least two more volumes, equally substantial, are awaiting their appearances. This fact constitutes despair to us readers, however, as we meet Wu‘s ―China-West interculture‖ quite protein, profuse, and global. Wu‘s themes under China-West interculture range from two Zhuangzi volumes (one is a world bestseller, published in 1990, still in print), through a dialogue volume with MerleauPonty, a volume on world togetherness, one on metaphoring as its methodology, one on Chinese wisdom, one on story-thinking, one on nonsense, to reach one on the Beyond, all with 469-672 printed pages each volume. Wu‘s volumes and articles of ten thousand or so pages touch China, the West, Japan, violence, milieu, music, the child, the Beyond (religion), etc.; his pages and themes cover oceans of themes worldwide, and are themselves a vast ocean of pages with an awesome variety of tight compelling arguments and fresh disarming descriptions. In view of such a challenge to the reader, the present writer presumes to propose one methodological thread, among many others, going through his vast numbers of themes to elucidate his complex ideas so bewildering. This thread is ―Chinese body thinking.‖ His volume with that title won the highest 185 academic award in Taiwan, 傑出獎, in 1996, demonstrating the recognition of that volume as authentically Chinese, but in my opinion all Wu‘s volumes both before and after that volume are devoted to elucidating Chinese body thinking and spreading it interculturally worldwide, globally enriching. The reason is simple. Wu writes breathing his lung, pulsing his heart. His writing pulses in life-rhythm of life-logic. He writes as his body thinks, to tell of ―Chinese Body Thinking.‖ Of course, we see volumes on ―body thinking.‖ Taiwan had one out in 1996, The Confucian View of the Body (not body thinking); Zhang published Traditional Chinese Philosophy as the 186 Philosophy of the Body in China in 2008. Still, none is deep, vast, persistent, complex, heartfelt, and intercultural, as Wu‘s life-project of ―Chinese body thinking,‖ an alternative thinking-mode to the Western. Our body thinks, and body thinking is things dancing all over Heaven and Earth, thanks to China‘s ideograph-characters. A thing makes its presence-impact in explosion alive. The 187 impact would have been raw and overwhelming but for the fact that the thing usually comes steady and sensible, steadying the world to dance with us. Stones and trees, squirrels and chickadees, all come to us as sense alive, captured in portrayals of Chinese characters. Things are senses-of-presence to soar to sing together; they appear as tunes of sense dancing in names sung by characters.
184 He is amazed to learn of two avid readers, Brien Kelley (NYU counselor with PhD from Columbia University) and Jason Kuo (professor of Chinese paintings in University of Maryland). 185 Kuang-ming Wu, On Chinese Body Thinking: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 1997. 186 楊儒賓著，儒家身體觀，臺北市中研院文哲所，民85. 張再林著，作為身體哲學的中國古代哲學，北京中國社會科學出版社，2008. I omit Japan‘s bodythinking research by Yuasa Yasuo 湯淺泰雄 who tends to sum up Jung more than interpreting him, and going beyond him. 187 Things raw and stark (e.g., chestnut tree) make us nauseous, said Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, NY: New Directions, 1964.
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Things thus dance together, in Nature naturing. Dance co-moves in tune in rhythm, in rhyme with life pulse; with other things we co-dance and co-swirl to co-thrive, breath to breath, step to step and in step, season after season. Dance here is joy-tapping beauty of ecological concord, whose beats are kept in pan-tune by the sounds and sights of senseideograms, Chinese characters. It is Chinese body-thinking dancing alive personal, interpersonal, and cosmic. We cannot help but gaze at this fascinating theme of Wu‘s, in the following pages. After describing what ―Chinese body thinking‖ is, we looking into it as concrete thinking, as story thinking, as logically and contingently ―necessary,‖ and as world intercultural and worldindispensable. We presume to claim this thread as Wu‘s thread of Chinese body thinking.
What “Chinese Body Thinking” is To begin, we must explicate what Wu means by ―body thinking‖ and ―body,‖ both quite distinctive of China. ―Bodily thinking tells of an independent thinking with bodily qualities, while ―body thinking‖ is human body itself engaged in thinking as body‘s inherent nature, i.e., the person; here thinking manifests the body that itself thinks. Body thinking is not bodily thinking as lips-talking are not lipstick of bodily quality decorating lip-thinking. Body thinking concretely bites into actuality, quite beyond what logical thinking is capable of. The ―logic‖ proudly developed in the West188 is fussy; it analyzes and cleanses only what is analyzable, but things concrete cannot always be so analyzable, and so logic ends up clearly and distinctly separating itself from the messy concrete world. Besides, logic cuts necessity from contingency while trying to join them, and joins while cutting them, and of course no one can join while separating. Logic thus proudly engages in impossibility, to separate itself from messy actuality. In contrast, ―Chinese body thinking‖ is thinking body-concrete, and thinks concretely actuality that is its home. Storytelling is how Chinese body thinks on things concrete, to makes sense of things concrete. Story thinking uses stories to think, and thinks story-way; it tells of things as they happen without rhyme or reason, thereby understands the way things go. Chinese body thinking is thus concrete thinking in story thinking that does justice to the Way of things; it mirrors the Dao, the Way, of the world that coheres in Dao, where worldly messiness vanishes. 189 Body thinking is milieu-thinking in this world and of this world. This millieu spreads from me-in-body viewing things to melt into things viewing things. As my body does not 190 lie, things as they are do not lie, and so my body-milieu-thinking is ever true to this world, true in this world. All this while, I am finding things surprising, to realize and wonder how far
188
Wu cannot help but remember proudly jubilant authors such as follows. Jacob Burckhardt, History of Greek Culture (1958), NY: Dover, 2002. Bruno Snell, The Discovery of the Mind in Greek Philosophy and Literature (1953), NY: Dover, 1982. Edith Hamilton, The Greek Way (1930), Chicago: Time Inc., 1963. C. M. Bowra, The Greek Experience, Cleveland: The World Publishing, 1957. The list goes on. 189 See Wu‘s ―The I-Milieu: Its Implications for Culture and Thinking (I: pp. 1-59, December 207), (II: pp. 1-68, June 2008), Journal of World Religions. Wu‘s ―milieu-thinking‖ enables I-Thou thinking and I-It thinking as part and parcel of Chinese body thinking. 190 Cf. John Diamond, M.D., Your Body Doesn‟t Lie, NY: Warner Books, 1979.
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out of this world this world is. Thus I as my body am born with Heaven and Earth, and I am one with myriad things, thanks to my body-thinking as milieu-thinking. All this means that logic is ingrained in bodily story thinking, for the purpose of logic is to make sense, and so logic pulses and breathes concrete story body-thinking that makes concrete sense; story thinking is logical, and Dao of the concrete is thoroughly logical beyond fussy logic, even beyond fuzzy logic. Telling stories, we understand logic, and undergoing logic, concrete storytelling reveals itself as logical as it is body thinking. Even the ―body‖ in Chinese body thinking must be carefully elucidated. Differing from 191 Merleau-Ponty‘s ―flesh,‖ Chinese body thinking is the full integral body in its holistic act of the person sensing the senses of things concrete. ―Body‖ here is not physiological but the totality of a person that originates physiological bodies; such body is the integral and embodied self thinking without ceasing. Gender vs. sex exemplifies ―body‖ actual beyond empirical. Sex is physiological, while 192 They differ yet are intimately inter-involved, gender is behavior-patterned comportment. and both arise out of originative sexuality that composes the person, as humanity. The same holds for body physiological vs. body actual, both included in China‘s ―body‖ holistic. ―Body‖ is used here to signify holistic personhood because, influenced by Platonic abstraction, the notion of ―person‖ tends to drop its inherent composition of the ―body.‖ The whole matter, captured in China as Yin-Yang interaction in the Ultimate One, is logical beyond logic, not because it is mysterious but it is starkly concrete beyond logicizing. This natural personal ―body‖ thinks, entirely distinct from disembodied ratiocination that dominates the appetitive and governs the voluntary parts of the self, whatever the ―self‖ means here; this is Plato‘s favorite imagery in Phaedrus and the Republic. In contrast, the ―originative body‖ naturally thinks as Chinese body thinking with three inherent aspects; it is concrete thinking, in story thinking, toward thinking in the world interculturing. First, being itself a body-act, Chinese thinking is thinking concrete in daily nitty-gritty of pain and joy. Secondly, such concrete body thinking is coherent thinking rolled out in time and space, making sense as stories to compose history. Finally, body thinking as concrete story thinking crisscrosses to compose world interculture, not a ―world philosophy‖ as a pie in a Platonic sky above worldly ideas, but thinking embodied intercultural in this concrete world. Now, six sections below unpack these three aspects, plus some additional themes of interest such as relativism, eternity, death, and necessity.
One: Chinese Body Thinking as Concrete Thinking193 The body does not lie, so body thinking is true and accurate; body is natural, so body
191 See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (1968) and The Prose of the World (1973), both published by Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Wu dialogues with him in Wu‘s On Chinese Body Thinking: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 1997. 192 Merleau-Ponty confuses the sex-gender distinction (without separation) as he explains ―the body in its sexual being‖ in M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962, pp. 154-173. 193 This portion barely summarizes Wu‘s Chinese Wisdom Alive, NY: Nova Science Publishers, 2010.
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thinking is concrete thinking. ―Concrete thinking‖ is a scandal in the Western context of logical analysis, though, where ―thinking‖ is by definition about the concrete, which then is not thinking, and so ―concrete thinking‖ is ―not-thinking thinking.‖ a contradiction. In contrast, ―concrete thinking‖ is the soul of Chinese body thinking. Since body concrete thinks, body thinking is concrete thinking as body‘s core and pivot. The modus operandi of concrete thinking goes from three concrete notions, to be considered soon, whose modus vivendi to persuade is concrete thinking ―arguing.‖ China‘s notions are notables in actuality, 194 not Western concepts as forceps pinching abstract meanings out of things. Concepts argue, while notions move with life, as life, to persuade people, and people say notions ―argue.‖ Of course, persuasion includes argument, and we can even play with argument to persuade, yet playing with argument does not argue but persuade, as thinking, to move people. Thinking moves freely as the body does to move people‘s minds and attitudes, but 195 instead of going into Wu‘s fascinating panorama of playing with argument in life, we only note that the body alone ―plays‖; ―mind‖ plays as part of the body. This is why China the home of body thinking has no analytical tradition of argument, but free play of argument to persuade irresistibly. To cleanse and stem the corruption of persuasion into demagoguery, we only need to return to the body as the base of thinking. As the body does not lie, so body-persuasion does not cheat. Such is the rationale of righting names 正名 of lived persuasion. This is the home of authenticity-expressed 信. loyalty to oneself 忠, and being like-minded with others 恕; they are all ―moral‖ notions. Morality and logic are supported and executed by body thinking that ―argues‖ truly. Thinking argues, and so concrete thinking ―argues‖ concretely, proceeding in two tiers, 196 (a) concrete notions in three ways, and (b) threefold concrete argumentation. Concrete thinking begins at demonstratives, affirmatives, and negatives; and concrete argumentation is built on such Chinese three ways of concrete notions, that is, the compact corresponds with the concrete, the metaphorical with the affirmative, and the ironic with the negative. The base of all these is the demonstratives whose meanings depend on specific situations, and quite naturally derive from Chinese body thinking. Demonstratives are a Western 197 analytical headache, however; demonstratives such as ―here,‖ ―now,‖ ―this,‖ ―I,‖ etc., are logically required to stay identical in meaning throughout all their uses, yet these words differ in meaning as their different users differ. Such meaning-variation in situational sensitivity is a logical scandal. In contrast, China realizes that these words and all words derive from ―I‖ who use them, and as ―I‖ differ, their meanings naturally differ. The well-known poetic conundrum, ―White horse, no horse,‖ just innocently points to this natural shift of sense in names in eight
194 See Wu, On Chinese Body Thinking, op. cit., p. 315, and his On the “Logic” of Togetherness: A Cultural Hermeneutic, 1998, pp. 350-352, both from Leiden: Brill. 195 See ibid., pp. 150-215. 196 This is the present writer‘s compact description of Wu‘s On Chinese Body Thinking, op. cit., pp. 22-79, and Togetherness, op. cit., pp. 324-334. Regrettably, Wu‘s rich details of elucidation had to be bypassed to bring out his solid supple lines of depiction of Chinese body thinking. 197 E.g., Palle Yourgrau, ed., Demonstratives, Oxford University Press, 1990, carries essays that greatly flex logical muscles; they all proudly display their tremendous analytical calisthenics to connect shifting actuality to staid logical universality, as if such connection were rare, exotic, and exceptional.
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ways. But this realization is not confined to Gongsun Long; shifting meanings alive in all names and words fill the literature of China, making it alive as living routines. Names-can―name‖ staid are not actual names,199 for names shift in sense as their use-situations shift. All words in China are demonstratives based on the arch-demonstrative, ―I.‖ This is not peculiar to China. All words are situation-sensitive demonstratives, for everything moves, and motion is situation-dependent, as seen by where and how I am. The scene seen moving is correct as seen from my car moving; geocentric view of the sun moving is correct viewed from the heliocentrically viewed earth moving. Thus nothing moves without 200 me ; all are moving as seen by where and how I am, who am myself a situation-sensitive demonstrative. All words are demonstratives because of I-demonstrative. China is just particularly sensitive-truthful to the truth of actual expressive situations. The only requirement here is, China says, that the name—word—used and its actuality 201 such referred to, must inter-conform. As one professes such and such, one must practice and such; it ―corrects names 正名‖ to achieve the name-actuality conformity, after which Confucianism (in sociopolitical praxis) and Name-logicians (in uses of words) strive. Now, let us see how China‘s body-demonstratives can be understood in the light of the West. In the West, Descartes says all thinking derives from the I-think; George Berkeley says, to be is to be perceived; John Austin says, to say is to do. Thus, China would say that the Ithink perceives to do the sensing of things, and this I-thinking-act is a natural extension of the I‘s body-thinking. Thinking extends my body (Descartes) to do (Austin) the perceiving to let things be (Berkeley) as the situation concretely shifts (demonstratives), for all thinking is my 202 body-thinking in situations concrete. Let us repeat. All demonstratives come from I-as-demonstrative. I-demonstrative has a 203 fascinating drama as in this story. Chuang Tzu said (2/94-96), ―Last night, Chuang Chou dreamed to be a butterfly; quite happily he was a butterfly, not knowing Chou. Suddenly he awoke, and then, surely, he was a man. Now he did not know. Was he a man dreamed to be a butterfly? Or is he a butterfly dreaming to be a man? Chou and butterfly must have difference有分; this is called things changing 物化.‖ Now, ―butterfly‖ symbolizes fluttering between life and death. Here life and death are revealed as quite peculiar. They are not simple demise and living of the self, but the self itself self-differing 有分 to thing-change 物化. This complex dynamics is unobtrusively exhibited—demonstrated—in the name ―Chuang Chou 莊周‖ of the story told by Chuang Tzu 莊子 whose name is ―Chuang Chou.‖ ―Chuang Chou‖ is the name of Chuang Tzu. Name 名 is what is called 謂 about an identity to conform to actuality 實. The problem is that the very identity differs 有分 in itself 198 Gongsun Long‘s eight explanations of ―white horse, no horse‖ confirm this situation-sensitive demonstrative character of names and words. See 公孫龍子 (臺北市三民書局, 2004, pp. 27-41). Cf. Wu‘s Chinese Wisdom Alive, NY: Nova Science Publishers, 2010, pp. 172, 217-36, 376, et passim. 199 Lao Tzu (1) is quoted and explained here, 「名可名非常名; name can name, not Name Always。」. 200 This is perhaps the origin of Buddhist ―things not moving 物不遷論.‖ 201 Hsün Tzu said, ―As we name things, so we see things‖ (荀子，正名篇). Things appear, to exist, as we name them. It is expanded to humanistic cosmology of the family of heaven, earth, and humanity, as stressed in Neo-Confucianism.. 202 Such West-China contrast persists through the rest of concrete notions and concrete argumentation. 203 This is an elaboration of the formal point raised in the long Note 10 on p. 414 of Wu, The Butterfly as Companion, op. cit. Cf. its pp. 461 (index on ―Chuang Chou‖) and 493 (index on ―butterfly‖).
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as dreaming and awakening differ, and interchange to mutually change between the self and the thing (butterfly) 物化. What is more, it is to self-differ that is called thing-change. For the self, to differ-in-itself is to change with the thing. This is why when Chuang Tzu tells his dream-story, he did not say ―I dreamed‖ but uses his name to say, ―Chuang Chou dreamed.‖ The storyteller differs dynamically from the storyhero who is storyteller himself. Such dynamism is symbolized by the name of the dreamed thing, ―butterfly‖ that flutters between life and death. Life-of-man is death-of-butterfly and butterfly-life is man-death; as dream differs from awakening yet involves awakening, so much so that we are awakened toward dreaming to tell and hear the story of dreaming to awaken, awakening to dream, living to death that comes alive in a living-dream. Thus when I-demonstrative differs in meaning as the I-users change, the I-users can be the same singular ―I‖ who self-differs to thing-change, inter-changing with thing(s). ―I‖ is 204 many in one and one as many as I-demonstrative. The self is another who is the self, a plurality single, a singular plurality, all packed in one simple word, ―I.‖ Chuang Tzu thus tells the story of himself with his name ―Chou‖ dreaming to be awake, awakening toward dreaming, each time differing in self-identity, a man, a butterfly, mutually inter-changing. Fabulous! Fascinating! Only story-thinking—storytelling, story-hearing—can handle such a dizzying dazzling dynamics of a simple identity-name, ―I.‖ We have just told a new story of Chuang Tzu‘s identity-story of his butterfly-dream. Now, three implications of Idemonstrative follow. First, we take identity as authenticity and cherish authenticity. We do not realize that ―authenticity‖ shifts internally (self-differs) and externally (thing-changes), breathing out of itself as it breathes in things. Authenticity correlates and interrelates with thing-milieu in which the self moves and lives. The self is the I-demonstrative that shifts as it affirms itself authentically in its shifting thing-milieu. Secondly, the affirmative comes by extending body-demonstrative. In contrast to the West‘s indifferent affirmative proposition, in China, the I af-firms ―this‖ as this, to set this up as not that. China‘s affirmation is how the self stands firm and what the self stands on to firm thing up. Such is Chinese affirmative, a verb-noun of the self in acts of affirming things. A story below explains this point. A story has it that Kagawa Toyohiko 賀川豊彥 was a weakly young man good at writing. He was writing for a newspaper company when a bully knocked on the door and wanted to ―borrow‖ money. He said he would give it to him tomorrow when he got ―money from a newspaper company‖ to which he was writing. The bully whammed him and left. Next evening, the bully heard a knock on his door; he opened it. The tiny Kagawa was there, with one hand holding a wet towel over the bloated cheek whammed by the bully, with another hand holding out a bag of money to the bully, saying, ―Here is the money I promised.‖ Overwhelmed, the bully vowed to be his friend to ―protect‖ him. Kagawa affirmed his word and his identity; his affirmation spread to the bully to firm up friendship. Authenticity of such trustworthiness 信 consists in a person staking the personhood 人 with asserted words 言; Confucius would not know what to do with the person who behaves otherwise (2/22). The twofold thread through what Confucius affirms is being loyally true to 204 Thus this self-dynamics in China is more complex than Paul Ricoeur would have imagined in his Oneself as Another, University of Chicago Press, 1990.
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the self 忠 and like-mindedly true to others 恕 (4/15). ―Being true‖ firms up the whole person as affirmatives. I-demonstrative naturally self-affirms to other-affirm. Finally, in contrast to the West‘s logical negation, China‘s negative is an affirmative naturally extended, to serve as the ―not not-A‖ to clinch the affirmative ―A is A.‖ The negative is the nodding admission, in self-emptied accommodation, to room an ―A as A,‖ as hollows in bamboo strengthen the bamboo sinuous and unbreakable. Confucius packs three sighs that begin his Analects with strong negatives, ―not rather pleasant?‖ and ―not known, not vexed.‖ China loves ―no do, wuwei 無為,‖ that does ―no notdoes 無不為.‖ Tommy shouts, ―I don‘ wanna sleep!‖ Mom knows, saying, ―OK, don‘t sleep. Just sit here beside your pillow; I‘ll read you a story, OK?‖ Tommy nods. ―Once upon a time . . .‖ and he hits the pillow. Mom no-does (not pushing Tommy, not letting him go), and 205 nothing is not done; he fulfills sleep-need, and Mom satisfies her love of him. Zhuangzi wants us to babysit the tyrant as Mom does, in wuwei-way. Now, I-demonstrative developing I-affirmative into I-negative would vigorously move on in three modes, compact, metaphoric, and ironic, the three moves that continue the three notional activities to persuade people; such persuading activities are usually dubbed ―arguing.‖ Demonstratives in affirming negatives go on to actively argue. Metaphor affirms ―that‖ with ―this,‖ with familiar this affirmed by I-demonstrative to point at that unfamiliar novel, to posit and affirm that as part of our familiar repertoire of my known this. China‘s metaphor is an existential affirmation of my self in my body-activity; it 206 is existentially more involved than Polanyi‘s mere cognitive ―tacit dimension.‖ The West since Aristotle takes metaphor as a dispensable adjunct to decorate straight 207 Even the very argument, while in China metaphor is the soul of concrete expression. ―logic‖ in China has metaphor as its modus operandi. It is this concrete-metaphoring that 208 A guest proposed to King Liang makes name-logician Hui Shi powerfully persuasive. 梁王 to forbid Hui Shi 惠施 to metaphor. When the King urged him to talk straight 直言, he replied, ―Suppose someone ignorant of what spring-bow is. If I said ‗Spring-bow is spring-bow,‘ would he understand what it is?‖ The king said, ―No.‖ He then said, ―Would ‗it‘s shaped as a bow, strung with bamboo‘ let him know?‖ ―Yes, it can let him know.‖ ―To persuade is of course to explain the unknown with the known to let people know. If your majesty stops it, then it cannot be done.‖ The king said, ―Fine.‖
Concrete logicizing must thus metaphor from a concrete case to another concrete case. Moreover, their concrete demonstrations are for practical concerns, to ―right names 209 正名實‖ —to conform conceptualization and argumentation to actuality, so as to straighten 205 See Zhuangzi‘s Chapter Four, ―World among People.‖ 206 Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (1958) and The Study of Man (1959), University of Chicago Press. 207 See Wu‘s massive On Metaphoring: a Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 2001. 208 See 劉向, 說苑, 卷十一善說 (臺北三民書局, 民85, p. 381). See also Wu‘s Chinese Wisdom Alive, NY: Nova Science Publishers, 2010, p. 217. 209 These words are in 跡府篇 to begin 公孫龍子, pp. 2, 4 in the version of 臺北三民書局, 2004. Cf. The Analects 12/11, 13/3. Other Name-Scholars asserted likewise, such as 鄧析子 (民86, p. 7) and 尹文子 (民85, p. 2, both published by 臺北三民書局).
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the world now messed up. Concrete demonstrations metaphoric are always applied to practical affairs such as lawsuits and ―international politics.‖ Concrete demonstration is affirmations that metaphorically stretch to that from this, and then compact themselves into simple elegance, with a connotative hierarchy of situational implications. This is what makes Chinese lyrical beauty of all sentences. In the West, argument aims to cover all aspects, cut all exceptions, and reply to all objections. Controversy naturally originates in endless quibbles. In contrast, Chinese pictograms (characters) dot some facts, as if asides, and omit all 210 others. Confucius‘ Analects collect these dots, as all historical documents do. Just read this amazing story in the Tso Chuan 左傳,211 China‘s oldest narrative history: Grand Historian wrote, ―Ts‘ui Chu assassinated his ruler 崔杼弒其君.‖ Ts‘ui killed him. His younger-brother continued and wrote so, and the dead were two. His younger-brother wrote (so) again. (Ts‘ui) then let it (stand as written). South Historian, having heard those historians were dead, was on his way (there) with all his tablets, when (he) heard (it) wasalready written, and went back.
The story did not even mention the names of the three brave Grand Historians! Such parsimony is so powerful that its aftershocks have been reverberating through all ages. We see two realizations, among many others, of later generations. One, we see how the three Grand Historians firmed up their truthful record with their very lives—they affirmed existential affirmatives; their truthful history upheld with their lives. Two, above all, we see how powerfully such reportage was made via its fewest possible 212 words. Wu says this is China‘s ―dot-pragmatics.‖ ―Few words‖ draw people; the less said, the more said. Compactness is power in silence; compactness connotes richly to say loudly in silence, through the readers who caught the compact punch. All Chinese classics are compact, dotting silence to turn incorruptible for ever. This is China‘s eternity that dwells in the felt situation, and becomes the situation of all time. Time is 213 an abode of eternity. In any case, metaphors so compact make stories, to make history continuous and incorruptible that makes China. Finally, negatives that confirm affirmatives make irony. Chinese sentences go ironic by saying A to say not-B, as a complicated mode of expressing Chinese negatives. Mencius pulls off a poignant irony in ―help grow‖ (2A2), two affirmatives composing his negative warning, i.e., we should never interfere with growth. Irony is metaphor in a negative form, a ―not‖ hid in metaphor to pique the hearer‘s curiosity into close attention, to realize ―never ‗help grow‘‖! Do-good-ism is a road to hell. Metaphor tells of ―as this, so that‖; irony-story is ―as this, so not-that,‖ with a wink omitting ―not that.‖ Such irony is all over China in likely and unlikely places, sometimes so subtly hidden unnoticeable. Irony can be said to sum up and climax all modes of expression of body 214 thinking. No wonder, Wu devotes the most pages to irony, almost reveling in it, and irony 210 Cf. Wu‘s Chinese Body Thinking, p. 55. 211 See 左傳，襄公二十五年，臺北市三民書局, 2002, p.1097. This is Wu‘s translation. 212 See Wu, On Metaphoring, op. cit., p. 664, index on ―dot-pragmatics.‖ 213 Ibid., pp. 192-194. 214 Ibid., pp. 60-79.
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seems to flow over these pages. Here we just cite Wu‘s five examples (with their stories), all ordinary and quite unsuspected: (1) finger pointing, (2) self-cultivation, (3) hiding to appear, and (4) Zhuangzi‘s ―supreme swindle.‖ One, finger pointing: The finger pointing beyond itself typifies irony. Finger-pointing aims at calling attention to itself only to point away from itself. Finger-pointing fulfills itself by negating itself. We need the finger to direct our gaze at the moon, and our gaze forgets the finger. This is Zen‘s favorite simile but we wonder if Zen people fully realize the ironic character of finger-pointing, for Zen noisily point at itself pointing. In contrast, all Chinese writings are silently constantly aware of their self-negating function quite indispensable and positive, i.e., being ironic. Two, self-cultivation: I caution in-solitude 慎獨 to right my soul 正心, to cultivate myself 修身. I-cautioner cautions over I-cautioned, I-cultivator cultivates I-cultivated, and yet all this while I am ―one‖ and the same myself, no caution, no cautioned. Such Confucian selfreflection is an existential irony, self-subject dealing with self-object into self-unity (selfaffirming) that is after all oneself to begin with, in no need of cautious-affirmation at all. I need such exercise in futility because of my self-split of me from myself that I am, to unify into ―me in one body.‖ What an ironic contortion it is of the body-movement of the self! The ―I‖ is a verb of self-movement, ironically straining to ―cultivate‖ what is already there. I am an irony. This is a Chinese sort of irony of Socratic self-knowledge, which no one in the West takes as irony. Now, self-reflection reflects helping others. ―Mercy is not for the other,‖ says Japan. He that gives lends; one good turn deserves another. Other-help mirrors self-help. Three Cups of 215 Tea describes how being helped originated helping others. This riveting story turns into New York Time‘s bestseller, dramatically rehearsing our ubiquitous Golden Rule, to do to others as you would wish to be done by. This reciprocity-sentiment expresses Mencius‘ ―heartfelt pain in sensitivity to other‘s 216 pain 不忍人之心‖ and Jesus‘ visceral pain of mercy, spaggchnizomai. Jesus puts the Golden Rule in positive love (Matthew 7:12), as Confucius did negatively (12/2, 15/24), ―Do not to others what one does not wish,‖ i.e., against doing violence to others. Mencius elaborates on it, saying (4A8), ―Cutting oneself invites others to cut oneself.‖ If self-love is love of others, self-violation invites self-violation by others, and then otherviolation turns violence all around, killing victor with victim. Violence boomerangs, Wu 217 says. Thus, as one‘s self is an irony, so my other is an irony. If existence is inter-existence, all existents are ironic. Irony is inherent throughout Heaven and Earth. Does this ironic unity originate honest learning from any three walking together (7.22), joining my caution to choose friends not unworthy of me (1/8)? Does this irony join instruction without discrimination (15/39) with refusing to deal with those unable to return three when confronted with teacher proposing one (7/8)? Here Confucius‘ honesty joins his prudential inconsistencies; the joining makes an irony. Three, hiding to appear: Have we ever noticed someone absenting oneself from friends to call attention to one‘s presence among them? Absence there is quite conspicuous. Besides, 215 Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin, Three Cups of Tea, NY: Penguin Books, 2006. 216 Mencius 1A7, 2A6. The term, ―pain in viscera,‖ is reserved for Jesus alone in the first three Gospels. 217 Wu, §Violence as Weakness—In China and Beyond, in Story-Thinking here, and ―Violence as Weakness—In China and Beyond,‖ Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, Winter 2003, pp. 7-28.
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stark nakedness erases all personal distinctions. Only by hiding one‘s physiological body in attire specifically chosen by oneself, as designed by fashionable designers, can one show oneself as oneself. Thus hiding oneself shows oneself. Hiding something in the world secures it never to lose. The world is made of such irony of hiding to appear! Four, Zhuangzi‘s ―supreme swindle‖: Daoist Zhuangzi specifically chooses and taunts what sensible people and logicians usually avoid, such as platitudes, non sequiturs, and selfcontradictions wholly senseless. Such display piques curiosity, provoking people to ponder on the reasonableness of life beyond our tired common sense. He (2/84) calls it the strategies of 218 ―supreme swindle 弔詭,‖ reveling in all that are avoided by ―decent folks.‖ In fact, all Daoist writings enjoy ironically swindling people‘s reason. Mind you. These four stories all have two crucial features that make up an even further irony. One, these stories are all quite daily, common, and ordinary, and yet, staying ordinary as they are, they are quite surprising. These stories show us how stunningly unusual the usual routines of life are. All we need is just to open our eyes wide and watch and discern; there is no need to go out of this world, whatever that means, to see this world as out of this world. The world is an ironic wonder. Now, two, the ultimate of all such irony is irony without irony. All things having been said and expressed, my body thinks to return to my body saying beyond saying; here is no saying, no silence. Body-silence says softly with breeze, and nothing opposes my heart-ofbeing 心. Irony thus tells most for silence to say most, for silence culminates irony. We omit 219 We only stress that silence is the self Wu‘s seven fascinating story-ways to tell silence. nodding at the self, my body-demonstrative affirming ―I am I‖ silently. 220 All this is shi 適, fit and comfort forgotten. Zhuangzi punches out the point: ―Feet forgotten is the fit of sandals; waist forgotten is the fit of a belt; knowledge forgotten of Yes and No is the fit of the heart; ‗in‘ not changed, ‗out‘ not followed, is the fit of events met; to begin at fit and(-until) not without fit, is the fit of forgotten fit.‖ Life‘s fitting comfort lies in comfort forgetting the comfort, even forgetting myself enjoying myself, as natural as my body. Love lives on; romance burns. The world I see is the world things view; all are one in myriads, being with one another without being with one another. This is irony (things and words inter-oppose to inter-express) beyond being ironic (things inter-gaze to inter-unify), unity beyond unity, opposed beyond opposition, as my body 221 silent, in/as this lifeworld as countless ponds various, alive. But variety of the ponds has more, even in the I. I-demonstrative is already an irony, where it is expanded from ―same word, different senses‖ to ―assumed, inexpressible.‖ On one hand, the I is always presupposed in all my acts 222 and sayings. On the other hand, the I is almost always understood, not asserted. ―I‘m normal‖ is assumed in all my expressions, oral or behavioral, yet displaying the proposition,
218 See Wu‘s ―弔詭怡生：一比較哲學試釋‖ in 吳銳編，楊向奎先生百年誕辰記念文集 (吉林大學出版社, 2009), pp. 25-34. 219 See VIII: Selflessness, Silence, and § Silence as Music at its end, above. 220 Chuang Tzu 19/62-64. The whole punch here is magnificent crescendos into de-crescendos! 221 This point is explicated in Wu‘s ―Ponds Various Alive (41 pages),‖ NY: Nova Science Publishers, forthcoming, and is refurbished above. 222 That is, except in taking an oath.
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―I‘m normal,‖ displays my abnormality. Spontaneity expresses I am as I am, yet to display it self-aware displays uneasiness, no more spontaneous. ―It is raining, and I doubt it‖ is situationally odd because its latter part violates the hidden 223 assumption, ―I believe it is raining‖ (Nowell-Smith ). Still, touting ―It is raining, and I believe so (or I say so)‖ is unusual if not also odd, reminiscent of touting ―I‘m normal.‖ The assumption has to be hidden, unsaid. ―Six Classics do not claim ‗classic,‘ Three Histories do not claim ‗history,‘ as people 224 have their ‗self‘ and allow no ‗self‘ to ‗self.‘‖ (Chang ) It is as odd as if ―I‘m not here‖ is 225 226 said by ―I‖ here and my saying so is hushed, not said. Ryle innocently dubbed it—by way of infinite regress of self-description—as the ―systematically elusive I.‖ Now, here are more ironies involved in Socrates advocating self-examination. He flagrantly violates the above tacit irony of the I. He meant to improve on people, and his 227 violation is ironically called ―seduction/corruption of youth,‖ deserving of death penalty. Irony-1 is here. Still, Socrates obeyed—without examination—his Daimon, the Guiding Genius of his self. Irony-2 is here. And then, even Daimon nodded at his death (Apology 40ab), after issuing Delphic Oracle to lead him to advocate self-examination, to violate the tacit irony of I-demonstrative. Irony-3 is here. This story of Socrates thus tells of the I-irony as tacit, and its being tacit as itself ironic in at least three layers, possibly more. I-demonstrative is a tacit irony, an irony in many ironies. Such bewildering layers of irony in the simple ―I‖! No matter, for all this depicts I-as-irony. Now, does this depiction itself violate tacit I-irony, as touting ―I‘m normal‖? We must stop here as Socrates stopped examining his Daimon, to stop sucking into infinite regress in the elusive I. Such tacit-ness of the tacit irony of ―I‖ must remain tacitly ironic, explained or not. Let us look around. Here things are as they are, as my body is as it is so natural as my self, nothing is the matter. As my body does not lie but silently tells me when to eat, when to sleep, so things with my body silently tell me the truth of loving virtue as loving sex (Analects 9/18, 15/8), following my desires to fulfill rules (2/4) of all things, as Confucius says. This is the ultimate of natural ironies of no-irony, an inherent part of all in all in my body thinking. In the West, metaphor, compactness, and irony are dispensable rhetorical devices just to decorate expressive punch, irrelevant to logical progress itwelf. In China, these three modes grow out of the living body thinking, and so they are the constitutive modes of lived persuasion, so much so that if we pull any one mode out, the whole body thinking collapses into nonsense. These modes are those by and on which body thinking lives. In conclusion, the modus vivendi of concrete thinking is thus organic and tightly integrated as the body-self is alive, and so the ―concrete argument‖ of body thinking is 223 P. H. Nowell-Smith, Ethics (1954), Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1965, pp. 83ff. 224―六經不言經，三傳不言傳，猶人各有我而不容我其我也。‖章學誠著，文史通義校注，經解上，北京中 華書局, 2005, p.93. 225 Wu, Chinese Body Thinking, op. cit., pp. 81-82. 226 Gilbert Ryle, ―The Systematic Elusiveness of ‗I‘,‖ The Concept of Mind, London: Hutchinson and Co., 1949, pp. 195-198. 227 Apology 23d ―diaphtheírei‖ is to ―seduce.‖ ―Perhaps there was a kind of justice in the allegation that Socrates, the master of this method, ‗corrupted the young men,‘ where the word translated ‗corrupt‘ was the same word which, when used of a girl, meant ‗seduce‘.‖ (R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1940, p. 45) In contrast, Confucius (9/11) was not above ―step by step seducing people toward good 循循然善誘人.‖
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irresistibly cogent. We must never forget that both these tiers of threefold activity, holistic and vigorous, are the concrete living way of the lived body thinking alive, to compose Chinese body thinking, entirely distinct from Western logical thinking. Mind you. Demonstratives, affirmatives, negatives, metaphorics, compacts, and ironies are the modus vivendi of the whole person flexing, uttering, and groaning, hand-waving, foottapping the felt impact of actuality. Here, sounds and images express the whole persons in all their respective density of denoting and connoting distinctness. Here are various colors, tones, rhymes, and rhythms fused into one impact of the music of senses of things. In China, singing says; how the speaker sings is what is said. To miss singing misses the said in the exultation and agony of living day by day. 228 Sound and sight unite in each ideogram-audiogram, Chinese character. It is not a straight photograph of a situation but a story-portrayal throbbing sense. Chinese characters are mini-stories that gather—remember, logos gathers—into exempla, one after another, to tell of stories of things happening as outside-events of history and inside-stirrings of fiction and poetry. China is the only culture today thriving lustily in onomatopoetic ―hieroglyphic‖ much simpler than the Mesopotamian ones, to manage to ex-press the concrete life-sense in all its jumping colors and rhyming sounds. Call it argument, call it rhetoric, such intoned expression in China in all its writings is missed by ―literal interpretation‖ that extracts denotative ―contents,‖ missing the Chinese body thinking saying and writing itself alive. Literalism makes a false reading. We must take in the totality of din and boom of the whole person‘s body-expression, body-language, to understand any writing or saying in China, for they are persons expressing themselves. This totality of body-expression in body-thinking is story-thinking. The West wants the stuff, not the wrapping of the story. But stories are told of the turbulent water in the turbulent the world, and so the medium is the message. If we want the message we must swallow the medium as well. The wrapping is part and parcel of the stuff, and both are the story that is the body of Chinese body-thinking alive and turbulent.
Two: Chinese Body Thinking as Story Thinking Now, have we noticed that the above explanations are all stories? Concrete thinking goes story-way as story-thinking. Whatever little amount of logical analysis above is absorbed as a part of story explanation. Stories are told by me in my body, heard by me in my body, and extend to others heard in their bodies. Body thinking concretely thinks in story-thinking. Story thinking reveals that nothing is usual in our usual lifeworld, that what is usual is always unexpected. We must expect all things as unexpected, so much so that even things we expect to be unexpected could happen anytime as expected. Stories convey this situation, to make us realize that there is no single ultimate truth staying put anywhere, while so many partial insights keep emerging here and there. Story-thinking thus has two aspects, how it goes (relativistic), and what it is (with four-levels).
228 Wu‘s ―Sound, Sight, Sense‖ in History, Thinking, and Literature in Chinese Philosophy, Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1991, pp. 125-173; Chinese Wisdom Alive, NY: Nova Science Publishers, 2010.
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Is Story-Thinking a Relativism?229 Someone would naturally say, ―Aha, this is relativism bred in uncertain plurality of things. Truth is certain, final, and single. Your view does not even show the path to truth; all this is sheer relativism.‖ ―Relativism‖ here is an abusive term; anything we dislike we relegate to the wastebasket of ―relativism.‖ All right, then, let us probe what ―relativism‖ can really mean, and we will be surprised to find that ―relativism‖ is one way to describe storythinking so dynamic in lifeworld. Yes, all this is ―relativism,‖ not as a view set and settled, but as thinking thrust living on as situations keep shifting. No view is totally right or wholly wrong, and we must carefully sift through each view for each grain of truth, in whatever sense they happen to show at the moment.230 All assertions are I-demonstratives, all words and wording are situation-sensitive, and all senses are sensed apropos at each moment; ―That was that time, this is this time,‖ said Mencius (2B13), responsibly discerning the situational sense each time. # ―This discord in the pact of things,/ this endless war ‘twixt truth and truth,‖ intoned 231 as he perished between truths. Chaotic are clashes of ―truths,‖ so jagged and Boethius brutal. Our responses must be bodily and timely, now dragon-soaring, now snake-slithering, 232 ever apt ―here now,‖ never touching the situation‘s dragonish ―reverse scales‖ to ever look forward to tomorrow, and another tomorrow, which today begins. Today always begins anew as the weather now keeps changing, forecasting just one tomorrow each today. Here is a concrete example. Johnny smiling with his favorite bottle is a precious sight to behold. And then he drives his big car as a helmeted race-car driver. And then he is a fighterplane pilot, and then an astronaut in ―Star Trek.‖ He is strong to tease all tots, and then strong to care for tots, and to feed small pets. Each ―today‖ is perfect itself so concrete, while forever growing into each ―better tomorrow,‖ each in its own perfect way, forever afresh. Remember, there can be no concrete caring, no growing into tomorrow, no warm hospitality, in the body-less eternity of Platonic sky intangible, intractable, nowhere anywhere. Body thinking alone is a growing thinking, never set eternal, ever elusive and forever sure of itself, for Johnny always knows what he is doing today and hoping to do tomorrow. Such is body thinking seemingly elusive but sure, as my body is vulnerable, tangible, gripping, responsive, and more concrete than things around I touch and cultivate, to grow together with things season after season. To understand this protean body thinking, we just tell stories of the times in which we move and live on, as we just did. Understanding the stories, we now sense the situation, and nod at our milieu meaningfully, got at heart, hit with hand. We are confident as a seasoned 229 The theme of relativism is so critical that it appears three times at least in this volume, first in connection with ―Rorty,‖ then with ―Various Ponds Alive,‖ and now with ―story-thinking‖ here. Thus this portion is abridged from ―Various Ponds Alive‖ above, and Wu‘s ―Rorty, Confucius, and Intercultural Relativism,‖ the first chapter after Introduction in Rorty, Pragmatism, and Confucianism, ed. Yong Huang, Albany: State University of New York Press, pp. 21-44. See also Wu‘s Story-Thinking: Cultural Meditations, NY: Nova Science Publishers, 2010, sections ―relativism and storytelling‖ and ―relativism as storytelling.‖ 230 See Wu, ―Existential Relativism,‖ Ph.D. thesis, Philosophy Department, Yale University, 1965. 231 Boethius, De Consolatione Philosophiae, V: 13. 232 Dragon-snake responses are in Chuang Tzu 20/1-7. Han Fei caught rulers manifesting ―逆鱗,‖ touched it, and perished, as Boethius also did. See ―逆鱗‖ in 韓非子，說難，臺北市三民書局，民86, p. 117. His entire writing is on this mortal ―difficulty 難,‖ actually everywhere. 司馬遷 quoted ―逆鱗‖ in 史記，卷六十三，老子韓非列傳，臺北市三民書局, 2008, 6:2800. Cf. its translation in Arthur Waley, Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China (1939), CA: Stanford University Press, 1982, p. 188.
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fisherman who never dies, for he just smells that way, smiling to ever sense the clouds and the breeze going this way and that, and steer himself accordingly, confidently. His ocean is the world, and he is the ocean smelling, smiling, and forever shifting 233 confident. Have you read the story, ―The Old Man and the Sea‖ ? The ―and‖ here is invisible; the sea and the fisherman grown seasoned old at sea tell us so by telling their stories. Their persistent struggles for long, sea and seaman together, simply stir our souls; we soar, breathtakingly risky. Now, haven‘t I told you concrete stories? Isn‘t story-thinking body-thinking in season and out of season? Storytelling body-thinking goes spatially to spread in time, through our free and brave handling of our milieu ever brave and new. They say that ―Genes aren‘t Destiny: The new field of epigenetics is showing how your environment and your choices can influence your 234 genetic code—and that of your kids.‖ If this is true, then, if DNA is one factor that decides the age, then I can decide my DNA to decide my age. All deaths are then suicides. We control our conclusions to our life and the lives of our beloved to come. Stoicism and Japan‘s bushido are nodding in smile. But then, natural science seems to forget that, as the old enrich the young even through their genetic decisions for their beloved posterity, the young generations later also enrich the former elderly generations by critically learning from them. Science in genetics forgets that, it is the lesson of history that backward is forward growing, that time goes forward by going backward. Our many gods above and at our backs are so young. Body thinking is intergrowing time-thinking, history-thinking. China is smiling. If such body thinking is not relativism alive, what is it? Thinking should be concrete as life, being part of living as human body; far from being a contradiction, ―concrete thinking‖ is the way of human life. Life forms history; it is an ongoing ―story argument‖ to which Chinese thinkers constantly appeal. So should the West with the rest of the world. So we see how relativism relates to storytelling. We hear Tommy say to Mom, ―I hate Charlie. I want to kill him!‖ Mom says, ―All right, you can kill him tomorrow. Now, come to your dinner, ok?‖ Tommy says, ―OK, Mom.‖ He then forgets all about what he said to Mom. A marvelous story of relativism in history is displayed here. We spontaneously nod to this story. It shows an amicable accommodation to whatever that comes. ―Whatever comes‖ is relativism; ―amicable accommodation‖ is its motherly story-solution. No wonder, relativism appears as part of Wu‘s story-thinking, as part of world 235 and now as part of Chinese body thinking. interculture (in dialogue with Rorty), Relativism is ubiquitous indeed, to cipher the body élan of the Grain-and-Principle 理 going 236 through myriad matters, always story-saying, ―That was that time, this is this time.‖ The beauty is that the solution of problems takes place so smoothly, so naturally, as if nothing were done. Relativism is storytelling ―solving‖ and resolving potential bloodshed, as Mom did to Tommy. Relativism describes the how, the élan of story-thinking. This is because story-thinking is I-demonstrative, exhibiting body-thinking alive. Three points must be made on how body thinking displays itself in our lifeworld. 233 Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea, NY: Charles Scribner‘s Sons, 1952. 234 See Time magazine, January 18, 2010, pp. 49-53. 235 Relativism appears in both places in Wu‘s Story-Thinking: Cultural Meditations, 2010. 236 That is Mencius‘ famous quip, ―彼一時也、此一時也‖ (2B13).
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One: Body-thinking displays milieu-thinking. Milieu is matrix, motherly environs where things happen. Milieu is of three sorts, M-I of the I, M-T of things, and M-B of the Beyond. M-I is the I-milieu that enables the I-relations, I-Thou and I-It, to take place. It is the Cartesian Cogito reworked by Merleau-Ponty at the base of life-activities, but we add to it the difference that this I is I-demonstrative, shifting as the I differs. This has much to do with Wang Kuo-wei‘s Self-ed Milieu, where the I can even self-forget. M-T is things-milieu such as stones, trees, animals, scenes, the place that enables positioning of I, Thou, and It to take place. This has much to do with Wang Kuo-wei‘s Self238 less Milieu where things look at themselves as themselves. M-T can also be taken as an extreme of M-I, for my self-less-ness in things is a form of being oneself. Finally, M-B is God-milieu, the matrix and milieu enabling all milieus to be, move, and have their being (Acts 17:28), the Milieu Ineffable for M-I and M-T. Mind you. all these M-I, M-T, and M-B are thinkable (conceivable) only in body-thinking, as various exhibitions of Idemonstrative, thinking as heartfelt bodily solicitude. Two: ―What does heartfelt solicitude consist in?‖ Body thinking is human thinking quite humane, carrying human warmth, body hospitality 體貼, a virtue peculiar to humanity; it is possible only via human body thinking, expressed everywhere human, even by Eumaios a 239 lowly swineherd of Odysseus. This human warmth, when negated, turns human cruelty in crimes against humanity. The inhuman bestiality is possible only among humans, nonexistent in animal kingdom; both human warmth and inhuman cruelty exist only in body thinking all too human. Three: Now, points One and Two are exhibitions of body thinking, non-existent in bodyless thinking. In fact, body-less thinking is humanly impossible, for this reason. As body language, silent language, is the matrix-milieu of language, so body thinking as body in the thinking act is the matrix-milieu of thinking, and even body-less thinking is actually ―disembodied‖ thinking, for as ―naked‖ means disrobed, so ―body-less‖ means disembodied. Thus, we see that all Western philosophers engage in body-thinking despite themselves, and then pull back to body-less thinking analytical. Plato saw body politic as human body writ large (body-thinking), then saw reason controlling bodily thrust and appetite (body-less thinking). But ―control‖ is no ―separation‖ to sever relation to sever control. Control implicates relation, as Hegel saw the master depend on the servant. Aristotle‘s empiricism is 240 body-thinking; his metaphysics is body-less thinking. Jesus‘ visceral love on the cross of enemies was later scholastically disembodied as ―theology.‖ Descartes found the indubitable base in ―I think, therefore I am,‖ and explained ―I think‖ as I desire, intend, perceive; that is body-thinking. Too bad, he split thinking-mind from think-less-body; that is body-less thinking. Kant had ―7+5=12‖ as synthetic a priori; that is body-thinking. Too bad, he then pursued what makes all thinking possible in transcendental 237 See Wu‘s ―The I-Milieu: Its Implications for Culture and Thinking (I: pp. 1-59, December 2007), (II: pp. 1-68, June 2008),‖ Journal of World Religions. 238 M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962, pp. 369-409. 有我之境 and 無我之境 in 王國維‘s 人間詞話, 臺北市三民書局, 民91, p. 4. 239 Read the moving story of warm hospitality, in The Odyssey of Homer, tr. Richmond Lattimore, NY: HarperCollins, 1965, told of in Books XIV and XV, pp. 210-239. 240 ―Visceral pain, spagchnizomai‖ is reserved for Jesus alone in the first three Gospels; it is reminiscent of Mencius‘ heartfelt pain of sensitivity to others 不忍人之心. Both phrases express the warm human core of body-thinking.
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logic; that is body-less thinking. And the list goes on. China must gently bring the West back to itself, where the body‘s integral activity, body-thinking, is its most natural thinking matrix. We have just told the story of body thinking as milieu-thinking and humane warmth. Now, let us come back to story-thinking. What is its modus vivendi, its actual modes of operation? Story-thinking has four levels, all needed. As said before, to describe how storythinking goes describes what it is. Story-thinking cannot be logically defined; it has to be described, told the story of how it operates.
Four Levels of Story-Thinking241 Story-thinking thinks as it tells and reads stories in four ways, and the thinking must cover all these four ways. To begin, to de-scribe the situation is storytelling, in two aspects— description here sets down coherently an actual situation, yet it is for those with ears to hear to freely hear its sense behind words, not to listen to the explicit words; all this is open. First we hear (a) how the story goes; this is a straight textual reception and criticism of a story. Then we see (b) what it amounts to; this is its exegesis. And then we realize (c) what it means; this is exposition. Finally, we realize (d) what this story means for us; this is hermeneutic reflection of the significance of a story. Description is coherent, in textual level(a) and exegetical level-(b); hearing its sense is open, in expository level-(c) and hermeneuticlevel-(d). What is important here is to ensure that we go through all the way to the final level-(d), on pain of disaster. ―Why do we have to bother reading a story on all four levels? Can‘t we, say, just learn how things happened in the 911 Incident ((a)) and just see that the Incident amounts to a terrorist attack on the American soil, and Americans must retaliate in kind ((b))?‖ The answer is a somber serious No. Here is a somber story (level (a)). During the Christmas and New Year of 2003-4, several Europe-to-USA flights were cancelled; then the 1/7/2004 news-report said that France and Germany were looking for passengers who booked the flights and failed to appear at the airports. We at once understand the story at level (b); the West‘s alert system worked. Tragically, however, no one in the West cared to go to levels (c) and (d). The invisible 242 ―terrorists‖ tried and failed this time, and will try again to use our airplanes, a fruit of the West‘s money-terror, mixed with their blood, to spectacularly advertise mass blood-terror— to tell us something. What is their message? This is level-(c). What does their message mean to us? What should be our response besides trying to smash them? This is level-(d). Sadly, our interpretive failure, (c) and (d), contribute continuously to worsening world terrorism, our money-terror and their blood-terror, each exacerbating the other. ―What disaster do we harvest by failing in interpretation levels (c) and (d)?‖ Our failure did make such terrors to worsen and spread worldwide. Here is a tragic hermeneutic failure harvesting disasters worldwide. It is thus that story-thinking has an ominous pragmatic cash value to the world today. Now we further realize. It is stories that tell us that romance burns us dead, not love that calmly gives life, and that pain is not always evil because pain can be noble while happiness 241 This portion barely summarizes Wu‘s ―Chinese Philosophy and Story-Thinking‖ (Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, Summer 2005, pp. 217-234), ―Distinctive Features of Chinese Hermeneutics‖ (Taiwan Journal of East Asian Studies, June 2004, pp. 233-247), Chinese Wisdom Alive, NY: Nova Science Publishers, 2010, Part IV, and many pages in various places above. 242 They indeed did on Christmas Eve, 2009, barely aborted only by their ineptitude and an astute passenger.
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can be despicable, and so seeking most happiness (Aristotle) for most people (utilitarianism) 243 barks up the wrong tree of morality. All these ―truths‖ are facts to guide facts, revealed by stories of facts and stories of concrete imagery beyond facts. All such enlightenments by story-in-time, history, are of quite grave significance. ―To receive the historian‘s single word of praise is to be glorified beyond high emolument; to be 244 accused by his slightest word of blame is to be punished beyond hacking of axes.‖ Storiesin-time describe to persuade and render judgments for all, to last for all time. Such is the power of journalists and historians more persuasive, their authority more convincing, than all lawyers of all nations and all arguments of all thinkers put together.
Three: Body Thinking on “Eternity” and “Death” Such words of stories are eternal, not timeless but time-dwelt. Eternity in body-thinking in China is being in the felt situation 情境, and becoming it. Eternity is the child taking abode 245 in time. Story-thinking gives norms concrete, solid, and incorruptible, to shape us for good, i.e., for the good of all and for good always. Story-thinking is thus forever with us. Saying all 246 this is unintelligible, however; an explanation is in order. Some watches are powered by the movement of our body. Likewise, time is powered by the movement of the watch called body-thinking. Body thinking moves to stay in a situation, and time then stays to cipher eternity. ―Eternal‖ is not out of time but depth of time; ―eternal‖ is always, ever at any time, time at its deepest where there is no ephemeral passage of time. Now, what does all this mean, concretely? I feel no motion while in a train ―moving.‖ While in the body-train, I feel no motion, as when I gaze with my eyes at a tiny flower, absorbed in a pet, completely melted in the felt situation where time passes no more. Bodily felt situation happens to my body alone. No body, no body-situated that is my situation. In such felt situation, I feel no time passing by; I am eternal. Kids playing and kids playing with their pets feel no ―time.‖ That is why kids do not feel time passing, for they are time, and so they are eternal; only we adults feel they grow so fast, not they. Such is eternity abiding in time. Body is required to abide, so time-abiding ciphers body-dynamics. As time never stays, so eternity in time never stays, ever going forward and so eternity is time staying and time not-staying, ever forwarding. Such forwarding dynamics of timely eternity includes death. The time-dynamics of eternity is surprisingly forwarded by 247 bodily death. It goes as follows. Body-thinking thinks today, and today originates in yesterday now gone, dead. Today grows into tomorrow, and my growth needs my parents who are the tradition my past accumulated. I grow by metaphoring myself from my parents; as the old, so the new, to grow on and on. Now yesterday, tradition, and parental old, all passed on, are death to me. My 243 See Chinese Wisdom Alive, pp. 194, 222, 279-280, 374-375, 380, 418, 426-433, 442-448, etc. Story-Thinking: Cultural Meditations, VI. Pain. 244 Liu Xie 劉勰 famously said so in 文心雕龍, 史傳第十六, 臺北市三民書局, 民83, p. 156. 245 See Wu‘s On Chinese Body Thinking: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 1997, pp. 192-194. 246 The following is extrapolation from ibid.; they are pages that take our breaths away. 247 This is an extrapolation from ibid. pp. 190-192 quite subtle.
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body dynamics forwarding goes via death; death the negative pushes forward to affirm me growing at my own speed, never to be ―helped grow.‖ Meanwhile, my body dies to continue into your body-birth. This is parent-child intimacy, as pivot of history, composing the human family into socio-politics. Thus a good teacher my father is a dead one, and the tradition—hand-me-downs—carries on bodily progress that is education and history. Body-thinking lives on a dynamics of ―death‖ in education and history. This process composes Chinese eternity, the incorruptibility of (1) integrity-virtue (2) achieved via (3) wisdom-education as word-tradition. Here is China‘s threefold culture ever abiding through history, as Chinese incorruptible eternity of body thinking.
Four: Body Thinking as “Necessary,” Logically and Contingently Lest the above explanation sounds arbitrary, we must note how body thinking in all above extending to eternity and death is based on bodily ―necessity‖ both logical and contingent. This claim sounds far-fetched but it is actually quite a natural outgrowth of body thinking. It goes as follows. We first look at the bodily base of logical necessity, and then of 248 contingency as necessary. All this is due to body thinking as ―thinking.‖ Kant famously claims that the logically necessary operation of ―7+5=12‖ is a synthetic a priori. The computation is ―a priori‖ because it is logically necessary, but it is said to be ―synthetic‖ to deny that it is analytical, for 12 cannot be deduced from 7, 5, +, or =. The computation must go through the operation of addition—synthesis—to necessarily reach the conclusion of 12 (a priori). We on our part note that this synthetic-necessary addition is traced 249 out by concrete body thinking. Mathematical necessity obtains by body thinking. 250 Geometrical necessity also obtains by body thinking. Merleau-Ponty says, my body traces a triangle geometrically necessary, its formation being directed by my body thinking. A proof on this triangle is completed by my body drawing, e.g., a line parallel to the line drawn through the apex. And so on. In all, logical proof, any formal proof, is thus formulated by my body thinking out in space and time. I add and draw to think. My body adding and drawing is my body thinking logical necessity. 251 Now, contingency has its own inevitability that cannot be mocked as logical necessity cannot be. A ―person‖ requiring no food is as odd-in-meaning as a ―married bachelor‖ is logically senseless. Pace Aristotle who claims both ―sea battle won‖ and ―sea battle lost‖ that make equal logical sense, we see how each sea battle has its own cause to effect a specific result, and so one situation results in a sea battle won and another situation in a sea battle lost; there should be no confusion, and this ―should‖ is necessary and compelling. ―Cause and effect‖ is bodily experienced as necessary-in-fact as ―laws of nature‖ in natural science, and as ―laws of nature of history‖ that causally rhymes, that never leaks albeit 248 This is an extrapolation from ibid. pp. 304-309 quite profound and natural. 249 Ibid., pp. 296-297, 300, and Wu‘s History, Thinking, and Literature in Chinese Philosophy, Taipei, Academia Sinica, 1991, pp. 16-17. 250 Actually Merleau-Ponty did not use the phrase ―body thinking‖ but his whole description clearly describes body-thinking. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962, pp. 384-386. See Wu, Chinese Body Thinking, op. cit., pp. 300-301. China‘s mathematical writings have something of the sort but its reference escapes Wu. 251 Ibid., pp. 302-306.
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coarse-meshed and free. History does not judge, to thereby judge, for mistakes would one by 252 one be criticized by later generations ; history is never to be mocked. All our free imageries are concrete, contingent, and necessary. What must be noted here is that all this necessity, both logical and contingent, is made by body thinking, and made intelligible as modus vivendi of body thinking.
Five: Chinese Body Thinking as Concrete Thinking Intercultural253 We may have already noticed that the above elucidation of Chinese body thinking proceeds by constantly contrasting Chinese mode of thinking with Western. Elucidation enriches something-A by contrasting A with not-A. This is in line with the law of identity, i.e., A is A as not not-A. Now, we must note that the law of identity is logical because it derives from the ontological law of existence as inter-revealing of identities. Existence is inherently inter-existence, often contrastive. Enrichment of the integrity of an entity consists in two operations, to stress A as A, and doing so in the context of A as not not-A. In our case, Chinese distinctness of body thinking must be elucidated in the context of contrasting with the West, where China-West interculture happens. Elucidation of Chinese body thinking is then for the sake both of elucidation of China and of interculture with the West. All this while, elucidation of Chinese body thinking as Chinese is vitalized by contrasting with the Western mode of logical thinking as logical. On both counts, in elucidation of China and interculture with the West, contrasts with the West are crucially, yet subordinately, at work. Let us go slower on this important theme. Incredibly, a simple law of logical identity augurs an existential process of interculture, thanks to the catalysis of Chinese body thinking in three points, as follows. To begin with, every culture is a miscegenation, a mix, ―A is A‖ mixed negatively with not-A‘s. Each culture is a unique synthesis of A plus not-A, and its uniqueness is strengthened by such contrastive mixing into its integrity. This mix that makes a specific culture portends well for interculture to inter-enrich. Interculture is an outward extension of the internal mix of a culture‘s existential integrity. As not-A strengthens A, so any one mix, (A plus not-A), strengthens another mix, (B plus not-B). World interculture is an augury of diverse integrities; it is greater and richer than individual cultures, to enrich individual cultures, progressing in three tiers. First, concrete thinking notional is here. ―A‖ mentioned above is a self-demonstrative of I-as-my-body. ―A is A‖ above is the self bodied forth affirming one whole personal self. ―A is not not-A‖ is the self bodied forth self-stressing via contrasting with its negativities. Negatives are affirmatives strengthening in contrast. Secondly, such notional body thinking stretches to concrete thinking persuading. As one (A plus not-A) is, so (B plus not-B) is also, and so understanding the B takes place through metaphoring process out of the A. Such metaphorical stretch-forth manifests (A and not-A) mirrored in (B and not-B), making for subtle compact expressions with many connotative
252 Story-Thinking: Cultural Meditations, op. cit.. 253 This portion barely summarizes Wu‘s ―‗Let Chinese Thinking Be Chinese‘: sine Qua Non to World Interculture‖ (Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, 2010, 9: 193-209), Chinese Wisdom Alive (NY: Nova Science Publishers, 2010), Part IV, and many pages in various places in his Story-Thinking: Cultural Meditations, here.
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layers. This compact manifestation strengthens the A by contrasting with not-A, i.e., B, and the twisty irony takes place to further clinch the case. Thirdly, such interaction among contrasts is structured in stories inter-told, heard, changed, and added, as ―dialogue‖ among cultures. Dialogue dia-logicizes, inter-con-versing to revolutionize assumptions of party-A as/in the conversation that revolutionizes assumptions of party-B. Revolutions of assumptions redound to enrich and deepen A and B beyond the original A and the original B, as stories are told back and forth to hear, change, and add further. Chinese body thinking is thus applied to the West beyond China. Here China demonstrates itself, body-compact, to stretch itself to no-China in negatives, as familiar affirmed to metaphor itself beyond China to the unfamiliar in ironies. Such is the concrete body-story of interculture inter-enriching. Thus, Wu‘s ―Chinese body thinking‖ is alive, and goes beyond Pascal‘s ―thinking reed.‖ As it is, the human body is a mere speck among myriad things; as body thinking, it composes intercultural togetherness with Heaven and Earth. Throughout this pan-intercultural process, we must watch out for double dangers; both already exist today. One is Chinese chauvinism, looking down on the West to close and embalm itself in Chinese traditionalism; another is Western colonialism, reinterpreting exotic China to absorb it into the West as the West‘s inferior part. Both dangers say that nothing is new under the sun, the Chinese sun or the Western. No one is looking at the other beyond itself. Both isolations stem from xenophobia out of Western ignorance of the not-West and Chinese ignorance of the not-China. Both eviscerate themselves by turning themselves into proud isolation-sepulchers. ―Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shalt meet‖ sounds a death knell to East and West, both at once, and demolishes the world-in-concord. Luckily, this line was 254 intoned in 1889 by the then quite popular Kipling, now hopefully buried in the dustbin of the past. Dr. Wu‘s life-commitment is to fight this deadly pronouncement to its death. Baldly to put it as above sounds so platitudinous that no one would seem to utter such silly trite stuff, yet actually, we see both woes rampant in China and in the West. I. A. Richards in his well-known Mencius on the Mind explores all possible logical meanings of each of Mencius‘ sentences. No Chinese writer or reader would have dreamed of doing such an ―outrageous‖ operation on the time-honored Mencius. On his part, H. Fingarette‘s influential The Secular as Sacred on Confucius takes him as a magician manipulating people‘s attitudes, and C. Hansen in his massive A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought takes Dao as ―analytical logic‖ of the West, and interprets all schools of 255 Chinese thought in its light, and confidently claims that that is China. They all look into the exotic mysteries of China and see themselves mirrored back at them, and confidently take that as China. Meanwhile, Chinese scholars, at home in English, enthusiastically embrace these Western interpretations as the unsuspected authentic Chinese thinking hidden behind moldy age-old classics. This trend is a result of a previous period of deliberation in China‘s recent
254 ―The Ballad of East and West‖ in Rudyard Kipling‟s Verse: Definitive Edition, Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co., 1940, p. 233. 255 I. A. Richards, Mencius on the Mind: Experiments in Multiple Definition (1932), Richmond, Surrey, England: Curzon Press 1996. Herbert Fingarette, Confucius: The Secular as Sacred, HarperSanFrancisco, 1972. Chad Hansen, A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought: A Philosophical Interpretation, Oxford, 1992.
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history, when Chinese scholars had vigorously debated on how to deal with various cultural encroachments of the powerful West. Zhang Zhidong 張之洞 and Wang Xianqian 王先謙 wanted to ―embody China, use West 體中用西,‖ to pit against Kang Yuwei 康有為 and Liang Qichao‘s 梁啟超 wholesale adoption of the West. The latter finally won the day, and a massive influx of translations of 256 Western literatures of every sort followed. Now, the pan-West ethos pervades all China; every sort of thinking must follow Western ―scientific methodology‖ to claim orthodox decency. Wholesale absorption of China into the West, by wholesale importation of the West, is thus busily initiated, and it still goes on today as the unquestioned trend of China today. The cure to this sad loss of China as China is to look beyond China to the other than China and learn from the other, so as to enrich China as China and the West the no-China as the other no-China. Concretely, it is to go through the fire of Western logic, to equip oneself with logical sensitivity (not logic Western, raw) wherewith to discern the subtle riches of 257 Chinese wisdom unheard of in the West, the true China existing unawares in China, as unearthed and described above, with—to repeat—logical sensitivity cultivated by going through the West, not staying there. The result is harvested above as ―Chinese body thinking‖ concrete, in the story-thinking mode. It is thus alone can China interculture with the West to enlighten itself, and deepen the West in return. It is easier said than done, though, and the situation today is understandably quite otherwise, dire as just described, wholesale absorption into the West. Dr. Wu seems to be the lone quixotic knight fighting at the inexorable turning of the windmill of the Westernized world today. Wu‘s ideas are summed up above as ―Chinese body thinking.‖
Six: Body Thinking Elucidated above as Itself “Body Thinking” Intercultural It is thus that we elucidated above such ―Chinese body thinking‖ that is, however, not quite Chinese, nor is it quite Western. Instead, the above elucidation executes aspects of body thinking, and exemplifies all above in story-thinking way, culminating in China-West interculture, as it is executed as such an interculture; it is not known to China, nor has it been ever thought about in the West. It is novel yet not exotic but faithful to China and to the West. Our sentences above are thus exposition at a meta-level. ―Meta level‖ is of two sorts, observing not-participating, and catalysis for things to happen. Exposition of Chinese body thinking is a meta-level catalyst to China-West interculture in story-thinking milieu, toward inter-enrichments among world cultures. Besides, this catalyst of body thinking is itself in the mode of body thinking. Here, the meta-level blends in with the contents covered. And such is Dr. Wu Kuang-ming‘s project heartfelt, body-executed, where China and the West inter-involve to inter-support, ever on the go, one inter-whipping up the other, in all his
256 See 蘇輿撰，楊菁點校，翼教叢編，臺北市中研院文哲所，民94. 257 Among many other works of Wu‘s on this theme, see Wu‘s most recent Chinese Wisdom Alive (500 pp), NY: Nova Science Publishers, 2010. Wu has been fighting a lone, continuous, quixotic fight for China, thereby for the world interculture that does justice to both China and the West, to enrich both as respectively such and no other.
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volumes so far and still going on unfinished. The following is just a partial list showing his continuing vision he passionately struggles to share and spread. Chuang Tzu: World Philosopher at Play (NY: Crossroad, 1982) enters world interculture with Zhuangzi‘s life-thinking as an alternative to Western logical thinking. The Butterfly as Companion: Meditations on the First Three Chapters of the Chuang Tzu (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990) develops cultural-interaction, with Zhuangzi‘s fascinating story-thinking bitingly concrete; it is the world‘s bestseller now. History, Thinking, and Literature in Chinese Philosophy (Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1991) sees China‘s concrete thinking as China‘s panorama of literature and history. On Chinese body Thinking: A Cultural Hermeneutic (Leiden: Brill, 1997) dialogues with the ―flesh‖ of Merleau-Ponty to explain Chinese body thinking; it won Taiwan‘s highest prize to show its approval by Chinese culture. On the “Logic” of Togetherness: A Cultural Hermeneutic (Leiden: Brill, 1998) explains how world concord in interactions obtains in five aspects. On Metaphoring: A Cultural Hermeneutic (Leiden: Brill, 2001) is an exposition of the method of cultural interactions as ―metaphor‖ in active verb function. <弔詭怡生：一比較哲學試釋>
in
吳銳編，<<楊向奎先生百年誕辰記念文集>>
(2009) has Zhuangzi‘s ―supreme swindle‖ of logic to interact with world philosophies. ―‗Let Chinese Thinking Be Chinese‘: sine Qua Non to World Interculture,‖ Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, 2010, 9:193-209, explains the urgent necessity and method of China-West interculture with China‘s concrete thinking. China-West Interculture: Toward the Philosophy of World Integration: Essays on Wu Kuang-ming‟s Thinking, ed. Jay Coulding, NY: Global Scholarly Publications, 2008, has Dr. Wu‘s autobiography of how his China-West interculture came forth, 14 scholars in 14 fields discussing global interculture, Dr. Wu joining dialogues, with his bibliography, 1982-2007. ―Rorty, Confucius, and Intercultural Relativism,‖ in Rorty, Pragmatism, and Confucianism, ed. Yong Huang, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009, pp. 2144, tells of how Confucius‘ concrete thinking interacts American philosopher Richard Rorty. ―Chinese Philosophy and Story-Thinking,‖ Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, Summer 2005, pp. 217-234, explains China‘s story-thinking and its worldwide significance. ―Distinctive Features of Chinese Hermeneutics,‖ Taiwan Journal of East Asian Studies, June 2004, pp. 233-247, explicates China‘s story-thinking in another dimension. Chinese Wisdom Alive: Vignettes of Life-Thinking, NY: Nova Science Publishers, 2010, 500 pp., comprehensively describes China‘s Wisdom alive through millennia, in dialogues among Western philosophies today. Story-Thinking: Cultural Meditations, NY: Nova Science Publishers, forthcoming, 450 pp, executes interactions among world cultures with story-thinking. ―Various Ponds Alive,‖ Nova Science Publishers, forthcoming, 42 pp, story-describes vivacious, various, and vast world-ponds diverse, noisily silent, moving not moving, active in composure, life in death. ―The I-Milieu: Its Implications for Culture and Thinking (I: pp. 1-59, December 207), (II: pp. 1-68, June 2008),‖ Journal of World Religions, depicts milieu-thinking in body-thinking. ―Heresy, Tradition, History,‖ Journal of World Religions, forthcoming, 56 pp, depicts the power of dynamic ―interrelations‖ in life and in religion. These are just some handful among many others of Wu‘s writings on world interculture based on Chinese body thinking.
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―Why must we do all this interculture?‖ The reason is simple but important. Interculture is the way to manifest-deepen each culture as distinctly itself. China staying alone has been imprisoned in the sepulcher of ―traditionalism,‖ as the West alone has fallen in a colonialismrut of logical analyticity in cultural and ecological disasters. China has already felt its danger of asphyxiation in isolation, and is actively learning from the West. The West also must learn from China learning, to learn from China to establish the West as Western, not universal. China is now actively learning from the West, yet it is attended with another grave danger, for it now falls into the temptation to elucidate Chinese culture purely in terms of the West, to turn into a mere part of the West, and its inferior part at that. Thus, China owes it to itself to learn from the West, so as to be amazed at China‘s own genius, as it guards against absorption into the West to lose China‘s own peculiar soul. The way out of these two traps—to avoid isolation-asphyxiation, and to avoid losing China‘s identity in pan-Occidentalism—is to watch and gaze at China afresh with the West‘s logical sensitivity (not logic per se) to find China‘s astonishing riches of vitality. The present essay strides its first step, undergoing China with logical sensitivity to bring out China as vigorously and distinctively Chinese, as above executed, following Dr. Wu‘s careful steps. ―But then how is China to learn from the West to turn clear in China‘s own way?‖ Let us 258 take a concrete example. Nowell-Smith‘s Ethics is more than on ethics; it sensitively elucidates how we say, Ryle-like, even criticizing G. E. Moore, etc. Yet I hesitate at its being too good, as if to analyze our exposed bones that ought to be hid invisible, as real bones‘ moves we can ―see‖ only hid in how our enfleshed body alive moves. He is a sandwich-board man boasting ―I am normal!,‖ to show he is abnormal. He shocks us to teach us clearly how to be clear-normal Hun-tun way, treating ―clarity‖ very well. Such is how China is to learn from Norwell-Smith, i.e., how China is to learn from the West‘s clarity, to turn itself clear subtly, alive, lucidly ambiguous, and be a live turtle dragging its clarity-tail in ambiguity-mud, a lotus flower beautiful unsoiled, thanks to the soil its humus. This operation goes in line with the curious fact of existence as inter-existence intermirroring. Existence has its physiognomy, its face, and face is facing the other, to manifest its face, its peculiar structure appearing via the other, for one is ignorant of oneself until mirrored in the other, a mirror or a friend. China must thus face up to the West to manifest itself as Chinese, in its body thinking, with its own unique story-thinking features as above described, thanks to facing the West, in contrastive interculture. China‘s body-story swings into history rhyming in symphonies of interculture, and body thinking sings the music of the spheres beyond sound and silence, ancient and now interchanting, far and near in polyphony, for the body to sense the senses of things. Sensing the sense sings the music of things myriad, through all time and all over places. Mind you. It is the body that sings music and dances it among concrete things. Not accidentally, all Wu‘s writings lilt and wax musically, often concluding in music and in its silence of world interculture. Chinese body thinking is music, and it is musical silence to move peoples of various cultures, in human rhymes of world history. This section has already initiated the first steps as such world interculture. The thousandmile double-walk of China inter-enriching with the West begins underfoot here now, at elucidating China in body-thinking. 258
P. H. Nowell-Smith, Ethics (1954), Harmondsworth, Middlesex, UK: Penguin Book, 1965. It seems to be his only book so far.
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Still, Western philosophy is persistently systematic and comprehensive, allowing no exception. This is why, while advertising pragmatic ―edifying conversations‖ worldwide, 259 Rorty‘s thesis is just that, his Rorty rejects Wu‘s proposal to inter-learn with Confucius. thesis comprehensive and exceptionless, no intrusion by Confucius allowed. Thus Wu remains alone in the world scene of interculturism. We do well to follow a lone thinker shouting in the wilderness, where no one cares to listen, Dr. Kuang-ming Wu the rare intercultural hermeneutist.
Meta-Reflections on Above So far, Wu‘s body thinking in China has been depicted; seven problems are found here. ONE: Jade-grain Li 理 in things is hard to extrapolate from body thinking. TWO: We ask, ―Wherefrom are standards for cultivation (Mencius) or education (Xunzi)? How do they know we even desire ‗good‘ if we are a hill laid waste (Mencius) or evil by nature (Xunzi)?‖ Mencius, Xunzi, or body thinking (one body, two opposites?) seems unable to answer. 260 THREE: Body thinking may be China‘s thread but propensity (Julien ), Dao, etc., are also its threads; reducing them to body thinking thins ―body‖ into a pale universal. FOUR: Body is inter-body as sex-gender duality. Wu needs to develop body-duality into sociality. FIVE: Sex is not gender; China has one word, xing 性, for both, to mean human nature. Can ―body‖ explain all this? SIX: Can ―body‖ bear all China‘s key notions and issues? SEVEN: If ―body‖ can bear the weight, ―pan-body-ism‖ would destroy its contrast, ―notbody,‖ and ―body‖ vanishes. Pan-body is no-body. Thus this essay destroys itself, as Wittgenstein kicking his own ladder, Laozi‘s ―can dao, no Dao,‖ and Zhuangzi‘s Swindle of logic—to make an ineffable sense. This essay‘s very self-demise could also mean something not worded or silent. This sense beyond sense could have three aspects, body thinking to expand out, body thinking limited, and Chinese body thinking flowed over China. One: Implications and connotations of Chinese body thinking could be worked out more carefully, if not systematically, comprehensively. ―Body‖ is itself a system organic and thoughtful, and systematically involved with all non-bodies around it. Wu said that body thinking is milieu-thinking, but this saying is tantalizingly ambiguous, crying out for elucidation and expansion. Two: Still, body thinking itself must have some sort of limit to its applications. Pan-body is no-body; pan-body-applications thin out into a pale universal. Body thickly concrete must focalize, and focalization indicates limitation. ―Focalized universality‖ is a centripetalcentrifugal, a contradiction. Here the very notion of concreteness is at stake. Can things concrete be universalized? Can concreteness be a universal? Can the body be cosmic? ―Body‖ as an umbrella notion is quite risky. Three: China amazes us. In its concrete naïveté, China is gleefully innocent of the above comprehensive-limited dilemma. One way China can be thoughtfully concrete is this. Body 259 See Wu‘s ―Rorty, Confucius, and Intercultural Relativism‖ (pp. 21-44) and Rorty‘s response (pp. 279-280) in Rorty, Pragmatism, and Confucianism, edited by Yong Huang, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009. 260 François Julien, The Propensity of Things: Towards a History of Efficacy in China, NY: Zone Books, 1999.
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thinking is China‘s thread, but Dao is also its thread, Yin-Yang is also, etc., that is, any notion that could serve as a key notion can serve as a thread of China‘s. Whitehead famously quipped that Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. Chan no less dramatically said, ―Confucius can truly be said to mold Chinese civilization 261 (and) philosophy.‖ Whitehead may or may not be correct; we see that Laozi and ―change 易 in Yin-Yang‖ also molded China, not just Confucius. China‘s many threads are beyond footnoting on one alone. These threads are of course related; everything is related to everything else in some way. So, it is not impossible to relate all threads in some Chinese way. To rely on ―some relation‖ to make one ―big clod 大塊‖ (Zhuangzi), though, seems far-fetched, and to name this ―clod‖ as a ―body‖ seems even less seemly—forced and distorted, overrunning the distinctness of the integrity of existents, notions, and other threads. We are not even sure if the pages above run such risk. Each thread is a ―Dao‖ that ―walks it and forms‖ (Zhuangzi), its ―thousand-mile walk begins underfoot‖ (Laozi), and each entity walks at its ―underfoot.‖ Where is the universal, the ―walk,‖ then? China is fabulously system-less and non-arbitrary; even Emperor Hundun the ambiguous makes his own story so convincing and surprising. In China, contingency is necessary, necessity is concrete; double walks 兩行 (Zhuangzi) despair of thinking we can manage, and our thinking despairs of China untamable. China does not care, though, but keeps blissfully writing out history 史 in wise literature 文. China is wisdom alive overflowing its body thinking. Stevens said, ―Literature is the better part of life. To this quip it seems inevitably necessary for us to add ―provided life is the better part of 262 literature‖ ; history fulfills all this, we would say. History in literature and literature as history makes China sparkle in the world.
G. TAIWAN THE GEM OF THE WORLD263 Taiwan is the gem shining forth its brilliance as it is situated strategically, to be tossed about, rubbed, and polished among piles of violence-dirt. We Taiwan-lovers must firmly keep in mind this solid fact as we strive to polish this gem further. Our strivings are political, ecological, and cultural, as follows in seven points, simple and revolutionary. One: Unlike Switzerland quietly tucked away in an indifferent corner of Europe, Taiwan has been in ceaseless turmoil in busy political, economic, and military traffics, quite brutal in wave after wave of historic violence, first Chinese, then Japanese, and then Chinese,
261 Wing-tsit Chan said so in A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, Princeton University Press, 1963, p. 14. Raymond Dawson (Confucius, Oxford University Press, 1981) also said, ―Has any individual ever shaped his own country‘s civilisation more thoroughly than Confucius? Certainly no other world figure has ever been set up as an example to more of his fellow countrymen.‖ 262 Zhuangzi 2/4, 2/33, Daodejing 64, Wu, ―‗Emperor Hundun 渾沌‘: A Cultural Hermeneutic,‖ Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, September 2007, pp. 263-278. Zhuangzi 2/40. Wu, Chinese Wisdom Alive, NY: Nova Science Publishers, 2010. Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous, quoted in Modern Poetics, ed. James Scully, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1965, p. 147. 263 Later this tiny essay was shortened and sharpened into ―Taiwan the World‘s Gem‖ in its Chinese version, ―臺灣: 人世寶石.‖
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Japanese, and USA in rapid succession, all due to Taiwan‘s enviable strategic spot; anyone in control of this small island commands Asia and in turn the world! Two: Taiwan has in fact been already independent for half a century now, at least since Taiwanese Li Teng-hui took office of presidency, if not earlier, when Chiang Ching-kuo (Chiang Kai-shek‘s son) smilingly said he was a Taiwanese. Taiwan‘s independence is proved precisely by China nervously bullying and interfering with its affairs domestic and foreign. China would have no reason to bully Taiwan if it is not an independent entity. It is thus silly to work for Taiwan independence already existing, as it is to try to heal oneself when healthy. Of course, being healthy, one must watch for bullies from outside; being independent, Taiwan must watch for China and others bullying it. Still, our central task for our beloved Taiwan is not to oppose silly bullies around Taiwan to survive their pesky interferences, though we must ever be alert against them. We must instead tame and teach these bullies—that the hard power of violence and coercion is futile. Hard power often rebounds to kill all, bully and bullied alike. Instead, what supports and nourishes us all is the soft small power of human warmth that attracts those in 264 contact. ―Soft power‖ is Taiwan‘s message to big bullies. Three: How does Taiwan teach and tame big bullies noisily roaming? By showing Taiwan‘s own smallness—democracy in powerless Taiwan works to allow and nourish the powerless majority—for all to see. Taiwan is exposed at its strategic international crossroads, welcoming all visitors, staying or no, culturally, democratically, economically. Here in Taiwan visitors see that acts of violently taking advantage of others soon dissolve into inter-marriages, into mixing various languages of all those who come and live here. Semitropical Taiwan has historically been violent in such tumultous transitions of political tsunamis, economic earthquakes, and cultural typhoons. Four: Swiss people freely speak three languages, French, German, and English. Taiwanese people can freely speak at least five, Taiwanese, Mandarin, any aboriginal language, Japanese, and English, and welcome German and French. Jostling together, these tongues are on their way to linguistic miscegenation beyond Esperanto in Europe. 265 This is rich humus toward deep literature soon to emerge. The violent inter-coursing of many nations and cultures catalyzes warm cosmopolitanism in Taiwan. This is shown already in excellent foods available in excellent varieties, on casual roadsides and in plush restaurants. Taiwan feeds many cultures. Five: Taiwan cosmopolitanism democratic is not a melting pot dissolving integrities but a 266 a loose federation vibrantly individualistic. In such bustling air of allrainbow coalition, hospitality, Taiwan can show softly, often failing but trying time and again, to various big cultures how to conduct themselves with warm hands and civilized hearts.
264 Although Joseph Nye, Jr. also uses this term, this term is Taoist, completely independent of his coinage. 265 Chen Li in Taiwan says that ―people or writers in Taiwan are likely to have a more profound understanding and subtler perception of the ‗beauty of Chinese‘ than people or writers in mainland China . . . to form a more flexible, energetic, hybridized, and colorful language.‖ Poetry, March 2010, p. 470. 266 ―Rainbow Coalition‖ is also used by Jessie Jackson in his 1984 campaign for US presidency. See David Hackett Fischer, Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History of America‟s Founding Ideas, Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 690-691. Sadly, USA was and is still not ready for it yet. President Obama today is more white than colored. With quite high IQ and high hopes, young Obama is achieving quite low and little. ―He will be a mediocre president,‖ said Howard Zinn, as reported by his website obituary in January 2010. Obama may be another Mr. Carter decorated with Nobel Peace Prize politically empty. Sad!
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Without a stable culture of its own, Taiwan can show China its rut of traditionalism, as China has instinctively revolted against its own self-rot by wholesale import of foreign cultures Western, Japanese, and Russian. Free-floating unattached among cultures, Taiwan can show Japan its risk of wholesale import and imitation of outside cultures Chinese and Western, forgetting its Shinto soul. Small and powerless, Taiwan can show big USA its danger of being blinded by its might military and cultural, to unilaterally bully world neighbors. Pax Romana lasted only two centuries; Pax Americana has finished its second century. Watch out, USA! The time for your 267 revolution, soft, radical, to cosmopolitan concord, is now, or never! Six: Robbed and rubbed repeatedly, Taiwan, now polished, shines at the strategic crossroads international and intercultural, inviting us Taiwan-lovers to polish further and toughen this gem. How? We must put our house in order. We must root out our corruption, selfish and uneducated, from our bustling democracy that is the envy of China and Japan. We must redress our own ecological disasters to cultivate our small plot of land fertile and green. Seven: Am I dreaming? Well, no human life can survive—much less thrive—without dreams. It is our dream that composes life to thrive in our struggles to actualize reality. Who could have imagined metal to fly and float? Thanks to our lone inventors (inventors are loners) defying constant ridicules, persisting through repeated failures often mortal, metal now flies and floats routinely. Now let us look at Taiwan. Is our dream for it ridiculous? Is Taiwan an ant precariously surviving among bully elephants? Well, small is beautiful and tough as gem, and is powerful, 268 too. A single ant can go into an elephant biting its inner ear, and the elephant is helpless. Or rather, remember Aesop‘s mouse saving a lion. Small Taiwan can work, precisely with its shrewd caring warmth, to save the world-lion from its own brutality. Best of all, no one is threatened by Taiwan so small and strategic. On the contrary, our dream for our Taiwan is not at all unworthy of embracing by all, for our dream is the world‘s most cherishable treasure. It is world concord of all with all, young and old, weak and strong! Everybody is a winner here! Wholeheartedly I must appeal to all Taiwan-lovers to wake up toward our shared dream such as this, to strive together to fulfill the common dream for Taiwan and the world. Taiwan is the world‘s gem shining the beacon of multicultural acceptance, to be an intercultural democratic model to the big bullies of the world. It is crucial ever to work at this dream of gem-polishing. Struggling for this beautiful dream of ours is itself good for us, for Taiwan, and for the world, for this reason. Taiwan is the intimate invisible self writ large, and the huge invisible world writ small, to turn both visible. Thus to see Taiwan is to see me and to see the world. We now see all interrelated breath to breath; polishing Taiwan the gem polishes you and me to polish the world, for Taiwan is me the gem and world the gem. This is what ―Taiwan the gem of the world‖ means. Taiwan the world-gem is our new vision and new task, good for us and for the world. Now, isn‘t storytelling above what makes all this to appear? Doesn‘t such storythinking pioneer this world-task? 267 Niall Ferguson‘s beautiful scary portrait of quick collapse of USA must be attended to. ―Complexity and Collapse,‖ Foreign Affairs, March/April 2010, pp. 18-32. 268 ―A small input to such a [big complex] system can produce huge, often unanticipated changes—what scientists call ‗the amplifier effect.‘‖ Ibid., p. 25.
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O the sky of our semitropical Taiwan is so high, so vast, and so blue penetrating the whole world, rural Colorado included, with its prairie homes and unhurried dreamy hills, and with Debussy‘s distant tunes of dreamy rugged nature in France! We‘ve got just a few tiny patches of clouds, inviting us all to soar up there! That is our Taiwan our world-sky! O what a beautiful morning! O what a beautiful day! We‘ve got a beautiful dream, all through us ahead—for our Taiwan the gem of the world!
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Nienhauser, William H., Jr., ed. 1986. The Indiana Companion to the Traditional Chinese Literature, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Polanyi, Michael. 1946. Science, Faith and Society, The University of Chicago Press. Rorty, Richard, M. 1967. The Linguistic Turn: Recent Essays in Philosophical Methods, The University of Chicago. _______________. 1979, 1980. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton University Press. _______________. 1985. Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays 1972-1980, The University of Minnesota Press. _______________. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Cambridge University Press. _______________. 1991. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Volume 1: Philosophical Papers, Cambridge University Press. _______________. 1991a. Essays on Heidegger and Others: Volume 2: Philosophical Papers, Cambridge University Press. _______________. 1995. John Dewey: An Intellectual Portrait, Prometheus Books. _______________. 1998. Truth and Progress: Volume 3: Philosophical Papers, Cambridge University Press. _______________. 1999. Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America, Harvard University Press. _______________. 1999a. Philosophy and Social Hope, NY: Penguin USA. _______________. 11/10/1999b. ―Analytic Philosophy and Transformative Philosophy.‖ _______________. 9/18/2001. ―The United States as Republic and as Empire.‖ _______________. 5/22/2002. ―Analytic and Conversational Philosophy.‖ _______________. 4/21/2003. ―Analytic Philosophy and Narrative Philosophy.‖ _______________. 4/21/2003a. ―Universalist Grandeur, Romantic Profundity, Humanist Finitude‖ Schilpp, Paul Arthur and Hahn, Lewis Edwin, eds. 1984. The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel, La Salle, IL: Open Court. Smith, Huston. 1991. The World‘s Religions, HarperSanFrancisco. Tolland, Anders. 1991. Epistemological Relativism and Relativistic Epistemology: Richard Rorty and the Possibility of Philosophical Knowledge, Philadelphia: Coronet Books. Van den House, D. and van den House, D. 1994. Without God and His Doubles: Realism, Relativism, and Rorty, Leiden: Brill. Watson, Burton, tr. 1961. Records of the Grand Historian of China, Two Volumes, NY: Columbia University Press. Waley, Arthur. 1982. Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China (1939), CA: Stanford University Press. Weiss, Paul. 1955-1989. Philosophy in Process, 11 volumes, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. West, Cornel. 1989. The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism, Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. Whitehead, Alfred North. 1954. Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead, Greenwood Publishing Group, 1977. ___________________. 1978. Process and Reality: Corrected Edition, NY: The Free Press. Wiener, Philip P. ed., 1973. Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas, Five Volumes, NY: Charles Scribner‘s Sons.
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Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1922. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ogden, C. K., tr., London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd. _________________. 1958. Philosophical Investigations, tr. G.E.M. Anscombe, NY: The Macmillan Company, 1953, 1966, 1968. _________________. 1961. Wittgenstein Notebooks 1914-1916. Anscombe, G. E. M., tr., (Von Wright, G. H. and Anscombe, G. E. M., eds.), Oxford University Press. _________________. 1998. Wittgenstein‘s Tractatus, Daniel Kolak, tr., Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Co. Wu, Kuang-ming. 1965. ―Existential Relativism,‖ Ph.D. thesis, philosophy, Yale University. ______________. 1990. The Butterfly as Companion: Meditations on the First Three Chapters of the ‗Chuang Tzu,‘ Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. ______________. 1997. On Chinese Body Thinking: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill. ______________. 1998. On The ―Logic‖ of Togetherness: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill. ______________. 1998a. ―Learning as a Master from a Master: ‗Chuang Tzu‘ in University Education,‖ Journal of Humanities East/West. ______________. 2001. On Metaphoring: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill. ______________. 2002. ―Realism (Fajia), Human Akrasia, and the Milieu for Ultimate Virtue,‖ in DAO: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy. ______________. 2003. ―Violence as Weakness: In China and Beyond,‖ in DAO: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy. ______________. 2005. ―Chinese Philosophy and Story-Thinking,‖ in DAO: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy.
INDEX 9 9/11, 99, 315, 319, 374, 427
A abstraction, 9, 419 abuse, 75, 102, 134, 253, 319 accommodation, 147, 423, 430 accounting, 381 achievement, 245, 265, 267 acquaintance, 76 adaptation, 36 adaptations, 373 adjustment, 82, 328, 373 adulthood, 32, 54, 257 advertising, 60, 387, 440 aesthetics, 102, 145 affirming, 275, 422, 423, 425, 426, 435 Afghanistan, 235, 247 Africa, 325 age, 57, 62, 98, 102, 104, 108, 165, 183, 211, 231, 269, 294, 325, 398, 405, 430, 437 ageing, 202 aggression, 212 agriculture, 99, 100, 101, 246 airports, 325, 432 alienation, 132, 326 alternatives, 35, 225, 238, 240, 242, 249, 252 altruism, 212, 213 ambassadors, 215 ambiguity, 62, 63, 162, 354, 400, 439 anarchism, 2, 148, 407 anger, 92, 210, 216, 217, 241 anthropology, 10, 17, 142, 330 anxiety, 372 appetite, 96, 108, 300, 431
apples, 221, 340, 341 applications, 37, 85, 440 Arab world, 314 Aristotle, 6, 18, 28, 65, 70, 73, 84, 104, 121, 136, 144, 149, 152, 153, 160, 168, 175, 182, 197, 199, 205, 208, 245, 259, 260, 271, 272, 277, 284, 290, 294, 296, 311, 319, 324, 330, 353, 361, 364, 385, 389, 408, 423, 431, 433, 434, 444 arousal, 203 Asia, 32, 103, 116, 330, 442 aspiration, 181, 374, 386, 387 assessment, 218, 317 assumptions, 172, 179, 200, 227, 330, 331, 336, 393, 436 asylum, 265, 328 asymmetry, 276 atheists, 22, 31 atmospheric pressure, 261 atoms, 22, 32, 126, 339 atrocities, 257, 260 attachment, 95, 97, 104, 105, 120, 203, 244 attacks, 239, 242, 249, 278, 314, 320 attitudes, 100, 105, 149, 179, 221, 227, 242, 271, 370, 408, 420, 436 attribution, 255 authenticity, 42, 96, 106, 115, 123, 130, 205, 252, 304, 316, 360, 420, 422 authoritarianism, 279 authorities, 173, 332 authority, 34, 100, 173, 210, 225, 253, 433 authors, 332, 416, 418 awareness, 4, 6, 33, 34, 90, 97, 98, 104, 110, 120, 123, 124, 139, 187, 193, 200, 204, 240, 244, 271, 301, 340, 394
B background, 116, 287, 353, 366
446
Index
baggage, 266, 298 balanced state, 276 banking, 368 bankruptcy, 41 beams, 199, 200 beauty, 3, 15, 89, 121, 130, 131, 147, 157, 158, 201, 216, 254, 259, 273, 274, 287, 324, 335, 336, 337, 338, 339, 345, 348, 356, 390, 418, 424, 430, 442 behavior, 14, 17, 103, 150, 168, 191, 204, 205, 216, 244, 253, 328, 329, 370, 373, 374, 419 behaviorism, 84 behaviors, 25, 185, 204 Beijing, 3 beliefs, 36, 101, 304 belligerent plurality, 2 Bible, v, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 33, 35, 38, 51, 52, 62, 63, 106, 107, 126, 127, 141, 142, 153, 191, 196, 203, 206, 207, 209, 214, 217, 218, 222, 224, 231, 238, 265, 267, 268, 335, 357, 398 biography, 9, 30, 64, 89, 167, 255, 298, 329, 364, 372 biopsychology, 370 birding, 229 birds, 6, 15, 50, 78, 97, 98, 99, 108, 128, 133, 159, 188, 229, 259, 290, 291, 292, 305, 327, 339, 348, 349, 354, 356, 357, 359, 382, 392, 395, 401 birth, 69, 72, 75, 85, 97, 157, 192, 199, 223, 225, 271, 272, 273, 293, 325, 391, 434 birth control, 225 black hole, 85, 213, 227 blame, 14, 18, 211, 294, 405, 413, 433 blends, 79, 143, 324, 437 blind spot, 370, 371 blindness, 91, 158, 171 blocks, 334 blood, 10, 24, 25, 37, 127, 190, 209, 218, 247, 314, 325, 400, 432 bloodshed, 147, 236, 240, 248, 275, 383, 430 bloodstream, 85, 120 bonds, 100, 101, 102, 210, 294, 405 bones, 7, 106, 136, 142, 200, 337, 369, 439 borrowing, 142 boys, 160, 163, 241, 257 brain, 84, 93, 141, 370, 371 brain functions, 370 breakfast, 188 breathing, 2, 7, 8, 37, 60, 90, 97, 161, 278, 286, 287, 291, 301, 343, 347, 353, 390, 415, 417, 422 breeding, 44, 311 brothers, 214, 239 brutality, 443
Buddhism, 21, 22, 23, 24, 30, 32, 36, 116, 129, 145, 182, 206, 223, 225, 227, 231, 254, 271, 272, 277, 284, 337, 398, 399, 411 budding, 258 bullying, 74, 344, 401, 442 burn, 24, 95, 165, 220 burning, 35, 52, 171, 245 Butcher, 65, 182
C campaigns, 18, 31, 255 Canada, 107, 279 cancer, 264, 301 candidates, 314, 320 capital punishment, 11, 214, 218, 219, 220 capitalism, 74 cast, 230, 263, 306, 319 casting, 101, 197 castration, 192 catalysis, 9, 435, 437 catalyst, 9, 249, 314, 437 catastrophes, 75 cattle, 261, 339 Chad, 140, 171, 228, 327, 436 chain of command, 253 challenges, 79, 148, 312, 321, 368, 375, 376, 379, 383, 407 channels, 309, 320 chaos, 16, 27, 36, 93, 106, 109, 110, 134, 196, 199, 303 character, 3, 9, 21, 28, 43, 57, 70, 133, 162, 191, 208, 228, 236, 238, 244, 245, 250, 255, 259, 260, 264, 265, 287, 327, 355, 372, 373, 385, 421, 425, 428 charm, 75, 303, 350, 391 chicken, 40 childhood, 5, 14, 67, 77, 196, 202 children, 6, 25, 32, 33, 45, 51, 54, 64, 65, 66, 73, 79, 126, 127, 130, 133, 143, 149, 196, 203, 207, 210, 214, 216, 217, 225, 226, 231, 242, 257, 258, 262, 269, 270, 294, 327, 328, 338, 343, 346, 349, 360, 361, 390, 405, 408 Chinese medicine, 3, 94, 192 Chinese philosophy, 7, 113, 137, 175, 245, 299, 330, 331, 363, 364, 365 chopping, 24, 30, 250, 263, 322 Christianity, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 28, 29, 30, 32, 33, 38, 39, 43, 77, 145, 182, 183, 196, 225, 226, 231, 232, 233, 258 Christians, 22, 23, 24, 26, 28, 30, 31, 33, 34, 36, 37, 38, 43, 107, 225, 227, 231, 232, 347
Index City, 101, 107, 182, 191, 198, 225, 263, 335, 341, 350, 366, 390, 436 civil rights, 252, 255 civilization, 5, 180, 189, 238, 242, 248, 251, 273, 441 clarity, 63, 76, 104, 154, 161, 164, 167, 174, 190, 192, 254, 393, 396, 397, 439 classical conditioning, 164 classification, 190, 391 cleaning, 6, 375 cleavage, 68, 288 clients, 213, 371, 372 climate, 60, 253, 326, 359, 394 coercion, 442 cognition, 25, 32, 169 cognitive perspective, 328 coherence, 3, 4, 5, 7, 16, 48, 59, 67, 88, 110, 111, 116, 117, 132, 134, 137, 139, 140, 142, 180, 195, 204, 209, 215, 322, 324, 342, 370, 376, 391, 409 cohesion, 102, 314 collective unconscious, 263 colonization, 393 coma, 122 comedians, 65 commerce, 296 commercials, 298 common rule, 73 common sense, 6, 23, 47, 72, 109, 110, 143, 144, 155, 182, 212, 253, 303, 306, 308, 316, 339, 354, 397, 403, 426 communication, 1, 50, 93, 119, 143, 174, 185, 186, 393 Communist Party, 248 community, 28, 48, 72, 99, 100, 104, 105, 118, 119, 120, 121, 133, 143, 153, 159, 175, 186, 189, 252, 289, 303, 304, 305, 306, 307, 308, 310, 311, 313, 315, 316, 373, 374, 377, 392, 396 compassion, 29, 31, 42, 74, 75, 141, 166, 204, 221, 222, 228, 230, 308 competition, 74, 102, 309 complexity, 61, 142, 162, 177, 185, 186, 187, 328, 388, 391 compliance, 156 components, 125 composers, 257, 341, 358, 387 composition, 47, 77, 152, 311, 315, 327, 334, 342, 345, 350, 404, 419 comprehension, 206, 215 computation, 84, 434 concentration, 268, 397 conception, 228 conceptualization, 89, 163, 423
447
concrete thinking, 150, 362, 409, 418, 419, 420, 427, 430, 435, 436, 438 concreteness, 41, 80, 135, 440 conditioning, 164, 328, 329, 372, 382 conference, 318 confession, 16, 37, 38, 39, 43, 50, 52, 108, 156, 267, 323 confessions, 156 confidence, 98 conflict, 150, 225, 255, 259, 260, 301, 380, 383 conformity, 303, 310, 314, 315, 421 confrontation, 338 Confucianism, 24, 37, 44, 145, 166, 171, 240, 244, 246, 247, 254, 255, 331, 366, 375, 381, 382, 421, 429, 438, 440 confusion, 29, 30, 44, 62, 68, 91, 142, 184, 199, 323, 336, 337, 411, 435 conjecture, 123 conscientiousness, 83, 140 conscious activity, 122 conscious awareness, 124 consciousness, 123, 124, 186, 263, 264, 272, 301, 328, 356, 374 consensus, 69, 102, 104, 309, 377 consent, 73, 263, 312 conservation, 326 conspiracy, 99 Constitution, 70, 312, 320 construction, 181, 246 consulting, 131, 309 consumers, 102, 103, 125 consumption, 103, 240 contingency, 22, 23, 77, 197, 198, 254, 319, 418, 434, 441 continuity, 175, 179, 332 contradiction, 2, 73, 148, 215, 216, 217, 272, 290 control, 17, 52, 66, 102, 166, 224, 239, 254, 314, 343, 368, 393, 430, 431, 442 controversies, 2, 169, 198, 368 convention, 7, 72, 169, 171, 182, 183, 330, 364 convergence, 228, 388 conversion, 27, 31, 35, 167, 416 conviction, 67, 76, 191, 249 cooking, 107, 117, 132 corporations, 103 corruption, 420, 427, 443 counseling, 13, 44, 141, 228, 263, 329, 370, 371, 372, 373, 374 counseling psychology, 370 counterbalance, 222, 340 coupling, 88 covering, 17, 160, 187, 245 crack, 42, 99, 126, 127, 196, 259, 265, 288, 318
Index
448
craving, 240, 256 creative process, 52, 198 creativity, 115, 116, 118, 179, 189, 202, 232, 266, 301, 328, 329, 372, 373, 397 credibility, 368 crime, 30, 105, 177, 208, 210, 218, 219, 225, 241, 242, 412 criminals, 24, 413 criticism, 7, 8, 53, 60, 68, 69, 134, 152, 304, 305, 307, 308, 309, 316, 317, 321, 330, 332, 336, 364, 378, 385, 432 cross-fertilization, 307 crown, 267 crying, 40, 54, 245, 257, 440 cues, 113 cultivation, 5, 7, 72, 99, 100, 105, 175, 246, 250, 253, 425, 440 cultural differences, 84, 161 curiosity, 214, 296, 299, 414, 424, 426 cycles, 133
D daily living, 22, 114, 118, 137, 182, 339 dance, 3, 47, 128, 130, 144, 263, 338, 346, 347, 349, 392, 395, 400, 417, 418 dancers, 349 dances, 48, 202, 263, 392, 400, 439 danger, 95, 161, 238, 268, 309, 313, 439, 443 data communication, 103 death penalty, 218, 219, 220, 243, 427 deaths, 219, 224, 237, 241, 253, 258, 267, 275, 325, 390, 415, 430 debtors, 107 decay, 254, 284 decisions, 101, 316, 430 deconstruction, 376 deduction, 140, 230 defects, 96, 329, 372 defense, 69, 102, 108, 191, 203, 243, 247, 250, 314, 316, 331, 333 deficiencies, 226 definition, 65, 88, 90, 109, 150, 161, 164, 235, 239, 245, 315, 341, 380, 420 deforestation, 230 delivery, 7, 151, 374 demagoguery, 7, 252, 309, 310, 318, 420 democracy, 59, 73, 74, 75, 141, 146, 147, 174, 205, 242, 252, 253, 256, 275, 289, 303, 304, 305, 306, 307, 308, 309, 310, 311, 313, 314, 315, 316, 317, 318, 319, 320, 323, 383, 386, 388, 442, 443 Democratic Party, 318 democratization, 369
demography, 369 demonstrations, 423 denial, 56, 148, 248, 277, 384, 402, 407 density, 428 deposits, 343 depression, 11, 73, 128, 156, 204, 207, 235, 266, 301, 355, 371 deprivation, 122 designers, 426 destiny, 78, 79, 80, 81, 174, 188, 289, 319 destruction, 100, 221, 235, 242, 245, 249, 272, 313, 338, 348 determinism, 228 deterrence, 219, 247 dialogues, 9, 31, 43, 47, 59, 69, 113, 153, 173, 299, 348, 379, 387, 410, 419, 438 dichotomy, 94, 131 diet, 94 dignity, 53, 205, 238, 316 directives, 243 disappointment, 392 disaster, 29, 87, 88, 190, 208, 209, 211, 305, 309, 310, 312, 318, 319, 330, 432 discipline, 4, 180, 276, 376 discomfort, 16, 170, 301 discordance, 136 discourse, 200, 288, 356, 358 discrimination, 50, 425 dissatisfaction, 102 dissidents, 329, 372 dissonance, 280, 347 distinctness, 366, 428, 435, 441 distortions, 69 distributive justice, 205, 218 divergence, 27, 187 divergent thinking, 164 diversity, 162, 227, 337, 383 division, 160, 364 doctors, 39, 221, 261, 262, 316, 371 dot-pragmatics, 164, 167, 424 drawing, 32, 52, 55, 189, 238, 258, 347, 434 dream, 122, 123, 124, 129, 144, 145, 163, 164, 201, 202, 203, 231, 232, 251, 284, 288, 334, 369, 404, 405, 422, 443, 444 dreaming, 122, 124, 129, 163, 201, 405, 421, 422, 443 dreams, 122, 201, 202, 247, 267, 270, 288, 395, 405, 443 dynamics, 69, 71, 83, 118, 126, 127, 142, 229, 247, 254, 301, 307, 316, 318, 322, 324, 336, 337, 369, 382, 383, 403, 421, 422, 433, 434 dynamism, 127, 128, 301, 422
Index
E ears, 50, 128, 138, 188, 201, 246, 247, 283, 340, 341, 357, 432 earth, 18, 28, 54, 101, 169, 186, 190, 211, 214, 222, 228, 261, 288, 289, 294, 339, 353, 354, 355, 358, 406, 421 East Asia, 1, 61, 92, 139, 155, 416, 432, 438 Eastern Europe, 325 eating, 96, 120, 130, 131, 133, 344, 359 echoing, 2, 50, 51, 117, 158, 161, 289, 317 ecology, 104 economic boom, 390 economics, 72, 79, 85, 91, 138, 296, 297, 315 education, 7, 8, 47, 73, 74, 75, 101, 166, 168, 192, 237, 238, 244, 249, 250, 253, 255, 274, 296, 310, 318, 319, 320, 332, 338, 434, 440 Education, 6, 8, 45, 65, 88, 152, 173, 192, 315, 318, 366, 446 egalitarianism, 74 egg, 74, 144, 145, 226 Egypt, 107, 122 elaboration, 32, 131, 152, 181, 406, 421 elderly, 430 election, 87, 309, 314, 320 electricity, 103 elucidation, 9, 91, 92, 283, 356, 420, 435, 437, 440 email, 267, 321 embargo, 102 emotion, 90, 91, 92, 203, 219, 229, 300 emotional intelligence, 328 emotional reactions, 218 emotions, 33, 90, 92 empathy, 29, 92, 300, 372 employees, 102 employment, 102, 220 emptiness, 85, 227, 273 endangered species, 271 endurance, 95 enemies, 11, 29, 38, 198, 199, 212, 214, 215, 216, 217, 220, 240, 245, 249, 257, 262, 291, 431 enemy combatants, 253, 261 energy, 6, 89, 103 engagement, 99, 128, 191, 303, 364, 392, 393 engineering, 296, 328, 374 England, 41, 97, 134, 150, 169, 284, 317, 393, 427, 436 entanglements, 41, 263 enthusiasm, 29, 45, 298 environment, 97, 98, 102, 104, 105, 262, 301, 326, 368, 430 environmental impact, 103 epigenetics, 430
449
epistemology, 133, 184, 186, 187 equality, 74, 255 equipment, 103 ethics, 4, 6, 11, 56, 84, 117, 142, 192, 195, 205, 214, 224, 227, 230, 243, 251, 256, 271, 274, 296, 329, 330, 364, 372, 439 ethnocentrism, 377, 378, 384, 385 etiquette, 108, 271 Europe, 181, 325, 432, 442 evening, 146, 147, 162, 163, 164, 267, 280, 291, 302, 321, 422 evil, 11, 20, 195, 203, 204, 206, 208, 209, 210, 219, 222, 224, 226, 232, 235, 250, 251, 252, 259, 260, 261, 295, 306, 307, 325, 337, 400, 433, 440 evolution, 71, 82, 126, 187, 197, 251 examinations, 76 exclusion, 149, 226, 408 excuse, 310, 415 execution, 219, 220, 246, 267, 283, 286, 287, 298, 312, 402 extrapolation, 177, 179, 433, 434
F facial expression, 278 factories, 103 failure, 123, 197, 248, 253, 254, 314, 322, 325, 356, 380, 432 faith, 22, 23, 24, 26, 27, 28, 30, 31, 33, 34, 36, 38, 130, 212, 226, 232, 256 family, 33, 35, 45, 66, 72, 73, 89, 96, 99, 100, 101, 102, 104, 107, 135, 136, 157, 174, 187, 198, 199, 200, 215, 219, 220, 228, 237, 243, 267, 294, 303, 305, 311, 315, 321, 327, 338, 341, 356, 366, 380, 400, 401, 404, 405, 413, 421, 434 family members, 72, 102, 136 famine, 265 fanaticism, 4, 251, 252, 254, 255, 256, 267 fantasy, 110 farmers, 73, 99, 100, 102, 275, 368 fear, 171, 201, 207, 226, 236, 239, 240, 246, 258, 270, 297, 314, 413 fears, 310 feelings, 25, 54, 90, 91, 95, 228, 251, 328, 335 feet, 54, 130, 164, 174, 241, 243, 268, 287, 313, 339, 349, 401, 403 fetus, 316, 383 fever, 371, 394 fibers, 341, 381, 389 fidelity, 28, 140, 157, 205, 208, 271 field theory, 111 Finland, 287 fires, 174, 276, 279
Index
450
firms, 422, 423 fish, 55, 56, 79, 88, 97, 132, 170, 183, 188, 238, 260, 285, 321, 322, 326, 327, 390 fishing, 106 fission, 397 fixation, 376, 379, 383, 409 flame, 34, 274 flavor, 132, 142, 172, 341 flight, 151, 165, 384 float, 22, 50, 443 floating, 381, 443 flood, 228, 394 flooding, 142, 353, 354 food, 27, 80, 120, 130, 131, 132, 133, 151, 164, 222, 285, 434 forecasting, 429 foreign aid, 249 foreign language, 334 forgetting, 49, 94, 130, 158, 192, 205, 228, 243, 260, 269, 282, 334, 346, 356, 384, 401, 426, 443 forgiveness, 217, 232 formula, 123, 124 fossil, 103, 187 fragility, 319 fragments, 384 framing, 160, 161, 197, 303, 389 France, 147, 180, 325, 432, 444 free market economy, 319 freedom, 9, 18, 20, 39, 104, 127, 141, 161, 162, 207, 211, 261, 314, 316, 332, 364, 383, 394 freezing, 99, 183 friendship, 20, 97, 185, 186, 196, 230, 244, 340, 422 frustration, 209, 241, 242 fuel, 102, 103, 187 fugue, 384, 386 fulfillment, 36, 130, 196, 240, 267, 400, 401 funding, 309 funds, 83, 106, 181
G Galileo, 199, 313 game theory, 79, 85 garbage, 105, 149, 408 garble, 114, 378 gender, 161, 419, 440 generalization, 151, 164, 384 generation, 54, 62, 96, 153, 249 genes, 92, 93, 94 genetic code, 430 genetics, 92, 93, 430 genius, 5, 55, 96, 116, 140, 221, 240, 246, 265, 266, 301, 306, 340, 342, 346, 372, 439
genocide, 356 genre, 5, 230, 341 genres, 62, 181, 300, 304 geography, 94, 100, 369 geology, 91 George Berkeley, 421 Georgia, 230, 340 Germany, 41, 134, 153, 325, 432 Gestalt, 25, 167, 168, 169 Gestalt psychology, 25, 167 gestures, 52 gift, 147, 150, 256, 380 girls, 160, 249, 257 global village, 393 gold, 99, 100, 190 governance, 72, 166, 255, 309, 347, 368 government, 47, 72, 73, 75, 100, 101, 103, 166, 244, 253, 255, 303, 306, 307, 308, 311, 312, 313, 314, 315, 318, 347, 354, 367, 368, 369 grades, 261, 276 grammar, 2, 3, 6, 7, 132, 162, 174, 334, 341, 364 grass, 51, 97, 108, 250, 259, 291, 319, 321, 358 grasses, 319 grassroots, 315 gravity, 5, 6, 110, 208 grazing, 250, 291 Greece, 75, 208, 254, 332 greed, 240, 318, 319 Greeks, 125, 139, 233, 238, 244, 338 green revolution, 225 grief, 210, 294, 405 groups, 225, 316, 391 growth, 17, 69, 70, 99, 106, 118, 126, 127, 151, 164, 166, 168, 210, 215, 249, 264, 275, 293, 296, 299, 300, 302, 347, 367, 368, 371, 384, 393, 394, 408, 424, 434 guidance, 72, 283 guilty, 224 gun control, 74 gunpowder, 403, 412 gut, 120, 251, 309
H habitat, 5, 201, 302 habituation, 6, 260 hands, 30, 43, 54, 74, 89, 130, 207, 212, 221, 240, 263, 281, 282, 283, 285, 287, 292, 314, 317, 321, 327, 349, 388, 443 happiness, 54, 136, 144, 149, 188, 205, 206, 208, 210, 211, 224, 291, 306, 312, 318, 319, 337, 338, 399, 405, 406, 408, 433 harbors, 258
Index harm, 37, 47, 73, 100, 104, 120, 205, 244, 255, 259, 301, 329, 337, 338, 344, 345, 382 harmony, 47, 73, 104, 120, 205, 244, 255, 301, 329, 337, 338, 344, 345, 382 harvesting, 242, 432 hate, 14, 20, 29, 132, 147, 150, 210, 214, 215, 216, 217, 266, 279, 293, 295, 322, 380, 405, 430 Hawaii, 171, 254 headache, 9, 263, 420 healing, 16, 34, 39, 46, 79, 85, 97, 106, 107, 122, 152, 159, 212, 217, 261, 262, 263, 264, 279, 328, 329, 344, 371, 372, 373, 386 health, 8, 31, 38, 73, 94, 97, 109, 128, 195, 205, 230, 254, 260, 261, 263, 329, 351, 371, 375 health care, 375 health insurance, 371 health problems, 260 heat, 57, 95, 105, 106, 171, 198, 328 hedonism, 239 hegemony, 284, 313, 326 height, 107, 125, 413 hermeneutics, 78, 168, 169, 170, 172, 323, 336, 365 highways, 390, 415 historical reason, 331 history, 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 18, 19, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 29, 30, 32, 33, 37, 42, 43, 44, 46, 47, 48, 52, 53, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 87, 89, 94, 100, 104, 109,110, 113, 118, 119, 126, 128, 134, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 150, 151, 152, 153, 155, 158, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 173, 174, 175, 178, 179, 180, 184, 185, 186, 188, 189, 192, 200, 203, 207, 214, 230, 241, 242, 243, 245, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250, 251, 255, 260, 264, 265, 267, 268, 276, 285, 288, 289, 291, 292, 294, 295, 297, 298, 300, 305, 307, 308, 311, 312, 313, 315, 317, 319, 323, 324, 330, 332, 335, 337, 338, 347, 348, 351, 354, 357, 358, 359, 360, 362, 364, 365, 366, 367, 368, 369, 373, 375, 376, 377, 379, 380, 381, 382, 383, 384, 386, 387, 388, 389, 404, 407, 409, 410, 411, 412, 415, 419, 424, 427, 428, 430, 433, 434, 435, 437, 438, 439, 441 holism, 105 homograph, 228, 229, 327, 354, 355 homosexuality, 156, 313 Hong Kong, 144, 165, 166, 168, 312, 331, 334, 366, 368 hopes, 322, 323, 365, 442 hormone, 393 hospitality, 130, 147, 212, 274, 429, 431, 442 hospitals, 31, 242, 247 host, 13
451
hostility, 247 House, 22, 24, 32, 38, 43, 75, 111, 182, 207, 225, 253, 317, 329, 345, 377, 444, 445 hub, 85 hue, 202 Hui Tzu, 40, 55, 56, 106, 163, 186, 228, 383, 404 human behavior, 75 human brain, 93, 370 human condition, 367 human dignity, 312 human experience, 70, 72 human nature, 72, 123, 142, 178, 205, 229, 237, 238, 243, 244, 248, 250, 297, 362, 440 human psychology, 372 human reactions, 92 human reason, 79, 215 human rights, 366 human subjects, 103, 370 humanism, 179 humanitarian aid, 247, 249 humility, 226, 357 humus, 36, 93, 329, 390, 439, 442 husband, 26, 28, 36, 69, 260, 321, 329, 372, 374 hypothesis, 79, 110, 168, 340
I ideal, 19, 42, 43, 47, 68, 72, 104, 122, 129, 166, 197, 198, 227, 244, 247, 252, 267, 280, 304, 306, 311, 315, 361, 369, 371 idealism, 76, 80, 249, 412 ideals, 22, 72, 166, 251, 256, 315, 321, 363, 374 identification, 68, 100, 340, 361, 371 identity, 76, 96, 124, 155, 188, 227, 240, 272, 296, 301, 303, 340, 395, 421, 422, 435, 439 ideology, 6, 68, 72, 109, 303 idiosyncratic, 92, 135, 305, 306, 313, 316, 320, 330 illumination, 164 illusion, 212, 247 illusions, 173 image, 24, 28, 51, 93, 226, 239, 367, 404 imagery, 419, 433 images, 17, 51, 69, 303, 391, 428 imagination, 5, 129, 186, 362, 384, 391, 395, 398, 415, 416 imitation, 64, 65, 136, 152, 284, 353, 385, 443 immediate situation, 368 immigrants, 147 immortality, 21, 25, 207 impeachment, 253, 310, 316 imperialism, 150, 151, 249, 314, 384 imports, 141 imprisonment, 219, 263, 369
452
Index
impulses, 307 impulsive, 141, 236 incidence, 272, 276 independence, 9, 104, 305, 307, 310, 312, 320, 416, 442 Independence, 311, 312 India, 41, 325 Indians, 2, 24, 105, 325 indigenous, 31 indirection, 62, 67, 98, 160, 171 individualism, 9, 100, 104, 304, 325, 326, 383 individuality, 242, 304, 305, 314, 316 individuation, 264 indolent, 106 induction, 140, 230 industrialization, 100 industry, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 255, 319, 368 inequality, 221 inevitability, 166, 434 infants, 32, 55, 257 infinite, 81, 82, 125, 186, 187, 231, 297, 391, 398, 427 inheritance, 53, 96, 180 initiation, 16, 115, 269, 279, 328 injections, 374 injuries, 329, 373 inner ear, 443 inner world, 267 innocence, 32, 53, 55, 164, 183, 222, 232, 307 innovation, 179 insane, 13, 22, 67, 257, 258, 265, 267, 305, 306, 320, 328, 372, 390, 413, 415 insanity, 92, 264, 265, 266, 305, 306 insects, 291, 356, 357, 391 insecurity, 27, 252 insight, 3, 20, 21, 25, 63, 65, 78, 141, 148, 167, 170, 179, 337, 371, 380, 413, 414 inspiration, 22, 139, 225, 332, 350, 392 instability, 266, 328 instinct, 3, 73, 118, 157, 206, 310 institutional change, 105 institutions, 100, 101, 370 instruction, 19, 244, 255, 425 instruments, 247, 346, 347, 348 integrity, 27, 34, 35, 92, 156, 169, 175, 179, 181, 221, 222, 226, 235, 238, 249, 250, 252, 253, 265, 267, 304, 334, 371, 372, 395, 434, 435, 441 intelligence, 253, 260, 263, 304, 320, 331, 390 intelligence quotient, 304 interaction, 70, 130, 133, 205, 273, 301, 303, 340, 371, 373, 419, 436, 438 interactions, 72, 91, 394, 438
interdependence, 129, 134, 307, 373, 416 interest groups, 319 interference, 38, 381 internationalization, 393 interpersonal communication, 185 interpersonal empathy, 374 interpersonal relations, 388 interrelations, 94, 383, 439 interrogations, 286 interval, 268 interview, 178 intimacy, 28, 43, 95, 103, 131, 132, 135, 186, 191, 434 intimidation, 318 intuition, 76, 264 inventors, 443 investment, 105, 237 Iraq, 134, 242, 252, 261, 275, 310, 315, 317, 318, 320 iron, 107 irony, 115, 248, 274, 278, 378, 386, 424, 425, 426, 427, 436 irradiation, 140 Islam, 182, 225 isolation, 436, 439 Israel, 27, 28, 33, 36, 38
J Japan, v, 11, 51, 64, 76, 77, 86, 87, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 133, 190, 191, 223, 230, 237, 242, 254, 281, 284, 306, 325, 326, 327, 331, 367, 391, 417, 425, 430, 443 Jews, 23, 25, 30, 34, 43, 106, 139, 214, 257, 258 jobs, 79, 100, 318 joints, 85, 142 journalism, 94, 99, 150, 253, 311, 314, 319, 323, 324, 373 journalists, 65, 253, 314, 319, 322, 323, 433 judgment, 18, 19, 20, 24, 34, 53, 78, 83, 107, 149, 150, 185, 192, 203, 204, 208, 239, 245, 256, 263, 272, 297, 298, 312, 313, 323, 331, 406, 407, 408, 409, 416 justice, 31, 34, 35, 43, 73, 89, 92, 116, 119, 205, 206, 209, 215, 218, 219, 220, 232, 242, 253, 255, 383, 418, 427, 437 justification, 181, 298, 413
K killing, 35, 133, 136, 147, 217, 219, 238, 239, 241, 257, 267, 322, 400, 425
Index kindergarten, 54 Korea, 325
453
loyalty, 102, 140, 192, 205, 241, 242, 252, 254, 255, 256, 284, 309, 356, 381, 420 lying, 138, 346
L labeling, 41, 151 labor, 59, 204, 220, 333 labour, 288 lakes, 403, 410, 411 land, 87, 99, 100, 107, 153, 154, 157, 247, 274, 306, 326, 344, 386, 398, 410, 443 language, 3, 6, 31, 38, 114, 118, 120, 128, 134, 141, 156, 157, 158, 160, 161, 169, 173, 174, 179, 198, 263, 264, 273, 274, 290, 291, 341, 359, 364, 367, 376, 378, 391, 393, 415, 416, 428, 431, 442 languages, 28, 142, 161, 173, 181, 442 Latin America, 362 laughing, 149, 183, 396, 405, 409 laws, 19, 36, 37, 87, 110, 111, 126, 195, 253, 308, 313, 395, 435 lawyers, 433 leaks, 277, 435 learning, 19, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 39, 43, 45, 59, 64, 65, 71, 74, 93, 94, 126, 130, 137, 142, 152, 154, 155, 158, 166, 172, 226, 237, 277, 285, 297, 299, 355, 373, 381, 385, 388, 394, 425, 430, 439 Legalism, 166, 238, 245, 246, 247, 382 leisure, 109, 291 leisure time, 109 lethargy, 169, 255 liberalism, 307, 318, 378 liberation, 263 life changes, 163 life-milieu, 3, 11, 48, 97, 177, 188, 200 life-patterns, 79, 100, 101 lifestyle, 5, 63, 100, 104, 109, 329, 373, 393, 394 life-thinking, 2, 177, 362, 364, 416, 438 lifetime, 102, 185, 322, 413 limitation, 181, 440 line, 26, 37, 76, 108, 110, 133, 161, 171, 221, 245, 249, 253, 254, 301, 310, 348, 356, 377, 401, 434, 435, 436, 439 linen, 66, 67, 196 linkage, 375, 377, 389, 407 links, 16, 101, 296, 332, 362 liquidate, 246 listening, 14, 15, 16, 48, 98, 125, 128, 211, 226, 229, 235, 262, 290, 291, 300, 339, 340, 354, 355, 373, 396 literacy, 31, 39 liver, 132, 211, 240, 294, 405 local authorities, 96 logical reasoning, 365
M Machiavellianism, 246 magazines, 3, 56 majority, 84, 205, 289, 303, 304, 305, 310, 313, 318, 319, 320, 442 management, 84, 88, 102, 130, 132, 279, 365, 414 Mandarin, 442 manipulation, 104, 326, 327, 341 manners, 191, 398 manufactured goods, 254 manufacturing, 101, 295 market, 74, 103, 131, 142, 167, 218, 386 market economy, 74 Mars, 154, 267 Martin Heidegger, 17, 59, 113, 114, 124, 128, 161, 177, 326 Marx, 132 materialism, 371 mathematics, 11, 63, 70, 79, 84, 85, 87, 91, 134, 140, 142, 282, 294, 295, 342, 370, 403, 411 matrix, 4, 169, 363, 431, 432 meals, 404 meanings, 55, 57, 61, 64, 77, 87, 114, 119, 124, 126, 130, 141, 143, 148, 161, 162, 164, 167, 168, 170, 177, 229, 236, 247, 273, 330, 400, 407, 420, 436 measurement, 87, 93, 341 measures, 246, 340, 341, 368 meat, 200 media, 94, 225, 393 mediation, 6 meditation, 5, 6, 44, 158, 200, 204, 232, 244, 253, 286, 287, 336, 347, 356, 362 melody, 47, 48, 91, 281, 287, 302, 340, 345, 346, 347, 350 melon, 114, 378 melt, 247, 281, 292, 323, 395, 415, 418 membership, 367 memorizing, 167 memory, 156, 169, 347 men, 19, 24, 33, 34, 37, 40, 57, 65, 68, 108, 127, 139, 144, 168, 188, 198, 208, 261, 276, 289, 306, 309, 312, 388, 390, 413, 427 Mencius, 37, 53, 60, 64, 68, 70, 71, 106, 130, 133, 144, 154, 161, 162, 164, 165, 166, 168, 169, 170, 171, 174, 188, 190, 202, 204, 212, 213, 227, 228, 229, 236, 237, 238, 239, 243, 246, 250, 274, 275, 278, 285, 292, 310, 311, 312, 333, 354, 356, 361,
454
Index
363, 365, 384, 387, 388, 397, 424, 425, 429, 430, 431, 436, 440 mental disorder, 328 mental health, 109, 373, 375 mental illness, 267, 326 Mercury, 40 Merleau-Ponty, 51, 71, 89, 115, 130, 160, 181, 182, 200, 294, 295, 299, 300, 369, 370, 417, 419, 431, 434, 438 metaphor, 119, 134, 135, 167, 169, 198, 199, 200, 275, 299, 315, 337, 378, 415, 423, 424, 427, 436, 438 methodology, 91, 92, 114, 362, 364, 374, 417 Mexico, 221 microscope, 126 military, 73, 74, 240, 246, 253, 255, 304, 313, 367, 442, 443 milk, 270, 302, 372, 415 millipede, 124 mimesis, 136 minority, 206, 303, 304, 307, 312, 313, 320 miscarriage, 219, 220 missions, 31 misunderstanding, 94, 142 mixing, 94, 103, 110, 114, 132, 435, 442 model, 220, 443 modernity, 102, 104 modernization, 104 modulations, 152, 386 modus operandi, 153, 277, 337, 382, 387, 420, 423 mold, 125, 279, 373, 441 molds, 101, 211, 294, 405 money, 74, 92, 101, 195, 223, 262, 277, 314, 317, 319, 321, 323, 325, 422, 432 moral behavior, 215 moral standards, 75 morality, 124, 145, 215, 232, 238, 239, 245, 337, 338, 401, 413, 433 morning, 14, 46, 79, 97, 99, 115, 139, 146, 147, 162, 163, 164, 188, 189, 267, 285, 298, 321, 322, 329, 358, 359, 414, 444 morphology, 364, 388 Moses, 26, 30, 52, 231 mothers, 89, 97, 149, 185, 193, 259, 327, 408 motif, 230 motion, 51, 272, 273, 290, 421, 433 motivation, 188, 259 motives, 259, 291 mountains, 52, 345, 355, 394 movement, 51, 83, 97, 105, 287, 310, 339, 340, 341, 347, 349, 425, 433 multiculturalism, 391 multidimensional, 203
multimedia, 253, 255 murder, 122, 216, 218, 220, 224, 284, 349 musicians, 54, 327, 346, 347, 350, 351, 414, 415 Muslims, 85, 214 mutuality, 31, 85, 132, 158, 160, 161, 228, 237, 297, 329, 370, 373 myopia, 236, 239, 241, 246, 249, 250, 371 myth, 3, 64, 72, 134, 136, 137, 144, 145, 189, 200, 258, 367 mythology, 18, 22, 36, 109, 110, 130, 134, 191, 222
N narratives, 4, 5, 380 nation, 48, 105, 147, 242, 287, 308, 313, 314, 368, 393 National Public Radio, 320 national security, 309 natural gas, 103 natural laws, 19, 195 natural sciences, 19 nausea, 91, 277 needy, 26, 35, 212 neglect, 61, 78, 170, 186, 243, 318, 333, 369 Netherlands, 245, 248, 293, 324 network, 99, 103, 117, 118, 182 networking, 118 neutral stimulus, 164 next generation, 187 Nietzsche, 62, 77, 133, 137, 152, 153, 168, 169, 278, 281, 291, 301, 365, 378, 385, 386 nightmares, 122 No Child Left Behind, 315 no voice, 108 Nobel Prize, 110, 159, 328 noise, 103, 284, 319 nostalgia, 166 novelty, 45, 79, 88, 109, 116, 119, 141, 167, 168, 179, 195, 257 NPR, 267, 309, 315, 317 nuclear weapons, 366 nursing, 228, 257, 327, 372
O obedience, 338 objective logic, 124 objective reality, 228, 327, 372 objectivism, 8, 124, 125, 370, 371, 372, 374, 375 objectivity, 62, 69, 80, 91, 93, 94, 95, 104, 173, 191, 193, 229, 295, 303, 331, 371, 372, 374, 375, 377, 412
Index obligation, 9, 215, 217, 221, 225, 226, 235, 356 observations, 19, 164 obstruction, 66, 335, 367 oceans, 225, 355, 411, 417 offenders, 238 oil, 102, 103, 273, 315 Oklahoma, 4, 15, 47, 52, 138, 190 openness, 30, 32, 35, 88, 376, 377, 409 opportunism, 244, 382 oppression, 247, 308 oral tradition, 18, 145, 151 order, 7, 14, 37, 52, 59, 64, 75, 105, 109, 111, 118, 119, 124, 125, 126, 178, 180, 181, 186, 190, 197, 227, 238, 239, 251, 259, 287, 316, 321, 323, 332, 333, 340, 364, 367, 379, 412, 433, 443 organism, 24, 195 orientation, 99 originality, 54, 65 ossification, 155, 158 otherness, 123, 130 ownership, 100, 219
P packaging, 152, 162, 163, 385 pain, 4, 14, 26, 78, 128, 141, 157, 159, 166, 190, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 216, 220, 221, 223, 224, 226, 227, 228, 231, 232, 233, 235, 236, 243, 245, 253, 259, 262, 263, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268,312, 324, 338, 349, 356, 383, 393, 400, 401, 402, 411, 412, 413, 415, 419, 425, 431, 432, 433 paintings, 3, 47, 182, 185, 286, 329, 337, 338, 350, 372, 417 paints, 67, 191, 286 Pakistan, 249 palindrome, 127 paradigm, 71, 197, 199 paradigm shift, 71, 199 parallel, 37, 62, 204, 328, 434 parasite, 266 parental care, 72 parenting, 77, 79, 127 parents, 8, 29, 33, 54, 69, 149, 183, 187, 190, 202, 203, 206, 207, 210, 211, 250, 263, 271, 275, 294, 346, 388, 405, 408, 409, 434 parity, 370 particles, 89, 353, 355, 396 patriotism, 255, 306, 309 Pentagon, 256, 257 perceptions, 88, 143, 162, 383
455
performance, 48, 62, 64, 71, 72, 77, 82, 165, 187, 222, 278, 287, 293, 294, 320, 329, 337, 341, 342, 347, 349, 372 performers, 302, 334, 342, 349, 351, 358, 359 perpetration, 251, 259 perpetrators, 223, 235, 236, 238, 241 personal choice, 304 personal identity, 156 personality, 169, 329, 372 personhood, 419, 422 persuasion, 7, 166, 247, 266, 267, 354, 389, 420, 427 Peru, 74 pessimists, 201 pharmaceuticals, 103 pharmacology, 84, 371 phenomenology, 29, 123, 185, 224, 295, 356, 365, 416 Philippines, 74 philosophers, 9, 41, 89, 118, 119, 122, 131, 137, 161, 299, 307, 310, 330, 331, 365, 370, 376, 377, 379, 412, 431 photographs, 160, 389 physical sciences, 91 physicalism, 300 physics, 6, 17, 71, 84, 85, 91, 109, 110, 126, 182, 370, 375 physiology, 17, 84, 91, 93, 141, 185, 370 piano, 50, 124, 258, 342, 346 Picasso, 6, 116, 191, 266, 267 plants, 49, 103, 344, 355 pleasure, 5, 11, 13, 81, 110, 146, 152, 157, 165, 195, 203, 204, 205, 206, 208, 256, 344, 386, 412 pluralism, 252 poetry, v, 2, 3, 4, 11, 27, 47, 51, 57, 77, 80, 84, 93, 94, 115, 117, 119, 128, 137, 144, 145, 161, 162, 168, 253, 255, 267, 274, 280, 290, 311, 324, 326, 337, 342, 344, 353, 354, 358, 359, 375, 387, 388, 390, 403, 415, 428 police, 205, 412 political parties, 101 political power, 253 politics, 4, 11, 59, 72, 73, 75, 117, 132, 140, 166, 220, 240, 296, 297, 311, 347, 366, 368, 369, 396, 424, 434 pollution, 103, 105, 326, 327, 334 poor, 20, 26, 74, 108, 118, 132, 147, 167, 206, 208, 211, 213, 221, 223, 250, 256, 262, 274, 284, 350 population, 224, 249, 368, 369 population growth, 368 portfolios, 392 portraits, 286 posture, 126, 128, 149, 381, 408
Index
456
poverty, 68, 195, 221, 222, 226, 249, 325, 355, 390, 411 pragmatism, 8, 147, 244, 362, 377, 378, 379, 382, 383, 389, 408, 409 praxis, 6, 8, 26, 37, 38, 42, 44, 65, 168, 188, 363, 382, 421 prayer, 217, 262, 347 predictability, 343 prediction, 79, 242 preference, 137, 416 prejudice, 53, 91, 339 pre-planning, 337 presidency, 305, 318, 442 president, 73, 74, 316, 320, 366, 443 prisoners, 134, 253 privacy, 252, 256, 313, 315, 320, 325 production, 368 profit, 102, 246, 277, 326 profits, 230, 245, 262, 315 program, 189, 247, 366 proliferation, 396 promoter, 73 propaganda, 73, 309, 317, 318, 320 properties, 89, 150, 289, 319 proposition, 154, 422, 426 prosperity, 102, 210, 240 psychoanalysis, 77, 329 psychologist, 130, 156, 369, 374 psychology, 4, 11, 17, 84, 87, 88, 90, 91, 94, 121, 122, 141, 154, 185, 190, 296, 300, 328, 329, 362, 363, 369, 370, 371, 372, 373, 374, 375 psychopharmacology, 329 psychosis, 157 psychosomatic, 228 psychotherapy, 13, 14, 167, 212, 329, 371, 372, 373 public awareness, 313 public education, 255, 320 public opinion, 173, 174, 311 pulse, 99, 418 punishment, 63, 208, 218, 219, 220, 231, 232, 245
Q quantitative research, 92 query, 4, 20, 21, 31, 66, 106, 175, 200, 250, 357, 374 questioning, 209, 210, 211, 296, 333, 360
R race, 30, 429 radio, 102, 279, 314, 390 rain, 18, 221, 395, 415
rancid, 389, 415 range, 88, 141, 252, 397, 417 rash, 238 rationality, 22, 203, 254 reactions, 7, 52, 92 reading, 1, 3, 7, 9, 11, 29, 48, 49, 52, 57, 63, 64, 70, 90, 114, 152, 157, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 268, 279, 281, 282, 287, 297, 317, 321, 322, 323, 324, 331, 332, 333, 336, 362, 363, 364, 365, 389, 401, 403, 428, 432 realism, 41, 191, 376, 377, 382 reality, 48, 123, 125, 129, 144, 182, 188, 229, 238, 295, 317, 327, 344, 372, 378, 379, 390, 415, 416, 443 reasoning, 18, 74, 87, 132, 148, 230, 243, 260, 299, 324, 365, 379, 383, 407, 412 recall, 172, 184, 185, 186, 187 recalling, 185 reception, 7, 321, 432 reciprocity, 141, 205, 235, 272, 425 recognition, 21, 25, 341, 417 recollection, 185, 334 reconcile, 20, 312 reconstruction, 242 recycling, 103, 104 reductionism, 169 reflection, 16, 34, 40, 41, 42, 43, 57, 58, 69, 75, 78, 83, 84, 91, 106, 117, 143, 151, 203, 236, 238, 241, 300, 321, 323, 328, 356, 365, 370, 432 reflexivity, 214 regenerate, 169 region, 175, 334, 369, 393, 394 regulations, 253 rehearsing, 66, 70, 99, 271, 346, 425 rejection, 27, 30, 244, 272 relationship, 38, 162 relatives, 240 relativism, 11, 45, 94, 109, 111, 113, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 362, 363, 375, 376, 377, 379, 380, 381, 382, 383, 384, 385, 386, 387, 388, 389, 406, 407, 408, 409, 410, 413, 419, 429, 430 relativity, 6, 117, 134, 276 relevance, 181, 272 reliability, 343 relief, 101 religion, 22, 27, 28, 32, 33, 34, 35, 40, 42, 43, 44, 57, 100, 121, 145, 153, 159, 182, 199, 207, 211, 225, 226, 227, 232, 233, 260, 261, 262, 264, 267, 284, 291, 304, 311, 337, 338, 339, 367, 417, 439 renewable energy, 103 repair, 104, 258 repetitions, 79, 250, 291 replication, 70, 72, 298
Index reprocessing, 82, 170 Republican Party, 74 resentment, 102, 317 reserves, 149 resilience, 238 resolution, 23, 43, 226, 263 resonance, ix, 1, 61, 70, 133, 142, 167, 168, 186, 243, 330, 355, 377, 387 resources, 100, 220, 368, 374 respect, 22, 39, 47, 99, 102, 103, 105, 169, 190, 191, 256, 270, 271, 282, 307, 347, 361, 388 retrospection, 82, 184 returns, 274, 279 rhetoric, 7, 9, 76, 165, 278, 354, 428 rhythm, 2, 47, 48, 65, 72, 79, 82, 91, 99, 118, 126, 167, 168, 169, 255, 301, 302, 310, 330, 343, 345, 346, 347, 353, 355, 359, 417, 418 right to life, 252, 316, 383 risk, 35, 102, 161, 167, 238, 244, 304, 306, 308, 311, 313, 363, 367, 441, 443 rolling, 82, 157, 221, 257 routines, 44, 99, 167, 406, 421, 426 Russia, 41, 50, 325, 332
S safety, 103, 105, 149, 245, 252, 312 saliva, 382 salt, 216, 351 Salvation Army, 108 sarcasm, 124, 278 satisfaction, 83, 133, 141, 146, 154, 205, 238, 240, 286, 318, 416 scandal, 21, 22, 23, 24, 33, 43, 44, 45, 46, 223, 253, 317, 414, 420 scatter, 138, 140, 324 scattering, 51 schema, 77, 294, 305 schizophrenia, 312, 323 scholarship, 32, 60, 92, 110, 181, 187, 199, 300, 330, 331, 332, 360, 396, 397, 402, 416 school, 32, 60, 74, 101, 168, 170, 171, 247, 249, 253, 305, 436 science, 2, 4, 11, 17, 18, 45, 70, 71, 74, 80, 84, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 99, 100, 103, 104, 105, 109, 110, 111, 128, 130, 134, 137, 138, 140, 144, 145, 167, 180, 181, 188, 189, 190, 197, 199, 257, 261, 270, 271, 274, 275, 296, 300, 302, 327, 328, 329, 335, 338, 341, 370, 374, 375, 377, 412, 430, 435 scientific knowledge, 414 scientific method, 90, 91, 374, 378, 437 scientific progress, 103
457
scores, 72, 183 search, 14, 21, 29, 89, 207, 277, 308, 322, 332, 366, 380 searching, 6, 29, 149, 226, 408 security, 102, 242, 247, 252, 311, 317, 383 seed, 242, 314, 321, 383, 395 seeding, 311 seedlings, 162, 164, 166, 275 self-awareness, 125, 128 self-consciousness, 123, 129, 156, 296, 301 self-consistency, 310 self-control, 238 self-descriptions, 303 self-destruction, 254 self-enhancement, 158 self-expression, 44, 93, 124, 125, 157, 239, 240, 244, 255, 314 self-fertilization, 303 self-identity, 123, 124, 239, 240, 296, 297, 298, 303, 422 self-knowledge, 76, 185, 186, 190, 300, 317, 355, 425 self-portrait, 298 self-reflection, 125, 155, 156, 184, 301, 338, 408, 425 self-understanding, 35, 298 self-view, 190 senescence, 72, 391 senses, 24, 114, 119, 130, 131, 158, 177, 202, 213, 275, 354, 359, 362, 363, 379, 390, 417, 419, 426, 428, 429, 439 sensing, 76, 161, 247, 302, 419, 421 sensitivity, 57, 99, 106, 124, 147, 154, 158, 160, 161, 165, 166, 167, 170, 172, 174, 203, 212, 227, 228, 243, 246, 255, 300, 309, 325, 349, 356, 374, 375, 393, 420, 425, 431, 437, 439 separation, 98, 104, 169, 198, 311, 419, 431 sex, 28, 29, 130, 138, 156, 226, 239, 337, 419, 427, 440 sexism, 43, 131 sexual identity, 300 sexuality, 225, 226, 419 shame, 101, 242, 405, 413 shaping, 52, 64, 74, 102, 105, 141, 155, 156, 158, 169, 172, 174, 200, 211, 214, 237, 272, 358, 371, 393 shares, 224, 311, 365, 377 sharing, 27, 100, 118, 158, 159, 169, 227, 383 sheep, 29, 74, 204, 205, 207, 308, 318 shelter, 13, 57, 344 shock, 2, 32, 49, 97, 175, 207, 393, 394 siblings, 5, 22, 407 signals, 148, 162, 407
458
Index
signs, 130, 239, 253, 276 silence, 2, 16, 31, 34, 38, 45, 50, 51, 56, 57, 99, 169, 183, 209, 257, 258, 259, 268, 269, 281, 282, 283, 284, 285, 286, 287, 288, 289, 290, 291, 292, 293, 335, 336, 339, 341, 344, 345, 346, 347, 348, 349, 350, 351, 353, 355, 356, 357, 358, 359, 360, 363, 389, 399, 400, 410, 411, 413, 415, 424, 426, 439 skills, 245, 326 skin, 21, 93, 193, 200, 377 smiles, 185, 227, 256, 257, 258, 344, 358, 392 social contract, 314 social influence, 91 social influences, 91 social psychology, 373 soil, 87, 100, 102, 104, 108, 190, 321, 324, 355, 389, 432, 439 solidarity, 102, 377, 386, 388 solitude, 157, 425 South Africa, 379 sovereignty, 73, 261, 273, 314, 383 Soviet Union, 332 space, 6, 11, 17, 60, 70, 71, 73, 85, 87, 103, 117, 118, 124, 126, 140, 143, 162, 177, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 276, 298, 368, 376, 381, 389, 390, 395, 410, 419, 434 spacetime, 140 Spain, 41, 325 special relativity, 117 species, 57, 92, 94, 133, 212, 213, 228, 230, 251, 252, 326, 327, 391 specter, 297, 329, 372 speculation, 32, 83, 229 speech, 3, 119, 120, 160, 168, 289, 317, 358, 399 speed, 22, 103, 270, 347, 434 speed of light, 22 spine, 210, 265, 293, 405 spontaneity, 118, 123, 124, 125, 130, 161, 166, 171, 243, 297, 310, 319, 350, 356, 357, 358, 361, 371 sports, 101, 102, 296, 323 standards, 19, 75, 241, 440 stars, 2, 154, 291, 340 starvation, 225 state-owned enterprises, 368 statistics, 84, 88, 221 statutes, 37, 73, 282 sterile, 416 stimulus, 164, 276 stock, 40, 71, 149, 231, 360, 367, 396 stomach, 187, 259, 264 storms, 261, 344, 346 story-adding, 3, 4 story-hearing, 1, 3, 4, 16, 52, 292, 321, 360, 422 story-notions, 162, 164, 165, 215, 364
story-thinking, ix, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 14, 16, 18, 22, 25, 29, 44, 53, 57, 77, 92, 117, 121, 133, 135, 140, 154, 159, 165, 171, 181, 183, 184, 187, 246, 251, 281, 282, 292, 293, 295, 298, 322, 324, 330, 335, 336, 341, 353, 359, 362, 363, 364, 365, 379, 381, 388, 416, 417, 422, 428, 429, 430, 432, 433, 437, 438, 439, 444 strain, 108, 354 strategic position, 247 strategies, 244, 247, 256, 426 strategy, 64, 245, 246, 409 strength, 34, 108, 147, 233, 236, 239, 247, 249, 257, 261, 264, 266, 267, 350, 378 stress, 74, 121, 139, 169, 212, 262, 276, 280, 330, 350, 364, 426, 435 stretching, 182, 335, 343, 360, 388 string theory, 71 stroke, 116, 221, 240, 260 students, 13, 45, 64, 164, 166, 168, 213, 280, 304, 305, 310, 313 subjectivity, 69, 80, 93, 161, 193, 229, 300, 303, 313, 327, 372, 377 succession, 442 suicide, 92, 94, 192, 241, 254, 267, 277, 327, 356, 375 summer, 403 Sun, 107, 137, 144, 216, 236, 245, 246, 247, 249, 287 supernatural, 64 supply, 63, 179, 254, 332 Supreme Court, 316, 320 survival, 57, 102, 190, 310, 315, 324 swelling, 81 switching, 98, 126 Switzerland, 442 symbolism, 16 symbols, 165, 264, 332 sympathy, 3, 227 symptom, 121 symptoms, 371 synthesis, 168, 301, 303, 364, 434, 435 syphilis, 258
T tactics, 88, 244, 247, 249 Taiwan, v, 1, 3, 31, 61, 66, 92, 139, 155, 193, 325, 363, 366, 368, 369, 416, 417, 432, 438, 441, 442, 443, 444 tax incentive, 103 taxation, 368 taxonomy, 391 teachers, 13, 74, 226, 237, 285, 290, 346
Index teaching, 8, 36, 141, 166, 274 temperament, 216, 404 tension, 27, 187 tensions, 368, 374 territory, 56, 88, 90, 119, 246 terrorism, 68, 253, 271, 324, 325, 348, 432 texture, 170, 323, 345 therapeutic approaches, 372 therapy, 13, 14, 64, 122, 266, 279, 301, 328, 329, 370, 372, 373 Thomas Hobbes, 73, 250, 311 Thomas Kuhn, 188, 199 thoughts, 52, 74, 78, 135, 156, 164, 170, 202, 262, 266, 267, 313, 331, 332, 386, 407, 415 threat, 198, 247, 316 threats, 173, 256 threshold, 162 tin, 15, 16, 190, 351 tobacco, 255, 316, 319 toddlers, 54, 382, 388 tones, 278, 428 tonic, 264, 328 tornadoes, 87 torture, 122 Toyota, 102, 103 trade, 138, 277, 383, 414 tradition, 18, 27, 28, 33, 35, 47, 52, 60, 83, 104, 106, 108, 115, 166, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 179, 180, 187, 230, 242, 248, 261, 309, 310, 312, 324, 330, 334, 340, 420, 434 traditionalism, 37, 52, 310, 311, 436, 439, 443 training, 247, 255 traits, 100, 253, 280, 376 transcendence, 145, 184, 271, 281 transcription, 61 transference, 61 transformation, 272, 379 transistor, 102 transitions, 442 translation, 4, 10, 59, 60, 61, 63, 73, 93, 114, 118, 121, 131, 142, 151, 155, 160, 161, 165, 166, 174, 177, 186, 204, 224, 228, 254, 276, 289, 312, 330, 348, 349, 385, 387, 424, 429 transparency, 279 transportation, 100, 103 trees, 15, 25, 52, 57, 76, 125, 128, 154, 284, 289, 290, 291, 292, 326, 331, 358, 389, 395, 417, 431 trends, 3, 77, 161, 168, 247 tribes, 220, 339, 340 trust, 203, 208, 231, 244, 283, 310 trustworthiness, 422 tuberculosis, 371 Turkey, 248
459
twist, 49, 119, 221, 258, 260, 272, 278, 397
U UK, 51, 439 uncertainty, 163 unconditioned, 164 unemployment, 320, 368 uniform, 150, 307, 380 unilateralism, 74, 253, 309, 310, 318 United States, 120, 367, 445 universality, 4, 83, 135, 383, 420, 440 universe, 6, 17, 79, 85, 104, 134, 139, 140, 182, 339, 391, 396 universities, 330 urban areas, 368 urbanization, 100
V vacuum, 179, 349 vapor, 89, 90, 284, 394 variations, 79, 249, 391 vegetables, 94 vehicles, 103 vibration, ix, 1, 353, 396 victims, 218, 219, 240 Vietnam, 134, 309 village, 35, 38, 100, 101, 163, 204, 249, 275 violence, 11, 73, 74, 75, 141, 221, 235, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240, 241, 242, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 256, 257, 258, 259, 262, 263, 283, 322, 337, 347, 400, 417, 425, 441, 442 violent crime, 368 viscera, 425 vision, 63, 66, 68, 121, 131, 157, 158, 198, 206, 340, 341, 342, 366, 368, 396, 397, 438, 443 vocabulary, 114, 177, 338, 377, 386 voice, 34, 50, 189, 222, 277, 357, 358, 376, 416
W waking, 121, 123, 129, 130, 301 walking, 26, 74, 99, 123, 124, 130, 168, 221, 273, 279, 280, 284, 343, 348, 351, 358, 359, 425 war, 20, 68, 79, 85, 96, 134, 163, 235, 237, 241, 242, 245, 246, 247, 249, 250, 252, 253, 271, 309, 313, 318, 337, 348, 394, 429 war years, 96 waste, 103, 105, 121, 246, 250, 302, 440
460
Index
watches, 433 wavelengths, 370 weakness, 34, 233, 235, 236, 237, 238, 239, 244, 245, 248, 250, 251, 256, 257, 258, 259 wealth, 42, 102, 107, 260, 261, 277 weapons, 74, 251, 252, 253, 348 weapons of mass destruction, 251, 253, 348 web, 77, 168, 195, 255, 297, 386 weeping, 71, 206, 233 welfare, 73, 166, 240 Western philosophy, 7, 32, 76, 113, 114, 115, 131, 282, 299, 364, 365, 378, 379, 385, 389, 412, 440, 441 wholesale, 21, 24, 179, 250, 251, 393, 437, 443 wild animals, 240 wilderness, 29, 189, 222, 226, 230, 253, 273, 416, 440 wind, 32, 51, 56, 93, 121, 124, 126, 139, 142, 161, 197, 284, 286, 287, 290, 291, 292, 319, 343, 353, 354, 357, 394, 395 winning, 54, 247, 254, 256, 319, 396 winter, 97, 98, 99, 120, 347, 389 withdrawal, 146, 149, 344, 408 women, 277, 309, 390 wood, 110, 191, 250 workers, 102, 368 workplace, 101 World War I, 368
worldview, 174, 188, 282 worry, 152, 221, 258, 385, 401 writing, 1, 2, 8, 47, 48, 49, 52, 63, 64, 95, 97, 110, 120, 138, 143, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 165, 168, 169, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 183, 189, 191, 192, 258, 266, 279, 280, 295, 297, 298, 299, 304, 323, 360, 362, 370, 402, 416, 417, 422, 428, 429, 441
X xenophobia, 394, 436
Y yang, 286 yarn, 22, 142, 222 yeast, 103 young women, 160
Z zoology, 110
