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Hwa Yol
u g Jun Transversal raTionaliTY &
inTerculTural TexTs essaYs in PHenomenologY and comParaTive PHilosoPHY
series in continental thought
Transversal Rationality and Intercultural Texts
SE RIE S
IN
CONT INEN TA L
TH O U G H T
Editorial Board Ted Toadvine, Chairman, University of Oregon Elizabeth A. Behnke, Study Project in Phenomenology of the Body David Carr, Emory University James Dodd, New School University Lester Embree, Florida Atlantic University José Huertas-Jourda, Wilfrid Laurier University† Joseph J. Kockelmans, Pennsylvania State University William R. McKenna, Miami University Algis Mickunas, Ohio University J. N. Mohanty, Temple University Dermot Moran, University College Dublin Thomas Nenon, University of Memphis Rosemary Rizo-Patron de Lerner, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Lima Thomas M. Seebohm, Johannes Gutenberg Universität, Mainz Gail Soffer, Rome, Italy Elizabeth Ströker, Universität Köln† Nicolas de Warren, Wellesley College Richard M. Zaner, Vanderbilt University
International Advisory Board Suzanne Bachelard, Université de Paris† Rudolf Boehm, Rijksuniversiteit Gent Albert Borgmann, University of Montana Amedeo Giorgi, Saybrook Institute Richard Grathoff, Universität Bielefeld Samuel Ijsseling, Husserl-Archief te Leuven Alphonso Lingis, Pennsylvania State University Werner Marx, Albert-Ludwigs Universität, Freiburg† David Rasmussen, Boston College John Sallis, Boston College John Scanlon, Duquesne University Hugh J. Silverman, State University of New York, Stony Brook Carlo Sini, Università di Milano Jacques Taminiaux, Louvain-la-Neuve D. Lawrence Wieder† Dallas Willard, University of Southern California
Transversal Rationality and Intercultural Texts Essays in Phenomenology and Comparative Philosophy
HWA YOL J U N G
OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS
ATHENS
Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701 www.ohioswallow.com © 2011 by Ohio University Press All rights reserved To obtain permission to quote, reprint, or otherwise reproduce or distribute material from Ohio University Press publications, please contact our rights and permissions department at (740) 593-1154 or (740) 593-4536 (fax). Printed in the United States of America Ohio University Press books are printed on acid-free paper ∞ ™ 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11
5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jung, Hwa Yol. Transversal rationality and intercultural texts : essays in phenomenology and comparative philosophy / Hwa Yol Jung. p. cm. — (Series in Continental thought) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-0-8214-1955-7 (hc : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8214-4369-9 (electronic) 1. Phenomenology. 2. Philosophy, Asian. 3. Philosophy, Comparative. I. Title. II. Series. B829.5.J86 2011 142'.78—dc22
2011010137
This book of thirteen essays is dedicated to my late mentor John Wild and the following short list of close friends and fellow-travellers whose associations have inspired and enriched my intellectual cultivation and growth: Fred Dallmayr, Cal Schrag, Bill McBride, Ed Casey, Lester Embree, John O’Neill, Kuang-ming Wu, Hugh Silverman, Herb Reid, Michael Gardiner, KIM Hongwoo, CHA In Suk MOON Chung-in Yong Huang, ZHANG Longxi, and my lifelong intellectual companion, Petee Jung.
C O N T E N T S
Acknowledgments Introduction
ix xi
Part I. Prelude to Phenomenology and Comparative Philosophy Chapter 1. Enlightenment and the Question of the Other: A Postmodern Audition
3
Part II. Transversality, Phenomenology, and Intercultural Texts Chapter 2. Transversality and the Philosophical Politics of Multiculturalism in the Age of Globalization
15
Part III. Transversal Linkage between Phenomenology and Asian Philosophy Chapter 3. Wang Yang-ming and Existential Phenomenology
37
Chapter 4. The Unity of Knowledge and Action: A Postscript to Wang Yang-ming’s Existential Phenomenology
56
Chapter 5. Jen: An Existential and Phenomenological Problem of Intersubjectivity
72
Chapter 6. Confucianism and Existentialism: Intersubjectivity as the Way of Man
87
Chapter 7. Heidegger’s Way with Sinitic Thinking
102
Part IV. Phenomenology, Literary Theory, and Comparative Culture and Politics Chapter 8. Reading/Misreading the Sinogram: From Fenollosa to Derrida and McLuhan
129
Chapter 9. Ernest Fenollosa’s Etymosinology in the Age of Global Communication
141
Chapter 10. The Joy of Textualizing Japan: A Metacommentary on Roland Barthes’s Empire of Signs
163
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Chapter 11. Revolutionary Dialectics: Mao Tse-tung and Maurice Merleau-Ponty
179
Part V. The Fleshfold of the Earth: Green Thought, East and West Chapter 12. Merleau-Ponty’s Transversal Geophilosophy and Sinic Aesthetics of Nature
211
Chapter 13. The Greening of Postmodern Philosophy: The Ethical Question of Reinhabiting the Earth
229
Notes Bibliography Index
249 321 393
A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S
A note of apologies to my offspring for sacrificing my “quality time” with them for writing. Le temps perdu will be remembered but never be regained. I am deeply sorry for that. Among my four grandchildren (Wiley, Adeline Petee, Damien, and Wyatt), only Wiley knew his nana well, and the other three were yet to be born when she passed away. My oldest grandson, Wiley, who is now twelve years old became interested in philosophy because of one of his teachers two years ago. He asked me earlier this year, “Papa, what is reality?” I hope that all of my grandchildren, whatever they do in life, develop some interest in and sustain curiosity for the “love of wisdom.” A note of thanks goes to Mickey Ortiz. I have been blessed with her skillful and outstanding assistance and work for three decades. She is one of a very few on campus who know what existential phenomenology, hermeneutics, philosophy East and West, and transversality are! I am eternally grateful for her service and dedication to my work. I am so glad that she is here. Because she has been so involved in the production of this book, she should take some responsibility for errors contained in it, typographical or otherwise. I am also thankful to Debbi Gaspar and Nancy Strobel in the Reeves Library for having taken care of interlibrary loan books for me for years. Last but not least, I wish to thank two anonymous philosophers for their wonderful reviews of my book manuscript. My gratitude goes to the following publishers and journals for granting me permission to reprint my published essays: chapter 1, “Enlightenment and the Question of the Other: A Postmodern Audition,” Human Studies 25 (2002): 297–306; chapter 2, “Transversality and the Philosophical Politics of Multiculturalism in the Age of Globalization,” Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009): 416–37; chapter 3, “Wang Yang-ming and Existential Phenomenology,” International Philosophical Quarterly 5 (1965): 612–36; chapter 4, “The Unity of Knowledge and Action: A Postscript to
x
acknowledgments
Wang Yang-ming’s Existential Phenomenology,” Journal of Chinese Studies 3 (1986): 19–38; chapter 5, “Jen: An Existential and Phenomenological Problem of Intersubjectivity,” Philosophy East and West 16 (1966): 169–88; chapter 6, “Confucianism and Existentialism: Intersubjectivity as the Way of Man,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 30 (1969): 186–303; chapter 7, “Heidegger’s Way with Sinitic Thinking,” in Heidegger and Asian Thought, ed. Graham Parkes (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987), 217–44; chapter 8, “Reading/Misreading the Sinogram: From Fenollosa to Derrida and McLuhan” (slightly modified from the original title “Misreading the Ideogram: From Fenollosa to Derrida and McLuhan”), Paideuma 13 (1984): 211–27; chapter 9, “Ernest Fenollosa’s Etymosinology in the Age of Global Communication,” Theory, Culture and Society 26, no. 2–3 (2009): 249–73; chapter 10, “The Joy of Textualizing Japan: A Metacommentary on Roland Barthes’ Empire of Signs,” in Bucknell Review, vol. 30, no. 2: Self, Sign, and Symbol, ed. Mark Neuman and Michael Payne (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1987), 144–67; chapter 11, “Revolutionary Dialectics: Mao Tse-tung and Maurice Merleau-Ponty,” Dialectical Anthropology 12 (1977), 33–56; chapter 12, “Merleau-Ponty’s Transversal Geophilosophy and Sinic Aesthetics of Nature,” in Merleau-Ponty and Environmental Philosophy: Dwelling on the Landscapes of Thought, ed. Suzanne L. Cataldi and William S. Hamrich (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 235–58; and chapter 13, “The Greening of Postmodern Philosophy: The Ethical Question of Reinhabiting the Earth,” in The Way of Ecopiety: Essays in Transversal Geophilosophy (New York: Global Scholarly Publications, 2009), 226–45 and 315–24.
I N T R O D U C T I O N
Questioning is the piety of thought. —Martin Heidegger We all stand only together, not only all men [and women], but all things. —Henry G. Bugbee Jr. If we keep on speaking the same language together, we’re going to reproduce the same history. —Luce Irigaray This book of thirteen selected essays spans almost half a century from 1965 (chapter 3) to 2009 (chapters 9 and 13). Many, if not all, of them are experimental and exploratory in nature. Since they are meant to be a transversal linkage between phenomenology and East Asian philosophy, Part III, which contains five essays, constitutes the kernel of this collection. Chapters 3, 5, and 6 form a triptych with an emphasis on the lifeworld (Lebenswelt) as a sociocultural or intersubjective world. Chapter 4 is a rejoinder on chapter 3 in which the idea of sincerity (cheng) is suggested and emphasized as the moral soul of East Asian peoples. In the late 1960s, we lived on the Moravian campus. When my oldest son, Michael, was four years old, somebody asked him what his dad taught. With a clear voice and without a moment of hesitation, he answered, “My dad teaches existential phenomenology and philosophy East and West.” Chapter 1 auditions the major agenda of Enlightenment thought, which is paradigmatic to Western modernity. Kant institutionalized and valorized the autonomy of reason and reason alone. While privileging the authority and autonomy of reason for alleged human progress and emancipation, he marginalized and disenfranchised the (reason’s) other whether it be the body, femininity, nature, or the non-West. J. G. Herder raises a critical question
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concerning the universal formulation of reason as “the single summit and purpose of all human culture, all happiness, all good” and challenges the unitary vision of Enlightenment rationalism with a question: “Is the whole body just one big eye?” Chapter 3 stands out as the earliest exploratory attempt to show an affinity between the Chinese philosopher Wang Yang-ming (1472–1529) and existential phenomenology and hopefully to open a meaningful dialogue between Chinese philosophy and existential phenomenology in particular and Western philosophy in general in the twentieth century (see further chapters 5, 6, and 7 in particular). Chapter 2 advances the concept of transversality, which is central to the main themes of this book. It begins with a critique of the notion of universality in modern Western philosophy. It targets Hegel—the modernist incarnate—in particular, who had a dark view of the non-Western world, particularly China and India. His overarching Eurocentric universality is founded on the fallacious assumption that what is particular in the West is made universalized whereas what is particular in the non-West remains particular forever. As the Martiniquan francophone Edouard Glissant puts it succinctly, however, thinking about “One” is not thinking about “All” (or “Many”). Eurocentric universality is outmoded and thus has no place in the globalization of the multicultural world. It simply ignores the reality of interlacing of multiple lifeworlds. Eurocentric universality is nothing but a form of what Roland Barthes calls “Western narcissism” (see chapter 10). The concept of transversality is symbolized in the Maitreyan Middle Way. The image of the new emerging face may be likened to the famous rustic wooden statue of the Buddha at a Zen temple in Kyoto, Japan, whose face marks a new dawn of awakening (satori) or signals the beginning of a new global regime of ontology, culture, politics, and ethics. From the crack in the middle of the old face of the Buddha, there emerges an interstitial, liminal face that signifies a new transfiguration and transvaluation of the existing world. The icon of the emerging new face symbolizes the arrival of Maitreya (the future “Awakened One”) or Middle Way—that third enabling term of transversality that is destined to navigate the stormy waters of intercultural, interspecific, and interdisciplinary border crossings. Transversality means to overcome and go beyond (“trans”) the clash of ethnocentrisms both “Orientalist” and “Occidentalist” as a result of “essentializing” (to use Edward W. Said’s phrase) the Orient or the Occident. We are warned not to take it simply as a middle point between bipolar opposites. Rather, it breaks through
introduction
xiii
bipolarity itself (theory and practice, philosophy and nonphilosophy, mind and body, femininity and masculinity, humanity and nature, Europe and nonEurope, etc.). What must be recognized as important is the fact that transversality is the paradigmatic way of overcoming all polarizing dichotomies and ready for the conceptualization of “world philosophy.” The end product of transversality in the fusion of cultural (and disciplinary) horizons is hybridity or creolization. Viewed in this way, what is traditionally called “comparative philosophy” is not just a neglected and underdeveloped branch of philosophy, but it is poised to transform radically the very conception of philosophy itself. Furthermore, this new philosophy of hybridity renders the American intellectual Francis Fukuyama’s thesis of the “end of history” on the one hand and his Asian-Singaporean counterpart Kishore Mahbubani’s thesis of “essentializing” China on the other. The three previously cited epigraphs permeate the spirit of this book. First is Heidegger’s notion of thinking as questioning. Second Bugbee captures that Deleuzean-Guattarian “geophilosophical” principle that embraces all matters of the earth as a whole. The incomparable American pioneering ecologist Aldo Leopold calls the land “a biotic community.” With a touch of Kantian deontological ethics, he speaks of a “land ethic” that entails human obligation to nonhuman beings and things on earth. Bugbee also uses the befitting expression the “sacrament of coexistence” among all earthly beings and things both human and nonhuman. The expression combines the artistic renditions by the noted French sculptor Auguste Rodin’s Cathedral that depicts interhuman existence and the Dutch lithographer M. C. Escher’s Verbum that geometrically details what we might call the ecological continuum of Being or simply Interbeing. At the early stage of my environmental writings that began to celebrate the first Earth Day in 1970, I used the expression “deep ecology” in the footsteps of its founder, the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess. Like geophilosophy, it means to be holistic. Nonetheless, geophilosophy defines the contours of the earth more comprehensively and inclusively than deep ecology (see chapters 12 and 13). The principle of the interconnectedness of differentiated elements in the cosmos is called “synchronicity” in the Yijing1 (the Chinese Book of Changes), whose calculation in terms of trigrams and hexagrams is based on the binary system of yin and yang as complementary. The American pioneering ecologist Barry Commoner calls synchronicity the “first law of ecology” in which everything is said to be interconnected to everything else in the universe, and nothing exists or can exist in isolation (compare the so-called
xiv
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butterfly effect). It refers to the structural patterns of asymmetrical reciprocity. But for graded differentiation there would be no genuine reciprocity. To be is to communicate; but for difference there would be no genuine communication because there would be nothing to communicate or no need for communication. Here Heidegger’s play of Differenz as Unterschied is most suggestive because it signifies both difference and the relational at the same time. The Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo intimates that the postmodern is “an adventure of difference(s).” What I call “relational ontology” characterizes the distinction of EastAsian thinking and doing: what Being is to Western thought from Heraclitus to Heidegger, Interbeing is to East-Asian thought from Confucius to Mao Zedong. Sinism (i.e., Confucianism, Daoism, and Chan/Zen Buddhism, which is a hybrid religion of Indian and Chinese cultures) is this-worldly, practical, concrete, specific, and particular. It is a species of relational ontology, including its language (ideography or sinography). It is predicated upon the conception of reality as social process. This social process is always already embodied. Also for the Romans, it should be noted, the idea of pietà (piety) signifying absolute reciprocity was something spiritual and bodily at the same time. Speaking of the relational ontology of Sinism, it is noteworthy that the dialogism of Mikhail Bakhtin and Emmanuel Levinas is an ethical celebration of the other (alterity) or, to use the neologism of Mark C. Taylor, “altarity” that places the other on a place higher (altar) than the self. The primacy of the other in Western relational ontology is a recent discovery by Ludwig Feuerbach that may be hailed as the “Copernican revolution” of social thought. Be that as it may, dialogue for Levinas cannot afford not to be ethical, while for Bakhtin, dialogism is a celebration of the other or alterity. Recently I came across Rainer Maria Rilke’s short verse that is inscribed in one of the “American Greetings” cards (made in China!). It reads, “I am so glad that you are here. It helps me to realize/ how beautiful my world is.” The content of the inscription is simply beautiful. It may be called the aesthetics of asymmetrical reciprocity or relationships. The eighteenth-century Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico judiciously formulated the idea of complementarity of the body and the mind as “the inseparable dancing partners” (Roy Porter’s phrase) in opposition to the Cartesian bifurcation of res cogitans and res extensa when he writes, “If there is no mind, there will be no body, and if there is no body, there will be no mind.” In fact, the body is the ontological factum of our very Interbeing in the world. It cannot be otherwise. The body, in short, is a social inscription
introduction
xv
in the world. As an authorial inscriber of the world, it “authors” the world before “answering” it. According to Merleau-Ponty, the body and the world are made of the same stuff. Moreover, to be alone is not to be: existence is coexistence. The “I think” is inherently egocentric or monological. Because to be social is necessarily to be intercorporeal, the “I think” scandalizes sociality. Following Norbert Elias, we can describe speech as nothing but social relations turned into sound. Similarly, sexuality too is nothing but social relations turned into carnal contact. The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips raises the most interesting question: why can’t we tickle ourselves? Because it is a contact sport, that is, it requires the tactile enactment of the other. Its pleasure cannot be had in the absence of the other. The French literary meijin (famous person) Roland Barthes declares that the human is his or her language (l’homme, c’est le language). He confesses that he can function only within language but not outside it. His Empire of Signs is an expression of his fascination with the vast network of ideograms and sinograms or a galaxy of signifiers (see chapter 10). It is, as Susan Sontag puts it, “the ultimate accolade” of semiology. If the city is an ideogram, the country Japan is an empire of ideograms or ideographic metropolis after the fashion of Ludwig Wittgenstein who wittingly likens language to a city. Vico has a keen sense of linguistic anatomy. Not only does he define man as “only mind, body and speech” but he also locates speech as standing somewhere “midway between mind and body.” As he writes, the carnal principle of etymology is that “words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to signify the institutions of the mind and spirit.”2 Many sinograms are the dramatic personae of corporeal movements as kin/esthetic performance. As a matter of fact, every sinogram is the metaphor of a thing human or natural. It is a gesture and as a gesture it is “mute speech.” A cluster of sinograms is “a conversation of gestures.” When Samuel Beckett remarks that in language as gestures the spoken and the written are identical, he is speaking of sinography even if he was unaware of it. Gestures animate language or are an animated language. They are the roots of language. Without it language becomes petrified. As language and thought are interconnected, the body plays the midwifery of both. Rodin’s sculptural masterpiece The Thinker leads us to believe that thinking is always embodied, and the idea of disembodied thinking or the Cartesian cogito is a fiction. As Merleau-Ponty puts it, what language is to thought, the body is to the mind. Thus Paul Valéry speaks of the dance as the “intense festival of the body in the presence of our souls,” while Stéphane Mallarmé calls the dance
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“corporeal writing” (écriture corporelle). There is a Chinese dance troupe that performs calligraphic dance or “writes” in the form of calligraphy. In the Sinic world view, culture and language are inseparable: they are correlative. Thinking tied to language is related to culture. Culture is a superset, and language and thinking are subsets. Richard Rorty is impeccable when he uses the expression “philosophy as cultural politics.” Language is a product of culture as much as it is an agent of culture. Fenollosa’s “etymosinology” is the expression that assumes the intrinsic relatedness or correlativity of language to Sinic culture. As a matter of fact, philosophy of the Cartesian cogito runs counter to Sinic relational ontology. From a Sinic perspective, in fact, language is relational ontology par excellence. Heidegger cannot be faulted when he regards language as the “relation of all relations,” that is, all human relations are rooted in language. It is worth noting that the Russian psychologist L. S. Vygotsky contends that the development of thinking as a function of language (speech translated from rech in Russian) occurs not from the individual to the social, but rather from the social to the individual. In closing, let me quote the dialogical philosopher Martin Buber when he says with humility about his endeavor as erecting “bridges,” not building “towers.” The aim of transversality, too, is to build bridges that would promote and facilitate cross-cultural, cross-speciesistic, cross-disciplinary exchanges as well as globalization toward the creation of planetary thinking. Neither globalization nor cosmopolitanism intends to create “one world” with “one government.” Globalization as glocalization is the process in which the global and the local are blended together: the global is rooted in the local. Transversality advances the cause of cross-cultural fertilization or hybridization as well as cross-disciplinary engagement in which truth as communicability privileges, and is monopolized by, neither the West nor philosophy alone. For truth’s center is everywhere and its circumference nowhere.
PART I
Prelude to Phenomenology and Comparative Philosophy
CHAPTER 1
enlightenment and the question of the other a postmode r n audi t i on
The Other is itself always other than itself. —Thomas Docherty Questioning is the piety of thought. —Martin Heidegger If we keep on speaking the same language together, we’re going to reproduce the same history. —Luce Irigaray What is Enlightenment (Aufklärung)? Kant’s response to the historic question, which was published in Berlinische Monatsschrift in 1784, is undoubtedly an epochal essay. It defines and distills the philosophical mood and tempo of modernity and apotheosizes its movement as “enlightening.” The unbridled optimism of Enlightenment, which promotes humanity’s infinite progress based on the cultivation of pure and applied reason, is the grandest narrative or lingua franca of Western modernity. In critically reviving Kant’s quest for Aufklärung and reformulating his “critique” in terms of the knowledge-power nexus in the late twentieth century, Michel Foucault is exacting when he frames it as an intellectual orientation rather than a mere periodization of European thought and history. Kant spells out the motto of Enlightenment in the clearest and simplest terms in the beginning paragraph of his famed essay: the autonomy of reason portends to rescue and emancipate humanity—perhaps more accurately European humanity—from the dark cave of self-incurred tutelage or immaturity (selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit). By so doing, he institutionalized the major agenda of European modernity. Ultimately, the autonomy of reason
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guarantees humanity’s progress in perpetuity. Kant’s critique of pure reason as an autonomous epistemological subject is certainly indebted to Descartes’s cogito (ergo sum), whose logocentrism sums up and unifies the combined characteristics of being disembodied, monologic, and ocularcentric. For the cogito, the mind’s “I” is the mind’s eye. Descartes’s cogito in pursuit of “clear and distinct ideas,” which are three visual terms, is as “enlightening” as Kant’s critique. It has indeed become the turning point of modern Western philosophy. Its rationality exacts Galileo’s inquisition of nature, which is open to our reductive gaze as a manifold of mathematical or geometric figures. Western modernity, which is empowered and driven by the disciplinary regime of the Cartesian cogito—epistemocracy, in short—is an analogue to Jeremy Bentham’s masterly architectural design of a prison house straightforwardly called the Panopticon, whose inspecting warden is capable of objectifying and universalizing the world at a single and quick glance. European modernity is set to prejudge truth claims by Enlightenment’s criteria. While privileging and valorizing the authority and autonomy of reason for allegedly human (material) progress and emancipation, it marginalizes, disenfranchises, and denigrates the (reason’s) Other whether it be (1) body, (2) woman, (3) nature, or (4) non-West, which happen to be four central postmodern landmarks and subversive possibilities.1 While its protagonists insist on modernity as an unfinished project, its postmodern antagonists consider it a failure and are determined to unpack and audit it. By thinking the unthought and unthinkable in modernity, postmodernists intend to overcome the delimitations of the unreflective habitus of modernist discourses on truth. If the postmodernist aim of philosophizing is to problematize and destabilize the prolonged intergenerational status quo of Western modernity, then Michel Foucault (author of Madness and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic, and Discipline and Punish) is the postmodernist par excellence, although he was indifferent to if not in opposition to such an appellation. In these discerning works, he is justifiably suspicious of the modernist “enlightened” projects, he excavates the seamy undercurrents of Western civilizational progress, and he enables us to shift our attention to the excluded, marginalized, and disempowered. In a nutshell, postmodernization means to surpass modernization.2 The opposite of autonomy, furthermore, is heteronomy, which cultivates difference and plurality rather than identity and homogeneity on the one hand and ambiguity rather than clarity on the other. On all accounts, the prototype of postmodernization is the philosophy of the eighteenth-century
enlightenment and the question of the other
5
Neapolitan Giambattista Vico, whose anti-Cartesianism, sensus communis, and above all hermeneutical principle of verum ipsum factum are so familiar and well known to us by now that they need no recapitulation. First, the modernist conception of autonomous reason is necessarily disembodied: by valorizing reason’s autonomy as enlightening, it bifurcates mind as res cogitans and body as res extensa. By objectifying body as well as mind as substance (res), the Cartesian plot is oblivious to the body as living subject and thus renders impossible sociality—both interhuman conviviality and interspecific connaturality. Sociality as a multiple web of relationships is untenable without the lived body as its root or anchor. Soma is not the sema (tomb or death) of the psyche. Rather, the former enfleshes and enlivens the latter. There is and can be no “disembodied reason” insofar as perception is a nascent concept or logos. Isn’t Nietzsche right when he considers psyche as another name for soma? Thus it is wrongheaded to say that what is rational is real, and what is real is rational. An event such as the Holocaust, according to JeanFrançois Lyotard, may not be rational, but it is real. Jürgen Habermas, who is today the staunchest defender of European modernity as an unfinished project, is also wrong when he criticizes, for example, the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty for centering his philosophical attention on the body. Habermas completely forgets the fact that reason defined as communicative action requires in itself the (lived) body as its root. His philosophy of communicative action defined in terms of mind as the site of reason and body as the site of unreason is rootless, abortive, and self-defeating. Auguste Rodin’s sculptural or handcrafted masterpiece The Thinker, for example, speaks loudly of thinking as embodied, in opposition to his compatriot Descartes (as well as Hegel and Jürgen Habermas), who visualizes existence solely in terms of the clarity of disembodied ideas. Rodin embodies “existing” as well as “thinking” as “I am my body.” As the body is ineradicably the material condition of sociality, man without a (lived) body is only a ghost or phantom but no “social man.” Indeed, he or she is a ghost in a machine or cyborg. The body, which is capable of first authoring the world before answering it, does not simply occupy space, but rather it inhabits the world with other (inhabiting) bodies. Second, écriture féminine, which constitutes for many an epochal issue, engenders, incorporates, and embodies what is principally postmodern. What, one may ask, is the gender of European modernity? It is overwhelmingly masculine or phallocentric. Indeed, critique of pure reason as enlightening privileges the masculine. By privileging the masculine, European modernity commits the “phallacy” of identity in that its univocity or universality fails
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and refuses to acknowledge or recognize feminine difference, which engenders care and jouissance by embracing the pariah senses of touch and hearing (jouissance also spelled j’ouïs sens) as opposed to rights and domination and the hegemonic sense of sight. By celebrating “gynesis” as the principium of feminine difference, feminism engages in the “subversion of identity.” It means and is determined to deconstruct masculine phallacy and supremacy. In other words, it contests with vigor “phallic monism” or “homogenizing identity” in which man is deemed to be the measure of all things and woman does not exist as an ontologically distinct category. Sexual difference is a real substrate of alterity, but this feminine substrate is not just a fig leaf hiding the genitalia. The essentialist theory of human nature (as universal) marginalizes the feminine and feminine difference in that it regards woman not so much as different from man but rather as less than man. According to the essentialist, what is particular in woman remains always particular, and what is particular in man is always and readily made universal. Herein lies the paradigmatic influence of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex3 on the social and cultural constructivist view of femininity: gender is made, it is a factum, that is, one is not born but is made a woman. It is the morphology rather than the anatomy of the body that destines, marginalizes, and disempowers woman. The essentializing or universalizing theory of human nature independent of culture and history is a fiction or chimera. Third, what is the gender of nature? In all cultures and throughout history, as far as I know, it is invariably feminine. The feminine and nature are symbolized together by the fact of fertility. Thus the exploitation and domination by man of woman and nature are the two sides of the same coin. By the same token, therefore, phallocentrism and anthropocentrism are the reverse sides of logocentric modernity. For the French feminist Luce Irigaray, it is no mere accident that the calendar of the feminine flesh is consonant with the cyclical rhythm of nature. Among modern anthropocentrists, Descartes and Francis Bacon should be singled out. In the footsteps of Galileo—who mathematizes nature as the geometric configuration of triangles, squares, and circles and promotes the idea that we must speak the language of geometry in order to understand and control nature—Descartes conceptualizes man as the possessor and master of dumb nature. In every significant aspect, Bacon is the intellectual harbinger and architect of the modern age as the age of science, technology, and quantitative economy that justifies and promotes modern humanity as the avaricious
enlightenment and the question of the other
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consumer of the earth. He is indeed the philosopher who designs and engineers the technomorphic and industrial ethos of modernity. Bacon upholds the convergence of theory and practical operations, of knowledge and utility, and of knowing and making. He knows neither Goethean “soft empiricism” (zarte Empirie) nor reverence for the earth. His hard experimentalism not only captures the essence of the modern sciences but also discovers the secret feminine bosom of nature. Bacon puts forth most forcefully the modern Promethean principles of Herrschaftswissen in which knowledge and power intersect the crossroads of utility for the sake of philanthropia. Philanthropia, which is the centerfold of his anthropocentrism, is the maximization of profits from man’s investment in nature by way of science and technology. Fourth and last, many Western commentators gender, wittingly or unwittingly, the East as feminine, which embraces aesthetic sensibility, and the West as masculine, which infuses scientific rationality. The non-West, or East, engenders and cultivates a rich field of geophilosophical ideas in which the earth (Gaia, Terra Mater) is not just one element among many but the all-encompassing elements of all elements. Geophilosophy, which is a phoenix rising from the ashes of modernization, is the condition sine qua non of humanity. Rabindranath Tagore thinks that the serene beauty of nature is as important as man-made chalks and blackboards for the education of young minds—whether nature be a lean blade of grass, a butterfly with dancing wings, a spider’s web sprinkled with dew in the early summer morning, a singing cricket in the autumn evening, the festive colors of a rainbow, or a majestically soaring Himalayan mountain peak. Sinism—Taoism and Ch’an (Zen) Buddhism in particular—epitomizes the geophilosophical attitude of what Heidegger calls Gelassenheit (serenity), which is subversive of Bacon’s Gestell and the enframing ethos of modernization. Mindful of nature as humanity’s flesh fold and its “pious reception” of nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson, too, is scornful of the so-called civilized man’s unself-reliance or dependence on man-made things as unhealthy “crutches.” Sinism is also demonstrative of the nonanthropocentric conception of sociality that is extended to include the relationships between human and nonhuman species. Take the example of the Sinic “eco-art” called “geomancy” (feng shui, or “wind” and “water”), which embodies the East Asian abiding sense of reverence for living in harmony with nature (tzu-jan, both “self-thusness” or the facticity of “being there” and “ten thousand things”). Feng shui is the Sinic way of harmonizing humans with their natural surroundings with reverence and heteronomic or non-self-centered care. It
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exemplifies “earthcare.” To think in terms of feng shui is to cherish and to be thankful for the generosity of the earth as a gift (l’étant donné) where we plant our firm foothold of life and pledge and promise our inseparable and lasting bond with the earth. Along with Taoism and Ch’an (Zen) Buddhism, feng shui exacts an East Asian greenprint for the future. To ignore or denigrate the non-West, therefore, is—to say the least—to abandon the treasure chest of many geophilosophical ideas and thus jeopardize the survival of humanity and the sustainability of the earth in the future. The European flight from ancient Asian ideas before modernization, for example, may spell an ecological disaster. For a growing number of the Western writing elite, the rediscovery and reclamation of Asian thought, particularly of Ch’an (Zen) Buddhism, is welcomed as a second renaissance in the cultural history of the West. As the advent of the postmodern marks the dissolution of Enlightenment as the philosophical soul of Western modernity, for a growing number of Western thinkers the “East”—for its ideographic namesake—stands for a new dawn of human thought and history. The East lives no longer in the dark shadows of the West. We are compelled to ask, “What are the race and primary color of Western modernity?” They are brightly and expressly white. Enlightenment or its reason is not color-blind. It belongs to the intellectual property of the white West. Therefore, the Enlightenment is identified with “white mythology.” From Hume and Kant to Hegel and Marx, it is unquestionably Eurocentric or Orientalist. Indeed, it has an unenlightened, dim, and immature view of the non-West. It is truly an eye-opener to read that in his “physiophilosophy,” the early nineteenth-century German thinker Lorenz Oken hierarchizes the human races according to a hierarchy of the senses: the white European is characterized as “eye-man,” the yellow Asian (Mongolian) as “ear-man,” and the black African as “skin-man.” According to the ruling Western metaphysics of the senses, the skin, which is the organ of touch and associated often with woman’s sense, is the most primitive sense and belongs to the lowest rung in the ladder of human sensibility. The pariah sense organ of touch is downright unaesthetic. On the other hand, the eye, which is the organ of sight and the organ of the European sense, is aristocratic in every sense of the word. It epitomizes the height of aesthetic sensibility, while the black race or “skin-man” is deprived of aesthetic sensibility altogether. For Kant and Hegel, sight is the rational sense and the bright sense of intellect. The intellectual propensity of Western modernity legitimizes itself as the privileged epicenter of the historical telos of the entire globe in the name of
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pure reason as enlightening. Hegel, for whom what is rational is real and what is real is rational, privileges the Western mind as the guardian of philosophy. For him, accordingly, the East—China and India in particular—lives in perpetual philosophical infancy, which points to the allegedly Eastern inability to speak the language of philosophy. Hume and Kant were professedly racists, white supremacists. In his “white mythology,” the empiricist Hume regards all the other races of men—particularly the blacks—as “naturally inferior” to the whites. The nonwhites produce no civilization worthy of its name. Kant, who is the philosophical paragon of the enlightened age (Aufklärung) of invincible Western modernity, parrots mindlessly Hume’s racism in his 1763 essay Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime4 and categorically declares that the difference of “mental capacity” between the whites and the blacks is as great as in the color of their skin: black and white. Kant falls flat on the face of his promise that critique begins with experience when he asserts that being black is “a clear proof” that what the man says is “stupid.” When, for example, we get entrapped in universalizing Enlightenment criteria or claims for truth, we approach the roots of racism: “Definition,” the New Zealand–born American ethnographer Michael Jackson declares judiciously in his At Home in the World,5 “is itself at the roots of racism: the way we reduce the world to a word, and gag the mouths of others with our labels.” The findings of ethnography—the Western academic discipline whose sole focus is on non-Western peoples and cultures—from Marcel Mauss and Claude Lévi-Strauss to Clifford Geertz, James Clifford, and Michael Jackson continue to challenge Western ethnocentrism and provide us with the basis of a critique of Western philosophy and clues for understanding oneself in the alterity of the Other, that is, “I am an Other” rather than “the Other is the negative mirror of myself.” It never ceases to amaze me that philosophers today do not take heed of ethnographers in search of philosophical primitives or elementals (e.g., Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s “flesh” as an “element”). In the final analysis, the advent of the postmodern is witnessing the dissolution of Enlightenment. The white mythology of Enlightenment as the philosophical soul of Western modernity is blind to the ethos of cultural and discursive pluralization. It should take heed of William James’s pluralist contention that there is no single perspective, European or otherwise, from which the world can appear as “an absolutely single fact.” Enlightenment fails to entertain the cardinal principle of (Gadamerian) hermeneutics that the Other (e.g., the non-West) may be right. The soul of hermeneutics has a
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touch of intellectual humility, which is conducive to philosophical dialogue, while Enlightenment displays intellectual arrogance if not dogmatism. HansGeorg Gadamer is both poignant and judicious when he contends that the fundamental prejudice (Vorurteil) of Enlightenment is “the prejudice against prejudice itself.” Indeed, Enlightenment’s denial of prejudice affirms and exemplifies it. It would be naïve to think that the acquisition of truth or knowledge by way of allegedly disinterested and unprejudiced reason can be insulated from the political and moral fold of any given historical era. In essence, Enlightenment fails miserably to lend its ears to different voices of the non-West. It is simply monologic and knows no dialogic principle as the way of constructing truths. Some suggest for very good reasons, therefore, that “the conquest of America”—which also happens to be the title of Tzvetan Todorov’s recent work—typifies the Eurocentric model for the constitution of the (non-European) Other. In a plurality of the lifeworlds and in the world that is increasingly becoming a global village, the perpetuation of the conversation of the West with itself is untenably shortsighted and dated as well as monologic. The future does not belong to just one culture. Rather, in it cultural difference and toleration will become synonymous. Difference and toleration go hand in hand: as the political philosopher Michael Walzer put it recently, toleration makes difference possible and difference makes toleration necessary. Disenchantment calls for transgression and transformation. The reclamation of truth must come by way of planetary (or cosmopolitan) thinking that is no longer Eurocentric but the result of correlating laterally the multiple sociocultural lifeworlds as the decentered sites of truth, for truth’s center is everywhere and its circumference nowhere. Planetary thinking seeks and allows to take place what the late Octavio Paz prudently calls the “confluence of differences” rather than the totalization of identity—Eurocentric or otherwise—in all human endeavors. I call this seismic confluence of differences by intercultural elenchi “transversality,” which deprovincializes and widens our intellectual horizon concerning foreign lifeworlds as more than the negative mirrors of our own. It stands for the true maturity of planetary thinking in the age of globalization. Thus transversality neither asserts the triumph of one particular cultural paradigm (as in Francis Fukuyama’s thesis of “the end of history”) nor endorses the separatist approach of “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet” (as in Rudyard Kipling) nor assumes the inevitability of civilizational “clashes” (as in Samuel P. Huntington). It is rather an interruption of universality as the foundational pillar of Western philosophizing. In today’s world as a global village or cosmopolis, to insist
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on and perpetuate the Eurocentric myth of truth as universal, or modernity as an unfinished project, would be counterproductive as well as myopic. Worldly philosophizing must be truly pansophic since truth is not carved into the Eurocentrist’s stone. Asian intellectuals have been asking themselves seriously for some time if Asian societies can enter into the process of globalization as genuinely Asian societies or merely Western replicas. The fashionable theory of multiculturalism as an alternative to Eurocentrism, too, is not much help in promoting the cause of planetary thinking because it manifests itself largely as multiple ethnocentrisms or as an uncoordinated, fragmentary, and localized cluster of ethnic “essentializations” (to borrow the expression from Edward W. Said), for example, Africanizing the African, Sinicizing the Chinese, Indianizing the Indian, Americanizing the American, Orientalizing the Oriental, and Westernizing the Western. Essentialized discourses may be likened to conceptual condominia. By inflating willy-nilly ethnic and cultural pride and with an unrestrained eagerness for recognition, multiculturalism often gets trapped in conceptual gerrymandering rather than interfacing and, worst of all, ends up practicing the very narcissistic politics of identity that it tries to subvert. In globalization, the real opposite of monoculturalism is not multiculturalism but transversality, which promotes cross-cultural fertilization and the fusion of cultural horizons whose paradigmatic case, I suggest, is the Sinicization of Indian Buddhism. Marshall McLuhan, who is an undisputed champion of the electronic age from radio and television to the Internet and the author of the household expression “global village,” poignantly characterizes the contracting and interdependent world with a touch of body language: we wear all humankind as our skin. Now is the time for us to defenestrate our intellectual habitus in believing that the disembodied mind of Western man is the measure of all things. If, in the end, the East stands for the dawn of a new, lateral thinking, the Western way of static and monologic “Being” must give way to the Eastern way of dynamic and correlative “Interbeing” in the world that is becoming more and more a planetary village. We must indeed dig a new hole rather than the same hole deeper and deeper with no exit in sight. The dawn of the new millennium will come when all earthlings feel at home in this planetary village. This is not a utopian dream but the hope for a heterotopian reality. I speak of “heterotopian reality” because, as the recent massive study of Randall Collins—The Sociology of Philosophies6—underscores, disagreement is the heartland of intellectual or philosophical life, and to contradict it is to authenticate it.
PART II
Transversality, Phenomenology, and Intercultural Texts
CHAPTER 2
transversality and the philosophical politics of multiculturalism in the age of globalization
Gateless is the Great Dao, There are thousands of ways to it. If you pass through this barrier, You may walk freely in the universe.
—Mumon (“Gateless” or “No Gate” in two sinograms) True theory does not totalize, it multiplies. —Gilles Deleuze Transversal logos replaces the universal logos as the lynchpin for the philosophy of the new millennium. —Calvin O. Schrag If we keep on speaking the same language together, we’re going to reproduce the same history. —Luce Irigaray
i. prologue: the idea of globalization Globalization is a new venture in the civilizational history of humankind everywhere. It is a movement toward the creation of a new world (mondialisation). As everything including globalization is a matter of communication,
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the late Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan fashioned the idea of the shrinking world as “a global village” in an age of electronic media that superseded the Gutenberg era of printing technology. Now his faithful followers digitalized the global village—the phenomenon of which may be called “McLuhan 2.0.” In terms of media or communication technology, he—who had fancied writing his magnum opus, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), in the medium of sinography—had an unerring sense of the flow and rhythm of history since the Homeric oral culture of ancient Greece. His disputed slogan, “the medium is the message,” scales Western history as much as communication theory. As we are living in the midst of the world, which is constituted by a plurality of sociocultural lifeworlds, the neologism “glocalization” signifies the interdependence of the global and the local or the rootedness of the global in the local: the global without the local is empty, and the local without the global is myopic. The end of globalization is neither to hold on to anachronistic national or cultural identities nor to establish a futuristic “one world” with “one government” if it is ever possible at all. Rather, it fosters a nonpolar middle path between the global and the local that shuns abstract universalism on the one hand and ethnocentric particularism on the other.1 In the world of multiculturalism, we are not one but many. Interestingly, according to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, “we” are neither “people” nor “masses” but a “multitude.”2 The idea of “people” for them reduces many to a single or unitary entity while “masses” is driven to uniformity or conformity. Both people and masses fail to take into account plurality cum difference or diversity. To conserve diversity in the idea of “we,” “multitude” is preferred in this essay to describe the contemporary sociocultural reality that is nothing but a multitudinous web of relationships as well as a multiplicity of experiential realities. “Multitude” for its namesake is a particularly befitting response to both the phenomenon of multiculturalism and the advent of globalization or, better, glocalization.
ii. western modernity and the legacy of eurocentrism Enlightenment thought is the intellectual soul of Western modernity. Its legacy continues and, as its inheritors insist, its project is far from being finished. Some speak of modernity as an unfinished project, a second modernity, even the modernization of modernity, or the second coming
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of Enlightenment itself. They have an unwavering faith in it as the absolute “end of history.” Enlightenment’s untamed optimism alleges to promote and crown humanity’s progress based on the cultivation of pure and applied reason. Kant is the paragon of Enlightenment thought, and as such he spelled out its rationale in the clearest and simplest terms: the autonomy of reason was meant to rescue and emancipate humanity from the dark cave of self-incurred immaturity. In so doing, he institutionalized the major agenda of European modernity whose rationality has never been seriously challenged until the auspicious advent of postmodernism found in the voluminous corpus of work in Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Gianni Vattimo, Gilles Deleuze, Luce Irigaray, and others. While privileging and valorizing the autonomy and authority of reason for allegedly human progress and emancipation, European modernity unfortunately left in the cold the (reason’s) Other, whether it be body, woman, nature, or Orient. Body, woman, nature, and Orient are not randomly isolated but four interconnected (t)issues: most interestingly, it is no accident that the feminine gender is assigned to body, nature, and Orient, while its (binary) opposites—mind, culture, and Occident—are masculine or “malestream” categories.3 It is worth noting that the heart of postmodernist contention lies in the refutation of these binary oppositions in the thinking or, better, unthinking of Western modernity. There is nothing trite about emphasizing the fact that all understanding, all thinking, is comparative. Comparison is the source and resource of discovering the limits of the self’s discourse in light of the foreign other who is always more or less exotic. For the sake of advancing comparative literature, the American literary theorist Jonathan Culler wisely prods his colleagues to abandon its traditional Eurocentrism and turn “global” or go planetary.4 The global exchange of ideas and values would advance a “world republic” of literature (la république mondiale des lettres)5 in the innovative spirit of Goethe’s “world literature” (Weltliteratur) beyond national boundaries. Since everything is literature (that is, reading, writing, and translating), it is binding on all academic disciplines including philosophy. Ethnocentrism, great or small, has filtered through some of the finest philosophical minds in the modern intellectual history of the West from Montesquieu to Rousseau, Hegel and Marx to Karl Wittfogel.6 There are always, of course, exceptions: Voltaire, Leibniz, Humboldt, and Herder who, as a judicious comparativist, refused to identify truth and felicity with just being
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European or Western. From the very outset, it should be said that the heatedly debated question of rationality in the production of intercultural texts is not so much the question of epistemological absolutism and relativism as of how lateral or transversal truth may indeed be formulated without being entrapped in ethnocentrism. The institution of the European mindset called Eurocentrism is that hegemonic disposition or propensity of the modern Europe (West), which legislates or legitimizes itself as the privileged or anointed guardian of the cultural, scientific and technological, political, economic, and even moral capital of the entire globe. By constructing a great dividing wall between the East and the West, in other words, Eurocentrism willfully engages in “a kind of intellectual apartheid regime in which the superior West is quarantined off from the inferior East.”7 Modernization is nothing but the allencompassing catchword given to the totalizing and hegemonizing process of this Eurocentric phenomenon. By positioning itself as the teleological temple of the world, Eurocentrism becomes a tribal idolatry. As the astute interpreter and critic of Western modernity and Eurocentrism Zygmunt Bauman relates, From at least the seventeenth century and well into the twentieth, the writing elite of Western Europe and its footholds on other continents considered its own way of life as a radical break in universal history. Virtually unchallenged faith in the superiority of its own mode over all alternative forms of life—contemporaneous or past—allowed it to take itself as the reference point for the interpretation of the telos of history. This was a novelty in the experience of objective time; for most of the history of Christian Europe, time-reckoning was organized around a fixed point in the slowly receding past. Now, . . . Europe set the reference point of objective time in motion, attaching it firmly to its own thrust towards colonizing the future in the same way as it had colonized the surrounding space.8 Indeed, this Eurocentric idea of colonizing the future gives a new meaning to the conception of modernity as an unfinished project or as the end of history. The ugly and ghastly Eurocentric racism of two of the guiding, “enlightened” philosophers of Western modernity certainly tarnishes them as world
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philosophers: David Hume and Immanuel Kant. They were unquestionably white supremacists. Hume wrote the following: I am apt to suspect the negroes, and in general all the other species of men . . . to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. . . . Not to mention our [British] colonies, there are NEGROE slaves dispersed all over EUROPE, of which none ever discovered any symptoms of ingenuity; tho’ low people, without education, will start up amongst us [Whites], and distinguish themselves in every profession. In JAMAICA indeed they talk of one negroe as a man of parts and learning; but ‘tis likely he is admired for very slender accomplishments, like a parrot, who speaks a few [English] words plainly.9 Kant, who was hailed as the political harbinger of the League of Nations, is reputedly the philosophical paragon of enlightened Western modernity. He championed human dignity, obligatory moral integrity, and universal knowledge. Unfortunately, however, he echoed or, better, parroted Hume’s racism in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1763). In addition to ridiculing the “grotesqueries” of the Indians and Chinese, Kant observed the following in a singularly unenlightened and prejudiced way: The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling. Mr. Hume challenges anyone to cite a single example in which a Negro has shown talents, and asserts that among the hundreds of thousands of blacks who are transported elsewhere from their countries, although many of them have even been set free, still not a single one was ever found who presented anything great in art or science or any other praiseworthy quality, even though among the whites some continually rise aloft from the lowest rabble, and through superior gifts earn respect in the world. So fundamental is the difference between these two races of man, and it appears to be as great in regard to mental capacities as in color. The religion of fetishes so widespread among them is perhaps a sort of idolatry that sinks as deeply into the trifling as appears to be possible to human nature. A bird feather, a cow’s horn, a conch shell, or any other common object, as soon as it becomes consecrated by a few words, is an
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object of veneration and of invocation in swearing oaths. The blacks are very vain but in the Negro’s way, and so talkative that they must be driven apart from each other with thrashings.10 The noted nineteenth-century African American thinker Frederick Douglass had white supremacists such as Hume and Kant in mind when he contended that the complexion of the skin has no bearing on the working of the mind.
iii. the dao of transversality Philosophy often begins anew by inventing concepts to come to grips with the world always already in transition. In today’s multicultural and globalizing world, we are in dire need of inventing new concepts to explore changing realities. I would venture to say that transversality is one of those new concepts that replaces the outmoded Eurocentric idea of universality in Western modernity. It is, in a manner of speaking, a phoenix rising from the ashes of universality wedded to Eurocentrism. By decentering or deprovincializing Eurocentrism, it intends to go beyond and transfigure the Eurocentric meganarratives of universality. It is truly an interruption in the etymological sense of the term. Thus it may be conceived of as “trans(uni)versality.” As a paradigm shift in our thinking, it may be likened to the lateral movement of digging a new hole, instead of digging the same hole deeper and deeper with no exit in sight.11 Transversality goes beyond the hierarchized binary oppositions, for example, between mind (the rational) and body (the sensorial), man and woman, humanity and nature, East and West, and North and South. It leaves behind the essentialized notion that what is particular in the West is universalized or universalizable, whereas what is particular in the East remains forever particular. To draw insights from Leszek Kolakowski, what the “priestly” is to Eurocentric universality, the “jesterly” is to transversality. He is incontrovertible when he observes that throughout the ages there is an incurable antagonism between “a philosophy that perpetuates the absolute” and “a philosophy that questions accepted absolutes.”12 That is, there is the antagonism between the priestly and the jesterly, which are the two most general forms of intellectual culture at any given period of time in history. Priests are authoritative and ceremonious guardians of the absolute, while jesters are those vigilantes who distrust the absolute as a stabilized system and intend to unpack it. The
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jesterly play of difference aims at the creation of an alternative or reversible world order. As a form of transgression and subversion, it intends to transform a real world into a possible world. Inspired directly and indirectly by the insights of continental philosophers (e.g., Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, Lyotard, Deleuze, and Guattari), the American existential phenomenologist Calvin O. Schrag develops, and spells out, the intricacies of transversality as diacritical engagement and enrichment across differences and embraces the conception of truth as the way of communicability.13 As a derivative concept of geometry, transversality denotes the crossing (“Xing”) of two diagonal lines in any given parallelogram. Schrag exacts l’esprit de finesse by way of a geometric configuration: in addition to the two diagonals crossing or intersecting each other at the epicenter of any rectangle, the hermeneutical circle and the rhetorical triangle also figure in an attempt to resolve the deadlock between Western modernity and postmodernity. Transversality is for Schrag capable of transgression, intervention, re-creation, and new invention. It is in search of “convergence without coincidence,” “commonality without identity,” and “cooperation without uniformity.” What started out to be a refiguration of rationality as a diagonal passageway between the modernist overdetermination and the postmodernist underdetermination of reason has become a radically new project that would be capable of navigating the stormy channel between—in his words—“the Scylla of a hegemonic unification”/“a vacuous universalism,” on the one hand, and “the Charybdis of a chaotic pluralism”/“an anarchic historicism,” on the other. One comes to understand transversality by splitting the difference between the two extremes. Most recently Schrag declared that “the transversal logos replaces the universal logos as the lynchpin for the philosophy of the new millennium,”14 which is already here. In other words, transversality deconstructs Eurocentrism, the mission of which is to proselytize the universality of the rational. It first dismantles or unpacks the status quo and then goes beyond what is given, received, or established by constructing a new formation or constellation of concepts. It attempts to challenge the assumed transparency of truth as universal and overcome the limits of universality as the Eurocentric canon of truth in Western modernity. It means to decenter Europe as the site of universal truth whose “identitarian” and “unitarian” motivation fails to take into account a plurality of cultures or a world of multiculturalism. What should be noted here is that in transversality differences are negotiated and compromised rather than effaced, absorbed, or assimilated into
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sameness or unitariness. In transversal engagement what is lacking in one is compensated for or supplemented by the other. Here we should take heed of the pluralist Johann Gottfried Herder, a pupil of Kant, who contended that colonialism effaces cultural differences. As Anthony Pagden points out, Western colonialism is for Herder “an evil because it reduces, or threatens to reduce . . . the number of cultural variants that exist in the world. That is an evil because plurality is part of the way the world is constituted.”15 Herder challenges the mainstream Western conception of universal reason in interesting bodily metaphors: “After dozens of attempts, I find myself unable to comprehend how reason can be presented so universally as the single summit and purpose of all human culture, all happiness, all good. Is the whole body just one big eye? Would it not suffer if every part, the hand and the foot, had to serve as the eye and the brain? Reason, too carelessly, too uselessly diffused, may well weaken desire, instincts and vital activity—in fact has already done so.”16 Insofar as transversality is the negotiated or compromised middle voice, it touches the soul and heart of Buddhism. I would not hesitate to suggest that the famous wooden statue of Buddha at a Zen temple in Kyoto, Japan, which is now housed in the Kyoto National Museum, embodies the mantra of transversality. The Buddha’s face—the “soul of the body” (Wittgenstein’s expression) that speaks the world in transformation— marks a new dawn of awakening (satori) or signals the beginning of a new regime of ontology, culture, ethics, and politics. From the crack in the middle of the old face of Buddha’s statue, there emerges an interstitial, liminal face that signifies a new transfiguration and transvaluation of the existing world. The icon of the emerging face symbolizes the arrival of Maitreya (the “future Awakened One,” Bodhisattva) or Middle Way—the third enabling term of transversality that is destined to navigate the difficult waters of intercultural border crossings. We are warned not to take it as a middle point between two polarities. Rather, it breaks through bipolarity (e.g., mind and body and East and West). What is important here is the fact that transversality is the paradigmatic rendition of overcoming any bipolarity. The bipolar solids melt into the air of transversality, as it were.17 The French sinologist and philosopher François Jullien calls the effort of decentering Eurocentrism or Western modernity—with Kant in mind— “a new ‘Copernican reversal.’”18 He contends that in “shaking up” Western modernity, China becomes a “philosophical tool.” That is to say, he uses Chinese thought to interrogate the limits of Western philosophy and to liberate it from its own “mental cage.” Most radically, he wishes to replace the
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very concept of “truth” itself with that of “intelligibility,” because “truth” is bound up with the history of Western philosophy. Jullien puts Foucault to the test in order to vindicate the Eurocentric legislation of truth for all global humanity. In his 1978 visit to Japan, the vintage Foucault remarked that knowledge and power are interwoven as one fabric; European imperialism and the era of Western philosophy come to an end. Foucault is not alone in conjecturing that philosophy of the future must be born “outside Europe” or in the “meetings and impacts” between Europe and non-Europe.19 Long before either Michel Foucault or French sinologist François Jullien, Maurice Merleau-Ponty spoke of the “lateral universal” and the lateral continuity of all humanity both “primitive” and “civilized” across history. He is unmistakably a consummate transversalist avant la lettre. The lateral universal is for him a new paradigm for world making and for world philosophy. For Merleau-Ponty, all history is not only contemporaneous and written in the present tense but also an open notebook in which a new future can be inscribed. It is unfortunate, I think, that his deconstructive effort for comparative philosophy and his sensitivity to the global scope of philosophy have escaped the attention of comparativists and specialists alike. This inattention is likely due to the same tendencies that inform our Eurocentric propensity and orientation in philosophy, including phenomenology.20 Merleau-Ponty’s deconstructive effort in philosophy, in comparative philosophy, is evidenced in his critique of Hegel’s Eurocentrism. In the conceit of Eurocentrism, the modernist Hegel judged the Oriental philosophy of China in a cavalier fashion. His grand narratives of Lectures on the History of Philosophy show at times an inexcusable philosophical truancy. He totally dismissed the importance of Chinese philosophy in world philosophy as “elementary” (infantile), the Chinese yin-yang trigrams and hexagrams as “superficial,” and the Chinese composition of elements (fire, water, wood, metal, and earth) as “all in confusion.” Then he caps his commentary on Confucius: “We have conversations between Confucius and his followers in which there is nothing definite further than a commonplace moral put in the form of good, sound doctrine, which may be found as well expressed and better, in every place and amongst every people. Cicero gives us De Officiis, a book of moral teaching more comprehensive and better than all the books of Confucius [emphasis added]. He [Confucius] is hence only a man who has a certain amount of practical and worldly wisdom— one with whom there is no speculative philosophy.”21 It is transparent that Hegel’s judgment is too rash in which Europe is his reference culture. The
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concept of universal truth is West generated, that is, born out of “Western narcissism”22 and “ethnocentric ignorance.”23 Hegel’s myopic view of universal truth may be likened to the Korean proverbial frog who lived in a deep well, looked up to the sky one day, and squealed with delight: “that’s the universe!” For Merleau-Ponty the West invented an idea of truth itself, and there is no one philosophy that contains all philosophies. Rather, philosophy’s center is everywhere and its circumference nowhere. Thus truth is concentric or polycentric, that is, transversal. Merleau-Ponty charges that Hegel arbitrarily drew “a geographical frontier between philosophy and non-philosophy,” that is, between the West and the East.24 For Merleau-Ponty, all philosophies are anthropological types and none has any privilege of, or monopoly on, truth. European philosophy is as much ethnophilosophical as Chinese philosophy. However, Hegel’s Eurocentric philosophy assumes that what is ethnophilosophical in the West is universalized, whereas what is ethnophilosophical in China (and India) remains ethnophilosophical.25 Chinese philosophy is dismembered from the exclusive club of philosophy itself. Besides philosophy’s own constant vigilance on what it is doing, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological orientation demands its attention to the ethnography of sociocultural lifeworlds,26 without which philosophy is a vacuous if not fatal abstraction. The way of ethnography’s thick description practiced by Marcel Mauss and Claude Lévi-Strauss, who also taught at the Collège de France, provides Merleau-Ponty with the idea of the lateral continuity of humanity between the primitive and the civilized, that is, with the incessant ethnographic testing of the self by the other and the other by the self, which has a diacritical value for humanity’s coexistence and its planetary solidarity. Ethnography redeems Western narcissism precisely because it is the human science of understanding the foreign other. Merleau-Ponty contends that while for Hegel philosophical truth as absolute and universal knowledge is notarized and certified by the Occidental seal of approval alone,27 the Oriental past must also have an honored place in the famed hall of philosophies to celebrate its hitherto “secret, muted contribution to philosophy.” He writes resolutely, “Indian and Chinese philosophies have tried not so much to dominate existence as to be the echo or the sounding board of our relationship to being. Western philosophy can learn from them to rediscover the relationships to being and an initial option which gave it birth, and to estimate the possibilities we have shut ourselves off from in becoming ‘Westerners’ and perhaps reopen them.” “If
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Western thought is what it claims to be,” he challenges further, “it must prove it by understanding all ‘lifeworlds’” as multiple geo-sociocultural realities.28 Thus Merleau-Ponty suggests that, in contrast to the “overarching universal” of objective sciences, or we might add, Western metaphysics, the “lateral universal” is acquired through ethnographical experience as the way of “learning to see what is ours as alien and what was alien as our own.” His lateral universal is a passport, as it were, that allows us to cross borders between diverse cultures, enter the zone of intersections and discover cross-cultural connections and convergences. While the European geophilosophical politics of identity claims its validity as universal truth, the lateral universal takes into account local knowledge prior to planetary knowledge (dubbed by some as “glocalization”) and allows the hermeneutical autonomy of the other who may very well be right. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty’s lateral universal is contextualized as an open-ended and promiscuous web of temporal and spatial (that is, chronotopic) interlacings. Merleau-Ponty further contends that the conceited path of Hegel that excludes Chinese thought from universal knowledge and draws a geographical frontier between philosophy and nonphilosophy also excludes a good part of the Western past itself. Philosophy as a perpetual beginning is open to examine its own idea of truth again and again, because truth is “a treasure scattered about in human life prior to all philosophy and not divided among doctrines.”29 In this view, Western philosophy itself is destined to reexamine not only its own idea of truth but also related matters and institutions such as science, economy, politics, and technology. Merleau-Ponty writes with unsurpassable poignancy: From this angle, civilizations lacking our philosophical or economic equipment take on an instructive value. It is not a matter of going in search of truth or salvation in what falls short of science or philosophical awareness, or of dragging chunks of mythology as such into our philosophy, but of acquiring—in the presence of these variants of humanity that we are so far from—a sense of the theoretical and practical problems our institutions are faced with, and of rediscovering the existential field that they are born in and that their long success has led us to forget. The Orient’s “childishness” has something to teach us, if it were nothing more than the narrowness [and rigidity, I might add] of our adult ideas. The relationships between Orient and Occident, like that between child and adult, is not that of ignorance to
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knowledge or non-philosophy to philosophy; it is much more subtle, making room on the part of the Orient for all anticipations and “prematurations.” Simply rallying and subordinating “non-philosophy” to true philosophy will not create the unity of the human spirit. It already exists in each culture’s lateral relationships to the others, in the echoes one awakes in the other.30 (emphases added). In Hegel’s thought, in sum, there can be no genuine dialogue between the philosophy of the Occident and the nonphilosophy of the Orient. Italo Calvino defines the very notion of multiplicity as an “inability to find an ending”: multiplicity multiplies itself.31 The same cannot be said of Hegel’s dialectic, which dictates the Eurocentric march of history. The ultimate synthesis of his dialectic of history is in fact the identity of identity (affirmation) and difference (negation). In mapping connections, Deleuze contends that his philosophy of multiplicity based on the “repetitive” logic of difference is “non-dialectizable.”32 In support of Max Weber’s conception of sociality as a reconcilable or transversal multiplicity of perspectives (Vielseitigkeit), Merleau-Ponty argues that the dialectic is inherently “unstable” and that the only “good dialectic” is “hyperdialectic,” that is, “dialectic without synthesis.” Hyperdialectic, he intimates, is “a thought that . . . is capable of reaching truth because it envisages without restriction the plurality of the relationships and what has been called ambiguity”33 (emphasis added). It is the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogical principle or dialogism, as opposed to Hegel’s (and Marx’s) dialectic, that deserves our close attention, as it uncovers the postmodern dispositif of multiplicity as having no ending. Hegel’s succession of sublations finalizes itself in the identity of identity and difference. Bakhtin’s dialogical principle, based on Dostoevsky’s poetics, is “unfinalizable,” that is, it has no ending. Not only is there neither a first nor a last word but every past meaning also has its homecoming festival. Speaking of Dostoevsky, Bakhtin writes forcefully, [A]t the center of Dostoevsky’s artistic worlds must lie dialogue, and dialogue not as a means but as an end itself. Dialogue here is not the threshold to action, it is the action itself. It is not a means for revealing, for bringing to the surface the already ready-made character of a person; no, in dialogue a person not only shows himself outwardly, but he becomes for the first time that which he is—and, we repeat, not only for others but for himself as well. To be means
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to communicate dialogically. When dialogue ends, everything ends. Thus dialogue, by its very essence, cannot and must not come to an end. At the level of his religious-utopian worldview, Dostoevsky carries dialogue into eternity, conceiving of it as eternal co-rejoicing, co-admiration, con-cord. At the level of the novel, it is presented as the unfinalizability of dialogue34 (emphases added). In the final analysis, Bakhtin’s dialogical principle is predicated upon the eternity of time and the infinity of space, that is, it is both eternal “chronopolitics” and infinite “geopolitics” that are historically intertemporal and culturally interspatial. The (Eurocentric) universalist has failed to take into account seriously the question of diversity in the world of multiculturalism. He is still entangled in the cobweb of absolute universal truth and cultural relativism. As difference marks diversity and all relationships, Heidegger’s Differenz as Unter/ schied edifies our discussion here because it plays and feeds on the double meaning of the words that connects, preserves, and promotes both difference and the relational at the same time.35 In Differenz as Unterschied, the other is neither assimilated and incorporated nor erased and segregated: the integrity of the other is well preserved. Here we would be remiss if, in light of Merleau-Ponty’s previously mentioned “lateral universal” including a critique of Hegel’s Eurocentrism, we failed to recognize the seminal contribution of the Caribbean francophone Edouard Glissant to the making of a transversal world.36 Educated in philosophy and ethnography in France, he is a philosopher, a poet, and a novelist whose “poetics of relation” shaped Caribbean (antillais) discourse on “diversality” and creoleness (créolité). Glissant has an uncanny convergence in the name of transversality with Merleau-Ponty in his critique of Hegel the Eurocentric universalist and absolute rationalist when he articulates without equivocation that transversal relation means to replace “the old concept of the universal.” “Thinking about One,” Glissant puts it concisely, “is not thinking about All” (La pensée de l’Un ne soit pas la pensée du Tout).37 Speaking of Hegel’s conception of history, Glissant retorts, “History is a highly functional fantasy of the West, originating at precisely the time when it alone “made” the history of the world. If Hegel relegated African peoples to the ahistorical, Amerindian peoples to the prehistorical, in order to reserve history for European people exclusively, it appears that it is not because these African or American peoples “have entered History” that we can conclude today that such a
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hierarchical conception of “the march of History” is no longer relevant.”38 Glissant unpacks Hegel’s history by dissolving it as irrelevant or passé in the postcolonial world of diverse cultures that rejects “the linear, hierarchical vision of a single History.”39 It is worth exploring further Glissant’s transversal philosophy because it is, I submit, an ontology of global relation à venir. Transversality embodies the heart of his poetics of relation as cross-cultural encounters. It is the way of crossing and going beyond (i.e., creolized) ethnic, lingual, and cultural boundaries. The word errance means for him “to be at home in several languages and cultures while not cutting off the umbilical cord to one’s own native land.”40 For Glissant, therefore, transversality, hybridity, and creoleness may be used interchangeably: transversality is nothing but “a project to relate” (italics added). The Caribbean archipelago as a constellation of small islands is a supreme symbol of interconnectedness and interdependence. As he puts it, the relational poetics of diversity seeks “a transversal relation, without any universalist transcendence.” Creoleness, too, is the way of discovering Caribbean “subterranean convergence” from within. As it is indigenous to the Caribbean archipelago, it is the métissage (Glissant’s translation of the term is “cross-breeding”) of Western and non-Western ethnicity, language, and culture. As métissage is “the site of multiple converging paths,” the converging histories of the Caribbean multitude liberate them from the all-encompassing vision of a single history. Caribbeanness is the root of a cross-cultural relationship that mutates culturally, ethnically, and linguistically. In brief, it frees the Caribbean multitude from uniformity. The British postcolonial theorist Robert J. C. Young, who regards Eurocentrism as a “white mythology,” makes an interesting and unusually astute observation that “postcolonialism is neither western nor non-western, but a dialectical product of interaction between the two, articulating new counterpoints of insurgency from the long-running power struggles that pre-date and postdate colonialism.”41 The so-called recognition or acknowledgment of difference, which is not one but many, is not the final but only the first step in the making of hybridity. In In Praise of Creoleness/Éloge de la Créolité—a Caribbean manifesto that is purposely written bilingually—“diversality” in opposition to universality is defined as “the conscious harmonization of preserved diversities.”42 When harmonization is understood musically, it enriches the totality and even coloration of diversality when two or more tones are put together (i.e., orchestrated); there emerges harmonization (or symphony) in which each
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individual tone is not lost but preserved, whereas when two colors are mixed together, there is no harmony but another color. In the name of “a polyphonic harmony,” “diversality” frowns upon “the obsessional concern with the Universal.” The previously mentioned Caribbean or creolized manifesto begins with the following sentence: “Neither Europeans, nor Africans, nor Asians, we proclaim ourselves Creoles” (“Ni Européens, ni Africains, ni Asiatiques, nous nous proclamons Créoles”).43 The Creole (as hybrid) is neither unitarian nor separatist but is likened to a hybrid “butterfly” who frees himself/herself by breaking off from an “ethnocentrist cocoon.” Glissant himself describes the principium of creoleness as the end of “diversality,” which can hardly be paraphrased: Diversity, which is neither chaos nor sterility, means the human spirit’s striving for a cross-cultural relationship, without universalist transcendence. Diversity needs the presence of peoples, no longer as objects to be swallowed up, but with the intention of creating a new relationship. Sameness requires fixed Being. Diversity establishes Becoming. Just as Sameness began with expansionist plunder in the West, Diversity came to light through the political and armed resistance of peoples. As Sameness rises within the fascination with the individual, Diversity is spread through the dynamism of communities. As the Other is a source of temptation of Sameness, Wholeness is the demand of Diversity. You cannot become Trinidadians or Quebecois, if you are not; but it is from now on true that if Trinidad and Quebec did not exist as accepted components of Diversity, something would be missing from the body of world culture—that today we would feel that loss. In other words, if it was necessary for Sameness to be revealed in the solitude of individual Being, it is now imperative that Diversity should “pass” through whole communities and peoples. Sameness is sublimated difference; Diversity is accepted difference.44
iv. epilogue What does transversality hold for the future? It begins with global dialogue45 and ends in hybridity or creolization as an “exonomy.”46 The aim of this chapter is to explore how transversality plays out as a thought experiment in the
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globalizing world of multiculturalism as an asymmetric infinity whose Many is irreducible to One. The Holy Grail of universality as an ethnocentric project gives way to transversality: universality may be spelled “trans(uni)versality.” This thought experiment of transversality requires a willingness to risk the safety and comfort of philosophical self-sufficiency and self-referentiality.47 Our journey is to discover the unknown continent of a new reality as well as a new way of philosophizing. In a globalizing world, meanings, ideas, and values do indeed travel and immigrate everywhere in all directions48—from West to East, from North to South, and above all diagonally—the phenomenon of which would reduce if not eradicate “ethnocentric ignorance.” MerleauPonty would call this thought experiment “a thought traveling in a circle.” However, there can be no genuine cross-cultural dialogue in the logic of Eurocentrism—or, for that matter, of any ethnocentrism, for example, Sinocentrism, Indocentrism, or Afrocentrism—where the host culture is conceived of as superior (master) and the guest culture as inferior (slave). In Hegel’s model of the master-slave struggle between the colonizer and the colonized, there is only the irreconcilable opposition of domination and subordination, which inevitably ends in—to use Hegel’s own language of the ultimatum—the death of one against the other. In other words, the aim of a cross-cultural dialogue is to transgress, that is, to turn the world upside down or inside out or go beyond the question of Hegel’s recognition, whose logic inevitably leads to the death of the other or the abolition of difference. His Eurocentrism as well as Hume’s and Kant’s racism is wholly or partly, I suspect, due to “ethnocentric ignorance,” whose banality engenders a colonial or imperialistic mentality. To overcome it, we need first and foremost a phenomenological anthropology of cultural differences. Transversality is one of philosophy’s most inventive modes today. The world of transversality is not a zero-sum game, because everyone wins except ethnocentrists. Transversality, in short, reduces ethnocentric ignorance. It calls for a radical regime change in philosophizing beyond both “Orientalism” and “Occidentalism.”49 The construction of transversality may be called a “global imaginary” after the fashion of the Canadian political philosopher Charles Taylor.50 To adopt and modify his conception of social imaginary, a global imaginary is something broader than an intellectual scheme. Rather, it is lifeworldly, that is, it is the way people think about and imagine their social existence in relating themselves to others with global connectedness in mind that is engaging and normative. Thus viewed, transversality has a global or planetary outlook. It is indeed a newly emerging face in the interstitial,
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liminal middle of an old face: it is toward future awakening. As the way of the middle or in-betweenness, it neither approves nor promotes irreconcilable binary oppositions of any kind, including what are now known as civilizational clashes. Nor can there be the effacement or defacement of differences. As with the ancient Chinese logic of yin and yang, which characterizes the way the world works, what is lacking or deficient in one is complemented or supplemented by the other. In short, it makes binary oppositions obsolete.51 In a transversal world that freely allows border crossings, it is populated with the peoples and events of hyphenation and hybridization.52 Recently the Singaporean intellectual and statesman Kishore Mahbubani, who is now Dean of the Lee Kuang Yew School of Public Policy, asked a testy question: “Can Asians think?”53 What he really meant to ask is this: can Asians think independently of Western influence or “Westoxification.”54 His question has now become obsolete if not wrong-headed in the world of hyphenations and hybridizations, that is, of confluences. By the Manichaean “essentialization” of European universalism (philosophy), on the one hand, and non-European particularism (nonphilosophy or ethnophilosophy), on the other, Eurocentrism builds a great divide between Europe and non-Europe, which makes no global dialogue conceivable or possible. To reiterate, for global dialogue, there can be neither Orientalism nor Occidentalism. Indeed, there is a geographical if not cultural contiguity between Asia and Europe: Europe is a “cape” of the Asian continent (Paul Valéry’s word) or “a little peninsula of Asia” (Nietzsche’s expression). The Foucauldian Edward W. Said warned us of the danger of “essentializing” a culture that occasions and spawns “culture wars” and hinders cross-cultural dialogues and conversations. As he puts it, it is the mode of Orientalizing the Orient, Occidentalizing the Occident, Africanizing Africa, Americanizing America, and so on.5 Essentialization is the site of civilizational clashes and culture wars. In his new preface to the 2003 printing of his seminal work Orientalism (1978), Said forthrightly asserted, “Rather than the manufactured clash of civilizations, we need to concentrate on the slow working together of cultures that overlap, borrow from each other, and live together. . . . But for [this] kind of wider perception we need time and patience and skeptical enquiry supported by faith in communities of interpretation that are difficult to sustain in a world demanding instant action and reaction.”56 Our future world is held in the palm of cultural pluralism marked by hyphenations and hybridizations. Out of a transversal exchange of the ideas and values of global humanity, the world is poised for transformation. The intersecting
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middle or crossroads (Xroads) is the way that Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and Foucault envisioned the rise of a new paradigm of planetary thinking. Cultural pluralism is rooted in difference, not identity or sameness, which effaces or defaces differences. The x factor in transversal or x-cultural studies goes beyond or, better, dissolves the dichotomous, epistemological, and axiological question of relativism and universalism. As relationism is radically distinguished from relativism, transversality is a new face in the miscegenating middle, as it were, for the age of multiculturalism and globalization, which is not one but many. There can be no one philosophy that monopolizes truth: truth is concentric or transversal. In the world of hyphenation and hybridization, no culture can claim its independence, self-referentiality, and self-sufficiency. As the old Chinese saying goes, everything is related to everything else in the cosmos and thus nothing exists in isolation. We are indeed condemned to be interdependent with one another not only among humans but also among all things. This web of interdependence privileges humanity for its responsibility to take care of all earthlings without exception. Transversality is conceived of as a global imaginary that is the pillar of correlating, negotiating, and compromising differences in the postmodern world of multiculturalism. It is a journey of difference without arrival, which may be likened to the saying of a Zen koan: “when you get to the top of the mountain, keep climbing.” Transversality demands global dialogue that facilitates the intercourse of ideas and values from East and West and from North to South. Indeed, it targets those intersections where two or more lines of thought and action meet. What is deficient in one is hopefully augmented and supplemented by the other(s). Globalization, too, is the process that facilitates the exchange of ideas and values at the crossroads (Xroads) of all sides. Ultimately, the future cultivation of global humanity between heaven and earth will become more tricontinental (Asian, African, and Latin American) and less European or Euro-American. Globalization is nothing but the (middle) way of cross-pollinating and crossfertilizing cultural meanings, ideas, and values in multiplicity. It enhances our chances for cosmopolitanism. The new phoenix of postmodern cosmopolitanism, whose language is interspersed with such prefixes as “inter,” “con,” and “trans,” has risen from the ashes of sovereign nation-states that the modernist Hegel deified as the political telos of his dialectic. As we are living in the midst of the world that is constituted by a plurality of sociocultural lifeworlds, the neologism glocalization signifies the
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interdependence of the global and the local or the rootedness of the global in the local: the global without the local is empty, and the local without the global is myopic. The end of glocalization is neither to hold on to anachronistic national-cultural identities nor to establish futuristic “one world” with “one government,” if it is ever possible at all. Rather, it fosters a nonpolar middle path between the global and the local that shuns abstract universalism, on the one hand, and ethnocentric particularism, on the other. The essentialization of culture that reifies or vilifies the other is not conducive to cosmopolitanism espoused by the Cynic Diogenes, Marx, Giuseppe Garibaldi, and Virginia Woolf, who called themselves citizens of the world. The civility of cosmopolitanism à venir means to feel at home—in the Freudian sense of being heimliche—in the world. As an active principle, civility goes beyond the mere toleration of difference. In the language of the postcolonial theorist Paul Gilroy, it is “the desire to dwell convivially with difference.”57 Merleau-Ponty spells out the true spirit of civility when he speaks of the chiasmus or reversibility of “ourselves as strangers” and “strangers as ourselves.” In the postmodern age of cosmopolitanism, the virtue of civility advances our communication and interaction with “foreign others” without holding their “foreignness” against them. The cultural polyglot Julia Kristeva echoes and amplifies Merleau-Ponty.58 Her “utopic” idea or “distant ideal” is “transidentificatory” cosmopolitanism in opposition to “identificatory” nationalism that essentializes and valorizes the modern nation-state as an inviolable and sovereign entity and impenetrable shield. She means to proselytize—in the etymological sense of propagating foreign or strange ideas. As it is a transversal affair, cosmopolitanism is the way of making us at ease with the world that is unmistakably polyphonic. Without it, the buzzword globalization or glocalization would be an empty slogan or a disguised form of conquest.59 In tune with global humanity, there is global Korea, global China, global Japan, global United States, and global Europe. Reflecting on the condition of global lifeworlds, philosophy too is poised for radical transformation. What is traditionally called “comparative philosophy” is no longer just a neglected branch of philosophy, but it radically transforms the very conception of philosophy itself. After all is said and done, the transversalist is a “fox” rather than a “hedgehog.” I am alluding here to Isaiah Berlin’s often-quoted line from the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus that reads, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”60 Thus the transversalist is an interdependent thinker who has both deftness and agility to interweave many
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things, whereas the universalist has one big magnetizing thought. The history of philosophy both Eastern and Western has been overshadowed by hedgehogs. In the world of multiculturalism and globalization, the balance should be shifted to the voice of foxes. In other words, the monistic voice of the universalist gives way to the pluralistic voice of the transversalist. The newly emerging face of the Maitreyan Middle Way mediates and facilitates cultural, disciplinary, speciesistic, and sensorial border crossings. It is concerned with those in-between matters that are intercultural, interdisciplinary, interspecific, interlinguistic, and intersensorial (i.e., intertextual) border crossings.61 It cannot be otherwise. It is high time to put an end to the metaphor of philosophy as the “owl of Minerva” that takes its flight at dusk. Philosophy should be metaphorized as the Muse who can play mousike (i.e., recite, sing, dance, and dramatize) for, and orchestrate, the global harmonics of interhuman and interspecific relationships at the dawn of a new day.
PART III
Transversal Linkage between Phenomenology and Asian Philosophy
CHAPTER 3
wang yang-ming and existential phenomenology
The Chinese and European philosophical ideas are compared and studied not with any intention of judging which is necessarily right and which is necessarily wrong, but simply with the interest of finding what the one is in terms of the other. It is expected that before long we will see that the European philosophical ideas will be supplemented with the Chinese intuition and experience, and the Chinese philosophical ideas will be clarified by the European logic and clear thinking. —Fung Yu-lan
i. introductory remarks At an East-West philosophical conference John Wild once aptly remarked that all the major forms of Western philosophical thought are to be found in a vast variety of Eastern schools.1 Recently some effort has been made to link Eastern and Western thought. The purpose of this essay is to examine, compare, and show an affinity between existential phenomenology and the philosophy of the sixteenth-century Chinese Neo-Confucian philosopher, Wang Yang-ming (1472–1529).2 The aim of the essay is limited in scope in that, first, it is not a full-scale attempt to expose either every aspect or every resemblance of the two philosophies, and second, it is of an experimental nature. Thus it is not my intention to draw a premature conclusion that Wang Yang-ming—or, for that matter, Confucius or Mencius—was, though a precursor, the first authentic existential phenomenologist. In order to make this comparison valid, however, the central themes of both philosophies must be compared. In so doing, I must admit at the outset that
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many obstacles make a comparison of this sort a difficult task. To mention a few, the first obstacle is a linguistic and terminological one. For example, the key terms such as hsin and liang-chih in the philosophy of Wang Yang-ming are as untranslatable as the Heideggerian term Dasein3 and the Husserlian term Lebenswelt. Another example is the Chinese term li, which is translated as “principle,” “reason,” “form” (Aristotelian sense), “law,” “pattern” (Gestalt), “definition,” Vernunft, logos, ratio, norme, or ordonnancement.4 Another obstacle is the magnitude and fecundity of existential philosophy and phenomenology. Take simply the example of phenomenology. As Herbert Spiegelberg says in his recent historical survey of the phenomenological movement, there are as many phenomenologies as phenomenologists.5 A third obstacle is the nature of Chinese philosophy that, when compared to Western thought, is often regarded as intuitive, simple, unsystematic, synoptic, and lacking precise definitions and refinements, thus leaving gaps that must be filled by further interpretations. Keeping these difficulties in mind, this essay will attempt to discuss first, Wang Yang-ming’s conception of mind or consciousness in terms of the unity of the internal and the external and its relation to body and sense perception (herein lies the most clearly phenomenological elements of his doctrine, that is, the intentionality of consciousness); second, “intuitive knowledge,” which often is referred to as the “original substance” (en-soi6) of the mind; and last, his insistence on the unity of knowledge and action. In the unitary philosophy of Wang Yang-ming these are only different dimensions of the selfsame mind or consciousness: they are in “one thread” (i-kuan), although the internal is the fundamental and the external is the secondary form.7 In a philosophical spirit akin to that of Henri Bergson, who said that every great philosopher has one fundamental central point of view from which he views all reality, and to that of Martin Heidegger, who stated that the philosopher thinks only one single thought (Denken des Seins), Wang Yang-ming thought that seriousness (ching) is nothing but the concentration on one thing and that the philosopher must be “serious.”
ii. existential phenomenology as a philosophy Existential phenomenology (or phenomenological existentialism) is a new movement that attempts to find a common style of thinking in the phenomenological thought inaugurated by Edmund Husserl and in the existential
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thought inaugurated by Søren Kierkegaard.8 Existential phenomenology is evidenced, for example, in the writings of Martin Heidegger,9 Jean-Paul Sartre,10 Maurice Merleau-Ponty,11 and John Wild.12 Two central themes of existential phenomenology essentially relevant to the philosophy of Wang Yang-ming are intentionality and what Husserl called the Lebenswelt or the “lifeworld.”13 As the starting point of existential phenomenology, William Luijpen points to the convergence of the phenomenological theme of intentionality and that of existence. In intentionality, he finds an implication of existence; by the very existential implication of intentionality, the self is open to the world. Intentionality is “encounter” (Begegnung), Gabriel Marcel’s “participation,” or Martin Buber’s mutuality (Gegenseitigkeit). It is a reciprocal relation of the subject to the world: consciousness of something is consciousness of the world, which is itself an essential activity of existence. So is the lifeworld that, above all, is the matrix of relations or the nexus of intersubjective relations. As Merleau-Ponty quotes Saint-Exupéry, “Man is but a network of relationships” (un noeud de relations).14 Intentionality is thus “being-to-the-world” that becomes synonymous with existence: “By virtue of the implication of the idea of intentionality, phenomenology is a philosophy of encounter.”15 At the end of his philosophical career, Husserl16 regarded the Lebenswelt as the primary or central theme of phenomenology.17 To consider the primary task of phenomenological philosophy as the constitutive analysis of the lifeworld of the natural attitude (Welt der natürlichen Einstellung) is in fact to consecrate existence. Thus Husserl moved in the direction of existential philosophy, and the lifeworld has become the most influential and absorbing enterprise of post-Husserlian phenomenology. “The very location of the Lebenswelt,” Maurice Natanson affirms, “is itself a phenomenological act.”18 Merleau-Ponty also alludes to the lifeworld as the “lived world,” the world not of “I think” (je pense) but of “I live through” (je vis).19 Existential phenomenology, in this sense, is related closely to John Macmurray’s philosophy of action,20 the recent philosophy of experience,21 and, above all, to the radical empiricism of William James. Therefore, to speak of “existential pragmatism”22 is meaningful and suggests a significant direction in characterizing the convergence of these movements. It is well known that the distinctive characteristics of phenomenology are marked by a descriptive method, as the term phenomenology (the “logos” of “phenomenon”) clearly implies. For example, phenomenology for Heidegger means “to let that which shows itself be in itself as it it.”23 As a matter
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of fact, Heidegger points out that to say that phenomenology is descriptive is redundant and tautologous. Phenomenology as a theory of knowledge, according to Aaron Gurwitsch, aims at the ultimate clarification and justification of knowledge, whether that knowledge be reflective or prereflective knowledge rooted in the lifeworld from which reflective knowledge grows. And knowledge is achieved through acts of consciousness. “Phenomenology,” Gurwitsch writes, “is concerned throughout with phenomena . . . not with things and objects simply, but with things and objects as they appear through acts of consciousness.”24 Thus the key to the understanding of phenomenology lies in the explanation of what a phenomenon is. A phenomenon is not a thing as it really is or a real thing, but a phenomenon is that which appears to the experiencing subject through an act of consciousness. In other words, a phenomenon is a thing that “is seen as itself given in person” (selbstda).25 A phenomenon, therefore, is explained as an object meant, intended, and experienced as it presents itself to the subject’s consciousness as a real existent. It is meaning for the experiencing subject. Agreeing with Gaston Berger, Gurwitsch acknowledges the fact that “phenomenology . . . does not recognize any other philosophical problems except those concerning meaning and signification.”26 Here is the clue to the battle cry of phenomenology: “Zu den Sachen selbst” (back to the things themselves), which means the return to “meaning.” As Merleau-Ponty puts it, “Man is condemned to meaning” (sens).27 Phenomenology is also understood in terms of its unique method called epoché, or transcendental-phenomenological reduction—a device for obtaining rigorous knowledge through the suspension of all existential beliefs and acts. The epoché is the act of suspending the integration of the object of consciousness with the world of existence or the real world in order to see this object more clearly. As Gurwitsch explains, “in the phenomenological reduction, instead of the existential belief simply being accepted, as it is in the natural attitude, it is suspended and bracketed, not eliminated, suppressed, or invalidated.”28 How this epoché, characteristic of the strict Husserlian school, is modified or interpreted when assimilated into existential phenomenology, is too complex to be analyzed here. As a descriptive method, phenomenology is a neutral instrument29 to be used by a philosopher of any persuasion. However, for many phenomenologists, phenomenology represents more than a descriptive and neutral method. To use the language of Paul Ricoeur, “Existential phenomenology never describes merely for the sake of describing”; it is an effort to “rediscover
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(retrouver) the place of man in the world.”30 The focal point of existential phenomenology is the notion of existence; phenomenology is used to help deal with the problematic of existence (problématique de l’existence). It is, in short, the phenomenological philosophy of existence. The early Heidegger, mainly represented in his epoch-making Sein und Zeit (1927), considered phenomenology as the method for disclosing or discerning the ontological structure of man, that is, what is well known as the Dasein or “There-being.” Strictly as a method, it guides the direction of how philosophy is done rather than what is to be investigated. However, for Heidegger, it is more than a method, for the task of phenomenology and of fundamental ontology (Fundamentalontologie) is one and the same: “Ontology is possible only as phenomenology.”31 Armed with a method of phenomenology, Heidegger here exemplifies existential phenomenology at its best in his analysis of the various modes of “Being-in-the-world” (in-der-Welt-sein). He exalts existential phenomenology when he writes, “The essence of Dasein lies in its existence” (Das “Wesen” des Daseins liegt in seiner Existenz).32 Merleau-Ponty resorts to the same theme: the Être-au-monde or the Êtredans-le-monde (Being-in-the-world). “Phenomenology is also a philosophy which puts essences back into existence”;33 or as Thévenaz puts it, it “aims at essences, and it ends up in existence.”34 Spiegelberg, although he is rather critical of selling the birthright of phenomenology for a mess of existential pottage, has not abandoned “the unifying goal of a practical philosophy on phenomenological foundations which would combine the better insights of a phenomenology of values with a deepened conception of human existence,”35 and he maintains that the primary task of phenomenological philosophy is to elucidate, deepen, and enlarge the lifeworld.
iii. wang yang-ming’s philosophy and phenomenology In the philosophy of Wang Yang-ming, one vainly looks for the transcendentalphenomenological reduction and an analysis of methodological procedure. However, both phenomenology and Wang’s philosophy are “an adventure in consciousness” (i.e., hsin). Phenomenology as a theory of knowledge centers on the notion of intentionality, the way in which consciousness directs itself toward the world.36 As in phenomenology, Wang’s theory of knowledge is marked by the notion of intentionality, which provides a link, to use Wang’s own language, between the internal and the external. Furthermore, insofar
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as phenomenology elucidates the world of everyday life, the philosophy of Wang Yang-ming is phenomenological in that the task of philosophy, as he conceived it, is understanding liang-chih (good knowledge). His philosophy, in this sense, is a mundane phenomenology that is attuned to the analysis of the natural attitude.
iv. wang yang-ming and the phenomenological notion of intentionality After many years of search for truth and reality, Wang Yang-ming one day had a sudden insight into the nature of philosophy. To philosophize is to grasp the structure and essence (en-soi) of the mind or consciousness. Philosophically speaking, his philosophy was a revolt against the alleged dualism of Chu Hsi and the so-called School of Principle or Reason (li).37 Practically speaking, he rebelled against the formalistic education of memorization, recitation, and the writing of flowery compositions. However, Wang acknowledges his intellectual indebtedness to Chu Hsi’s doctrine as “a revelation from the gods.”38 Wang’s exhortation to return to the mind or consciousness is simply a plea to return to the golden age of Chinese philosophy, that is, to Confucianism. The School of Mind (hsin) in general and his philosophy in particular have an affinity with Buddhism and Taoism only to the extent that they both focus their attention on the mind or consciousness.39 Although Wang himself studied Buddhism in his youth, its influence on him must not be exaggerated. In fact, he was repelled by the rebellious teaching of Buddhism and Taoism; thus he emphatically denies that his philosophy has anything in common with “Buddhist and Taoist lifeless contemplation, emptiness, and silence”;40 and he asserts that his philosophy is Confucian through and through: the Confucian way is the only way of philosophy.41 His “return to the mind and its en-soi, called ‘intuitive knowledge,’” which might be called Wang’s philosophical battle cry, resembles in spirit the motto of phenomenology, that is, zu den Sachen selbst. This concept, as Merleau-Ponty interprets it, has an existential implication, for “[t]o return to things themselves is to return to that world which precedes knowledge, of which knowledge always speaks, and in relation to which every scientific schematization is an abstract and derivative sign-language, as is geography in relation to the country-side in which we have learnt beforehand what a forest, a prairie or a river is.”42 The prereflective world of which Merleau-Ponty speaks is a network of subject-to-subject
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rather than subject-to-object relationships. This world is not the “egocentric” world of thought but the “heterocentric” world of action. In this sense Merleau-Ponty’s claim, the most important gain of phenomenology is to unify the Scylla of extreme subjectivism and the Charybdis of extreme objectivism, can be accepted.43 The basis of this claim lies explicitly in the phenomenological notion of intentionality. This deep echo of the consecration of intentionality and the Lebenswelt is heard in the philosophy of Wang Yang-ming as the world of liang-chih (“good knowledge”). It must be clearly understood that Wang’s battle cry is by no means an exaltation of the Buddhist bliss of pure consciousness or of an incarcerated substance called the mind or self. By returning to the mind, Wang does not imply that reality is already within the mind. On the contrary, reality is a relation or encounter between the internal (the mind) and the external (the world). The self is open to the world. To cultivate the mind does not mean to detach the self from the world and to withdraw it to the inner world of the pure self. Rather, it means self’s involvement in the world. Not withdrawal but involvement is the essence of Wang’s philosophy. True to the phenomenological and existential meaning of intentionality, the mind is of centrifugal character: it extends or directs itself toward the world. For Wang Yang-ming an infallible beginning is essential to any philosophical inquiry simply because “an infinitesimal mistake in the beginning may lead to an infinite error at the end.”44 To live up to this philosophical spirit, the analysis of Wang’s philosophy must begin with his notion of hsin and its en-soi (pen-t’i) called liang-chih. And if the philosopher is a “perpetual beginner,” as Husserl said, then his beginning must perpetually return to his original home, hsin and liang-chih. The Chinese term hsin is usually translated as “mind” and, interestingly enough, Wang Tch’ang-tche translates it as coeur in the Pascalian sense.45 It may connote the thinking subject as in the Cartesian cogito, the spirit in the Berkeleyan sense, and the ego, self, or person in the sense that hsin is the unity of the act of intelligence and an agent who is able to generate action. More importantly, it may be further described as consciousness. As Wang writes, hsin is “wherever consciousness is”46 and “what makes seeing, listening, speaking, and moving possible.”47 Hsin is not a static thing, for it is always active: after all, the act of thinking itself is an activity. The activity (yong) of hsin is called yi. Yi is translated most often as “will” and sometimes as “thought,” “consciousness,” and so on. However, to translate yi as “will” is unsatisfactory, because will only refers to volitional acts.
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Therefore, the term will for yi is restrictive. But to translate yi as “thought” is to circumscribe the activity of hsin to reflection. Thus when yi is referred to as the activity of hsin, it should not mean either volitional acts or acts of reflection separately. To use the language of phenomenology, yi is an intentional act in the widest sense; it includes all intentional activities whether they be objectifying or nonobjectifying. It is used in the sense that intention is necessary to both action and thought. In reference to action and thought, yi may then imply practical intention and theoretical intention respectively. Yi, that is, consciousness as activity, therefore, is best described as “intentionality” in the phenomenological sense.48 In the metaphysics of Wang Yang-ming, hsin often has a transcendent, cosmological, organistic, and even ethical meaning. However, the key to the understanding of hsin is that hsin is always active, that is, consciousness is the source of thought and action and is also the way in which it activates (directs) itself toward the world. For all practical purposes, then, hsin and yi are identical: as Husserl said, consciousness is intentionality (Bewusstsein ist Intentionalität). Thus, the comparison of the epistemology of Wang Yangming and phenomenology must be focused on hsin (i.e., consciousness) or, more specifically, yi (i.e., the intentionality of consciousness). Wang Yang-ming’s concept of intentionality is also the radical starting point of Husserl’s phenomenology and can be explained in phenomenological terms. The phenomenological description of the subject-and-object relation is radically different from the traditional view, for example, the Cartesian cogito or the Berkeleyan percipi, which affirms the simple fact that thinking requires an object of some sort to think about. For Husserl (following Franz Brentano), all conscious acts are of intentional or directional character.49 In the stream of consciousness, intentionality is directed toward an object, whether it be real or ideal, existent or imaginary, objectifying or nonobjectifying: thinking is thinking of something, remembering is remembering of something, willing is willing of something, and so on. In other words, intentionality is “a relation which all, or at least certain, acts bear to an object.”50 The cogito, which is always ego cogito, bears within itself its cogitatum and thus is the ego-cogito-cogitatum or consciousness-of-the-world. To describe it in Husserl’s technical terms, the object as intended is called noema, and its correlate, the act of intending, is called noesis. Intentionality is then a term for the inseparable noematic-noetic correlation. The (external) world, which is already given, is tied to consciousness. The very intentionality of consciousness is Wang’s claim for the unity of the internal and the external.
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In this sense, Wang Yang-ming declares that the essence of hsin is singleness or unity, which does not separate the internal from the external. The very directionality of consciousness liberates the cogito from its own prison cell to open it to the world. According to Wang Yang-ming, consciousness never exists in a vacuum because, as it will be remembered, it is always doing something (i.e., intending), whether this “doing” be the activity of thought (theoretical intention) or actual doing (practical intention). Yi as the activity of hsin is the stream of intentional acts, thought, or action: consciousness “is always connected with some thing (wu) or event (shih).”51 Wang says that “the mind is always conscious of something.”52 However, like Merleau-Ponty and other existential phenomenologists, Wang is existential in that the intentionality of consciousness is essentially practical, that is, it is a person-to-person encounter. “What emanates from the mind,” he writes, “is the will . . . and wherever the will is directed is a thing.”53 At a quick glance, intentionality seems to refer to theoretical intentionality. However, the existential implication of this passage is found in Wang’s meaning of “thing” (wu). For Wang, “thing” really means “affair” or “event” (shih), which primarily suggests the principles of human relations. As Wang himself writes, “[W]hen the will is directed toward serving one’s parents, then serving one’s parents is a “thing.” When the will is directed toward being humane to all people and feeling love toward things, then being humane to all people and feeling love toward things are ‘things.’”54 Thus filial piety, brotherly respect, loyalty, and benevolence are all “things.” Intentionality is then primarily practical intentionality. It refers to the vast nexus of practical human relationships. Similarly, this is the way in which Merleau-Ponty interpreted “things” (Sachen) as the lived world or the world of action rather than the world of things and thought. Although intentionality refers primarily to practical intentionality, Wang Yang-ming extends it so as to include theoretical intentionality55 and perception and emotion as well. The following passage summarizes his notion of intentionality as well as his entire philosophy: Principle is one and no more. In terms of its condensation and concentration in the individual it is called the nature. In terms of the master of this accumulation it is called mind. In terms of its emanation and operation, it is called the will. In terms of the clear consciousness of the emanation and operations, it is called knowledge. And in terms of the stimuli and responses of this clear consciousness, it is called
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things. Therefore, when it pertains to things it is called investigation, when it pertains to knowledge it is called extension, when it pertains to the will it is called sincerity, and when it pertains to the mind it is called rectification. To rectify is to rectify this, to be sincere is to be sincere about this, to extend is to extend this, and to investigate is to investigate this. These are all means of investigating the principle of things to the utmost so as to develop the nature fully. There is no principle in the world outside nature (and the mind), and there is nothing outside nature. The reason why the Confucian doctrine is not made clear and does not prevail is because scholars of today consider principle as external and things as external.56 In essence, therefore, the message of Wang Yang-ming’s philosophy is the inseparability of the internal and the external. Basically Wang criticizes the dualistic thought of the Ch’eng-Chu school, whose starting point was the external. In so doing, Wang often shifts his emphasis to what is internal. However, to misrepresent him as a “subjective idealist”57 is to ignore totally his insistence that hsin is not a self-enclosed self but is a “being-to-theworld.” Certainly Wang’s critics remind us of the misguided positivistic and naturalistic criticism of the phenomenology and existential philosophy of our own time as being subjectivistic and even solipsistic. Man, whose ontological structure is the center of Wang Yang-ming’s philosophical attention, is a unity of mind (or consciousness) and body; mind and body are mutually dependent: “If there is no mind, there will be no body, and if there is no body, there will be no mind.”58 Certainly mind is the master of the body; however, the relationship between the two is that of the master and the servant rather than that of the master and the slave. Although the mind or the true self is not “a piece of flesh with blood,”59 it and the bodily self are not separated. Thus, death terminates mind as well as body. Emotion or feeling (ch’ing) is also produced as a result of the activity of hsin itself. The seven feelings—pleasure, anger, sorrow, joy, love, hate, and desire—are natural to man. These feelings are inside the realm of hsin itself. For instance, the joy that a sage enjoys is not identical with the joy of one of the seven feelings, but it is nonetheless related to it and may be shared by the common people. The only problem with the common people, however, is that, according to Wang, they are blind to joy even if they have it—to use his own analogy—they are like those who look for a donkey while riding it. True joy is consummated only in the realization of hsin and its en-soi, liang-chih.
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Furthermore, Wang’s explanation of sense perception must be understood in terms of the unity of the internal and the external, that is, the unity of sense organs and the objects presented to them. For Wang, sense organs do not have any substance of their own, since hsin does not have a substance of its own. Sense perception thus must be understood only in a functional sense. First, sense perception and hsin are inseparably linked: “The ears, the eyes, the mouth, the nose, and four limbs are parts of the body. But how can they see, hear, speak, or act without the mind [hsin]? On the other hand, without the ears, the eyes, the mouth, the nose, and the four limbs, the mind [hsin] cannot see, hear, speak, or act when it wants to.”60 Second, there is also the mutual dependence between sense perception and sensed things or objects: “The eye has no substance of its own. Its substance consists of the colors of all things. The ear has no substance of its own. Its substance consists of the sounds of all things. The nose has no substance of its own. Its substance consists of the smells of all things. The mouth has no substance of its own. Its substance consists of the tastes of all things.”61
v. wang yang-ming’s notion of liang-chih (“good knowledge”) Having examined the notion of intentionality, we shall try next to interpret Wang Yang-ming’s notion of liang-chih and its implications in the light of the Lebenswelt, of prereflective knowledge, and of intuition (Anschauung). Liang-chih is certainly the pillar of the practical as well as the theoretical aspect of Wang’s philosophy. It is originally of and to hsin and must be sought in relation to hsin; it is not obtained by listening to discussion and formalistic learning but only by personal cultivation and experience (t’i-jen). Liang-chih is not the knowledge only of those who are privileged, like a sage, but is within the reach of every man, whether he be a sage, a man of substance, a common man, or even a fool, because it is a natural endowment, simple, easy, straightforward, and clear. As Wang puts it, liang-chih is the seal of hsin; it is omniscient and eternal because it has no beginning and no ending and because in it “there is neither the past nor the future”; and it is difficult to understand because it has “neither spatial restriction nor physical form.”62 In the final analysis, it is the fountainhead of all other knowledge: outside liang-chih there is no other knowledge.63
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Book 7, Part 1, Chapter 15, paragraph 1 of the Book of Mencius—one of the so-called great Four Books—says that “the ability possessed by men without having been acquired by learning is intuitive ability, and the knowledge possessed by them without the exercise of thought is their intuitive knowledge.” No Chinese philosopher before or after Wang Yang-ming has extended this single paragraph in such a way as to give it a major philosophical theme. Two key notions are intuitive ability (liang-neng) and intuitive knowledge (liang-chih). The literal translations of liang-neng and liang-chih is “good ability” and “good knowledge,” respectively.64 They suggest certain modes of doing and knowing, both of which are intuitive, that is to say, doing “without having been acquired by learning” and knowing “without the exercise of thought.” As to intuitive knowledge in particular, this intuitive mode of knowing is prepredicative or prereflective knowledge in exactly the same sense as phenomenologists understand it, because “knowledge” here is the knowledge “without the exercise of thought.” As I have already intimated in the beginning of this essay, the Lebenswelt and its place in his philosophical investigations preoccupied Husserl at the end of his life, and thus he moved closely toward existential philosophy. Relating the idea of the Lebenswelt to the philosophy of Wang Yang-ming, at least at the first glimpse, is not as obvious as in the case of intentionality. Nonetheless, the meaning of the lifeworld is present in his idea of liang-chih, or intuitive knowledge refers directly to lived and everyday experience; it is the knowledge that is intuitive and prereflective. It is interesting to compare liang-chih with Alfred Schutz’s notion of the “epoché of the natural attitude” as contrasted with the phenomenological epoché. The epoché of the natural attitude is the suspension of doubt in the reality of the world, whereas the phenomenological epoché is the suspension of existential beliefs in it. “What (man) puts in brackets,” writes Schutz, “is the doubt that the world and its objects might be otherwise than it appears to him.”65 For Wang, liang-chih is direct, clear, simple and even unmistakable. It is also clearly suggestive of Husserl’s natural concept of the world (natürlichen Weltbegriff) and identical with Macmurray’s “knowledge in action.”68 Liang-chih is the prepredicative knowledge acquired by acquaintance with the world rather than predicative knowledge about it. In other words, it is the knowledge of existence or of the world achieved by participating directly in it; it is knowledge by which we are guided in our world of everyday life, and thus this mode of knowledge is with the lifeworld. The philosophy of Wang Yang-ming, grounded in liang-chih, is, in the final analysis, more than a theory of knowledge; it is an ontology of man—man not as
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the disinterested thinker and spectator but rather primarily as actor and participant. It is thus substantively phenomenological and existential in its stress on liang-chih and the extension of liang-chih (chih-liang-chih). We may justly characterize Wang as a philosopher of lived experience, a radical empiricist in the best and most persuasive sense: he does not simply talk about lived experience; his philosophy emanates from his own lived experience. In the latter sense, Wang Tch’ang-tche affirms that the philosophy of Wang Yang-ming is essentially one of lived experience.67 Since this is the crucial point of reference in relating the philosophy of Wang Yang-ming to existential phenomenology, the Lebenswelt should be examined more closely. The Lebenswelt is described as “the world of concrete existence as projected and lived by men in daily life.”68 As Wild explains, by the Lebenswelt “Husserl meant not a thing, not any set of objects, but rather an ultimate horizon within which all such objects and the individual person himself are actually understood in the ‘natural attitude’ of everyday life.”69 It refers to the common and shared world of everyday life and experience characterized by action, projection, and decision. Therefore, the scientist qua scientist or the philosopher qua philosopher does not participate in the Lebenswelt as an actor.70 The lifeworld is primordial and primary in the sense that the world of theorizing is necessarily presupposed by and grounded in it: it is “pregiven to both the man in the world of working and to the theorizing thinker.”71 “Theoretical knowing and speaking,” writes Wild, “presupposes this world. They are themselves special ways of being in the world.”72 Because it is the world of “I live through” in contrast to the world of “I think,” distinctively philosophical problems do not arise in it, even though they are posterior to it. “The importance of this ‘life-world,’” as Natanson puts it, “is not its status as knowledge but its focus as the meaningful ground of human action.”73 The lifeworld is the primary world of action, whereas the world of thought is the secondary world. The theory of action—more specifically the primacy of action—makes existential phenomenology and the philosophy of Wang Yang-ming as well as William James’s radical empiricism and John Macmurray’s philosophy of action converge. Man lives or acts before he knows: “It is by acting and in action that man is enabled to know.”74 As I have indicated, liang-chih is the cradle of Wang Yang-ming’s philosophy; and the world implied in liang-chih is the Lebenswelt. As reflective knowledge is to philosophy, liang-chih or intuitive knowledge is to the world of everyday life. Now liang-chih as immediate apprehension (chih-chou) can be examined further in the light of the phenomenological concept of intuition.
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Intuition or intuitive knowledge is related to praxis and reflection both in Husserl’s phenomenology and Wang Yang-ming’s philosophy. The importance of intuition in these two philosophies can hardly be overlooked. Husserl considered the principle of intuition as the principle of all principles (das Prinzip aller Prinzipien). Inasmuch as phenomenology maintains that what is evident need not be demonstrated, it is “a philosophy of intuition.”75 The same is true for Wang Yang-ming; his philosophy centers on liang-chih and thus may be appropriately called the philosophy of liang-chih or intuitive knowledge. To be sure, intuition is a vague, ambiguous, and therefore troublesome word. But the existence of its referent is hardly questionable, for, as Strasser points out, “any explicit act of reflection presupposes something that first is grasped without reflection.”76 As man cannot deny consciousness, so he cannot refute the existence of intuition. Therefore, the theory of intuition rests on the primacy of consciousness that determines his existence.77 Intuition is a mode of cognitive consciousness, or is an objectifying intentional act, by which man comes in contact with being in a direct manner. As Wang Yangming says, liang-chih is “clear intelligence and consciousness.”78 Intuition is a direct vision or seeing. Being and transcendence as well are determined by intuition, and intuition is the “idea of the absolute existence of consciousness.”79 As a cognitive or objectifying consciousness, intuition has its own share of intentionality, that is, intuitive intentionality. Thus, “phenomena” as properly understood in Husserl’s phenomenology designate not only “what appears to consciousness” but also “what can become the object of intuition.”80 Furthermore, if man is to understand intellect as the faculty of knowing the ideal, intuition is not as foreign to intellect as it is in the philosophy of Bergson. In this way, as Emmanuel Levinas asserts, phenomenological intuition transcends the Bergsonian antagonism between intellect (or reason) and intuition.81 Likewise, for Wang Yang-ming, intuition “is never opposed to ‘reason’ well understood.”82 They are not mutually exclusive; on the contrary, intuition as a cognitive act paves the way to reflection. Intuitive knowledge cannot be dispensed within either philosophy or science. Although immediate apprehension is an indispensable stepping-stone to reflective knowledge, intuitive knowledge is of greater interest in its relation to the world of action or the lifeworld. Intuition, or what Strasser calls “prescientific intuition,” is an essential element of the lifeworld: “Without this intuition there would be no explanation of why the praxis of the everyday world keeps functioning and why on the prescientific level things run their orderly course.”83 The primacy of the lifeworld affirms that intuitive
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knowledge is primary to the world of reflection: living or acting is primary and prior to thought. In this sense alone, the meaning of liang-chih as (intuitive) knowledge in action must be understood. As action is the completion of knowledge, the extension of knowledge is to put intuitive knowledge into practice. The truth of intuitive knowledge is verified only by action.84 For Wang Yang-ming, the cultivation of personal life is to extend liangchih or intuitive knowledge to human relationships. Just as he applied to things (wu) the human term “affairs” and “events” (shih), so too the investigation of things (ko-wu)—which has been an important philosophical theme in Chinese philosophy—is given a human meaning, on the basis of which he repudiated the doctrine adhered to by the followers of the Ch’engChu school. According to Chu Hsi, truth is attributed to the external things themselves. A recorded episode reveals that Wang’s attempt to discover the truth in the bamboos was a total failure. One day he suddenly discovered that the investigation of things did not mean the investigation of every bamboo, blade of grass, leaf or branch of a tree, but that, instead, truth and reality are to be found in hsin and its activities. Thus, Wang concluded that ko-wu really means ko-hsin (rectification of the mind). Thus, he attributed a new meaning not only to “things” but also to “investigation” (ko) by interpreting the latter as “rectification.” Reality and truth coincide only when one concentrates on hsin and its en-soi, liang-chih that, practically speaking, amounts to the cultivation of personal life: “The rectification of the mind, the sincerity of the will, the extension of knowledge, and the investigation of things are all means of cultivating the personal life.”85 Each of them has its own place, but they are of one thread. They are different only in procedure: “Investigating, extending, being sincere, rectifying, and cultivating are the tasks performed in the procedure.”86 In this respect, Wang Yang-ming’s notion of the cultivation of personal life contains an existential element: as Wild points out, existential philosophy is concerned with “the finite existence of the human person as lived from within.”87
vi. wang yang-ming’s unity of knowledge and action The last theme in this discussion is Wang Yang-ming’s notion of the unity of knowledge and action (chih hsing ho yi). Seriousness, according to Wang, is the concentration on one thing. In this sense, he is truly a serious thinker, and the question of the unity of knowledge and action also has to be referred
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back to the question of hsin, as they are tied together. Hsin is active, that is, always doing something that may be thinking or acting. Thinking is an activity and man has a natural ability to know.88 Outside consciousness (hsin), nothing is possible and there will be no problems, philosophical or otherwise. Although the term chih (knowledge) suggests no distinction between reflective and prereflective knowledge, it is safe to say that chih here implies reflective knowledge, whereas I have identified liang-chih with prereflective knowledge or knowledge in action. The term hsing refers to bodily movement in general, which may be conscious or unconscious, as well as to action defined in a meaningful way, that is, action that is both projected and purposive.90 However, it is limited to overt action that precludes thought process. Thus chih hsing ho yi is tantamount to the unity of theoria and praxis. The question of the relationship between knowledge and action is coeval with philosophy itself; and the notion of the unity of knowledge and action has been a persistent theme in the history of Chinese philosophy from Confucius and Wang Yang-ming down to Sun Yat-sen, Mao Tse-tung (not Confucian but Marxian), and Chiang Kai-shek.91 However, Wang was the first philosopher who held the inseparability of knowledge and action. This unity condemns pure scholasticism, and it is the real substance of existential phenomenology that attempts to bridge the gap between academic philosophy (knowledge) and culture (action). “To return to hsin” means going back to the original source of knowledge and action. Both knowledge and action are the intentional activities of consciousness. As Wang insists, they are inseparable: “Knowledge in its genuine and earnest aspect is action, and action in its intelligent and discriminating aspect is knowledge. . . . Knowledge is the direction for action and action the effort of knowledge,”92 and “knowledge is the beginning of action and action is the completion of knowledge.”93 Truth, then, is the dialectic mediation between knowledge and action; and truth’s mediator is the intentionality of consciousness. As it has been pointed out, intention is the fundamental and necessary character of both knowledge and action: to use the language of Wang Yang-ming, it is “the original substance of knowledge and action.”94 Intention was divided into theoretical intention and practical intention. The theoretical or epistemological aspect of intentionality was discussed extensively when Wang’s theory of knowledge was compared with phenomenology. Now practical intention will be considered with respect to the existential (pragmatic) aspect of phenomenology. When intentionality is identified with “encounter,” it is primarily practical intentionality. Indeed, the world of lived experience, with which existential
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phenomenology is concerned, is the world governed not by any theoretical interest but only by practical interest.95 Action as an intentional activity in this lived world is encounter that, in turn, represents a nexus of relations of persons or agents who project, choose, and decide. In this connection, one can speak of the pragmatism of existential phenomenology. Pragmatism and existential phenomenology as philosophies of knowledge are concerned primarily with the knowledge about this lived world rather than the world of pure thought. The philosophy that is concerned with the lived world becomes a heterocentric philosophy or a philosophy of jen (humanity)96 because this world itself is commonly shared and intersubjective. Insofar as the theory of action or, more specifically, the primacy of action is implicit in pragmatism and phenomenology, the two converge.97 Similarly, the philosophy of Wang Yang-ming contains a pragmatism to the extent that he maintains the view that consciousness (hsin) is praxis before it becomes theoria, that is, intentionality is practical before it becomes theoretical. To repeat what Wang himself wrote, “Knowledge is the beginning of action and action is the completion of knowledge.” This is the culminating point of convergence between Wang’s philosophy and existential phenomenology. The extension of knowledge, then, consists of action, and without action, there is no extension of knowledge;98 similarly, when knowledge is extended, the will becomes sincere.99 Sincerity (ch’eng) simply means to carry out knowledge in action. Furthermore, the investigation of things is the effort to extend knowledge;100 thus, the investigation of things to the utmost involves carrying out knowledge in action. Learning that includes study, inquiry, thinking, and sifting has practice in view: learning is the learning of the fundamental principles of human relationships. To think is to learn, and to learn is to act, which completes a full cycle of knowledge and action.
vii. closing remarks As I have attempted to show, the philosophy of Wang Yang-ming has phenomenological and existential elements in its essential forms and stands out as an indubitable testimony against the familiar dualism of subject and object, mind and body, theory and practice, reason and emotion, and value and fact. His philosophy is a unitary system through and through; it is one thread that opposes every form of bifurcation; and he is a truly “serious” thinker. Above all, man cannot philosophize in a vacuum: academic philosophy must link
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itself to living, the Lebenswelt or the world of hsing (action). In the unity of the lived world and philosophy, not only the late philosophy of Husserl, post-Husserlian phenomenology, and the philosophy of Wang Yang-ming, but also existential philosophy find their meeting ground. We must not confine ourselves to the convergence of the fine points of philosophical themes in existential phenomenology and the philosophy of Wang Yang-ming, but, more significantly, we must widen the horizon of our vision to the spirit in which philosophical activities are carried out and to Husserl’s and Wang’s conceptions of the role of a philosopher defined in “a striking manner”; put simply, the philosopher is the “civil servant of humanity” (fonctionnaire de l’humanité or funktionäre der menschheit).101 I can find no better description than this one to convey the spirit of Chinese philosophy, the philosophy that shares with existential phenomenology the urgent and engulfing sense of human existence and humanity. All philosophical controversies in Chinese philosophy largely reflect this sense of urgency. The tradition of Chinese philosophy is that of a philosophy of jen. The ultimate function of philosophy is tested in the manner in which it serves, albeit indirectly, to sustain and enhance human existence. To borrow the elegant expression of John Smith, “The products of man’s intellect must not be allowed to remain as recondite adjuncts to life.”102 To rejuvenate and elevate the status of Chinese philosophy in the new light I have indicated, we must first come to grips with its history, because philosophy and history of philosophy are inseparably linked. Wang Yangming’s philosophy of hsin and liang-chih is largely propounded in the framework of a commentary on the Four Books and Five Classics.103 We have here suggested a new approach to cultivating (for the West) the almost virgin land of Chinese philosophy by using the new tools and techniques of existential phenomenology. By so doing, another bridge may be built between the East and the West, and we may open a way toward a phenomenology of phenomenologies. Chan Wing-tsit recently pointed out a movement toward synthesis that has been taking place in modern Chinese philosophy, attempting to combine Western philosophy with traditional Chinese thought.104 However, so far as I know there is regrettably no sign of the influence of phenomenology and existential philosophy on recent Chinese philosophers, even though, as I have shown, there is a close affinity between the philosophy of Wang Yang-ming and existential phenomenology both in their approaches and spirit, particularly in their philosophical spirit, which shuns much of the traditional speculative conundrums and chimera of abstraction in the name of
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humanity. Philosophy in search of truth and reality, beyond doubt, transcends and must transcend the boundary between the East and the West. Fung Yulan was prophetic; his prophecy will be fulfilled when the merger of Chinese and Western philosophy is effected through the common bond of existential phenomenology.
CHAPTER 4
the unity of knowledge and action a postscript to wang yang- m i ng’ s e xiste ntial phe nom enol ogy
Uniform ideas originating among entire peoples unknown to each other must have a common ground of truth. —Giambattista Vico
i. introduction Chinese philosophy, because of its practical preoccupation, has suffered I think the same, unfortunate fate as existentialism that has often been victimized as a nonphilosophy in the hand of rationalism or intellectualism because it dwells allegedly on the irrationality of man. My authoring “Wang Yangming and Existential Phenomenology” in 1965 in International Philosophical Quarterly was motivated by two factors.1 In the first place, I was eager to prove that China—or, for that matter, the Orient—has indeed, a bona fide philosophy—logic, cosmology, metaphysics, ontology, and, above all, ethics. One way of proving this claim was to show that Wang Yang-ming’s thought is philosophically comparable to the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, and others. In the second place, I intended to show that Chinese philosophy makes its most significant intraphilosophical contributions to the areas of practical philosophy in the broadest sense of the term. I am convinced now more than ever before that Wang Yang-ming is one of the exemplary philosophers in the history of Chinese philosophy who makes significant intraphilosophical contributions in terms of practical philosophy to both world philosophy and the phenomenological movement as a global phenomenon.
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The question—whether China has a philosophy—originates in the main, I think, from two sources: the first is comparable to something of what the literary critic Edward W. Said calls “Orientalism”2 or Western intellectual ethnocentrism particularly since Hegel, and the second is the nature of Chinese thought characterized in 1929 by H. G. Creel as “Sinism”3—that cluster of characteristics that are uniquely Chinese. The phenomenon of Sinism should apply to all the geographical regions—Korea and Japan as well as China— where Chinese ideograms have been and are in use. Many other prominent, astute observers of Chinese thought, history, and culture such as Fung Yulan, Chan Wing-tsit, Nakamura Hajime, Suzuki Daisetz Teitaro, and Marcel Granet concur with Creel on the core characteristics of the Sinistic mindset that is embodied and expressed in its ideographic language. We may attribute the modern origin of Orientalism to the rationalist Hegel for whom the East—China and India—represents the childhood of history. For him, Chinese history—like the rhythm of nature—repeats itself endlessly and becomes an unhistorical history, a historical infantilism or paleography in the progression of world history. Chinese history is the static and seamless flow of the eternal yesterday. Against Hegel’s ethnocentrism, it should be noted, the French existential phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty entertains the idea of discovering the universal essences of human culture beyond objectivism and relativitism. He speaks well of ethnological findings from Marcel Mauss to Claude Lévi-Strauss. Their ethnological findings open up the “lateral universal,” which is no longer the “overarching universal of a strictly objective method” but which is acquired “through ethnological experience and its incessant testing of the self through the other person and the other person through the self. It is a question of constructing a general system of reference in which the point of view of the native, the point of view of the civilized man, and the mistaken views each has of the other can all find a place—that is, of constituting a more comprehensive experience which becomes in principle accessible to men of a different time and country.”4 Unlike Hegel who viewed Oriental thought, history, and culture in a cavalier fashion, it is for Merleau-Ponty immensely interesting, suggestive, and instructive. Philosophical truth as absolute and universal knowledge is for Merleau-Ponty not certified by the Occidental seal of approval alone. Rather, all thought is for him part of the lifeworld (Lebenswelt) as the total meaning horizon of a sociocultural world; all philosophies are sorts of anthropological types, and none has any privileged birthright to a monopoly of truth. “If Western thought is what it claims to be,” Merleau-Ponty challenges, “it must prove it by understanding all ‘life-worlds.’”5
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For Merleau-Ponty, the arrogant path of Hegel that excludes Oriental thought ab initio from absolute and universal knowledge and draws a geographical frontier between philosophy and nonphilosophy also excludes a good part of the Western past. Philosophy as a perpetual beginning is destined to examine its own idea of truth again and again because truth is not divided among doctrines but is a treasure scattered about in human life before philosophical—that is, conceptual—formulation. If so, Western philosophy, too, is destined to reexamine not only its own idea of truth but also related matters and institutions such as science, economics, and politics. MerleauPonty thus declares, From this angle, civilizations lacking our philosophical or economic equipment take on an instructive value. It is not a matter of going in search of truth or salvation in what falls short of science or philosophical awareness, or of dragging chunks of mythology as such into our philosophy, but of acquiring—in the presence of these variants of humanity that we are so far from—a sense of the theoretical and practical problems our institutions are faced with, and of rediscovering the existential field that they were born in and their long success has led us to forget. The Orient’s “childishness” has something to teach us, if it were nothing more than the narrowness of our adult ideas. The relationship between Orient and Occident, like that between child and adult, is not that of ignorance to knowledge or non-philosophy to philosophy; it is much more subtle, making room on the part of the Orient for all anticipations and “prematurations.” Simply rallying and subordinating “non-philosophy” to true philosophy will not create the unity of the human spirit. It already exists in each culture’s lateral relationships to the others, in the echoes one awakes in the other.6
ii. wang’s sinism and phenomenology As for Sinism, it is that Weltanschauung that accentuates what we would call “the primacy of the practical”—that is, the Sinistic lifeworld, which is this-worldly, practical, concrete, and particular, rather than otherworldly, speculative, abstract, and general. It is definitely an orientation of, and an emphasis on, the vita activa rather than the vita contemplativa, that is, ethics
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and politics rather than theology and metaphysics. Is the king or ruler not, etymologically speaking, the unifier of heaven, man, and earth in all Chinese thought? In Sinism, the praxis of man is identifiable with a diverse nexus of social relationships: a variety of the rules and rites of reciprocity. As a “practical humanism”—if I may use and extend Professor Chan Wing-tsit’s characterization of Confucianism to the entire spectrum of Chinese thought, Chinese philosophy emphasizes not so much what man is (i.e., essence), as how he acts and ought to act (i.e., existence). In its orientation, it is existentialist rather than essentialist. As it focuses on the nexus of social relationships, it puts a premium on the nature of moral conduct in the everyday lifeworld culminating in the ideal of humanity (jen)—the quality of being genuinely human, being benevolent, and being humankind as a collectivity. In short, Chinese thought seeks the unity of knowledge and action (chih hsing ho i) in terms of the primacy of the latter over the former wherein lies its affinity with existential philosophy with a difference. It must be pointed out that the problematic of knowledge and action is intraphilosophical. In China, it has been the most persistent and perennial theme from Confucius and Wang Yang-ming to Sun Yat-sen and Mao Tse-tung. In the West, it has persisted from the “wise men” of Athens and Jerusalem to Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Marx, John Dewey, and JeanPaul Sartre.7 Above all, it is quintessential to moral, political, and social philosophy. However, both intraphilosophically and in terms of the long, cherished tradition of Chinese thought, Wang Yang-ming formulated the idea of the unity of knowledge and action most forcefully and clearly. As Wang insists, knowledge and action are one single effort: “Knowledge in its genuine and earnest aspect is action, and action in its intelligent and discriminating aspect is knowledge. . . . Knowledge is the direction for action and action the effort of knowledge.” In essence, “knowledge is the beginning of action and action is the completion of knowledge.”8 Unity here, I suggest, should mean the dialectical interrelatedness of knowledge and action as two distinctive but inseparable ideas or phenomena that necessarily complement each other. It is neither monistic nor dualistic. Nor is one reducible to the other. The idea of unity as dialectical interrelatedness, therefore, avoids monism, dualism, and reductionism at the same time. We may say that ultimately the “sincerity of the will” (ch’eng i) is for Wang Yang-ming the “original source” (pen t’i) of both knowledge and action. To put it in the language of phenomenology, knowledge and action are mediated by consciousness as intentionality, that is, hsin (mind-and-heart)
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as active extends or directs itself toward the world—the world of both persons and objects.9 Unity as dialectical interrelatedness is not, of course, foreign to the tradition of Chinese thought. The twentieth-century Chinese philosopher Chang Tung-sun ascribes as unique the “logic of correlation” or “correlative duality” to Chinese thought that implies, interestingly, political thought rather than theology and metaphysics as its ultimate background.10 Chang is simply paraphrasing in the language of modern epistemology the familiar ancient conception of the unity of yin and yang as complementary whose complexity is seen fully in the I Ching. The unity of two distinctive phenomena as complementary may pertain to that of subject and object, mind and body, speech and silence, man and nature, and so on, as well as to that of knowledge and action. I prefer the term diatactics, which is borrowed from Hayden White,11 for several reasons. First, White wishes to have it replace the term dialectics in order to avoid the certain ideological overtone of Marx on the one hand and the transcendental overtone of Hegel’s thought on the other: diatactics is neither “paratactical” (conceptually underdetermined) nor “hypotactical” (conceptually overdetermined). Second, just as in the logic of yin and yang, diatactics avoids the Hegelian and Marxian dialectics as teleological progression toward a higher synthesis, which is ultimately theological or eschatological. In this sense, it returns to its original meaning as practiced by Socrates and conveyed by Plato as dialogue—the mutual and genuine exchange in a consociational encounter of questions and answers—as a method of disclosing truth (i.e., aletheia).12 Third, diatactics is tactical to the extent to which it arouses the intimate sense of touch or tactility and emphasizes the pragmatic or performative side of language in use. Contrary to the duality of conception and perception deeply rooted in that of mind and body in the tradition of Western rationalism, the meaning to which diatactics is ascribed here is not just conceptual but perceptual as well.13 It should also be said that the primacy of the practical, which is the hallmark of the Sinistic lifeworld(s) and the centerpiece of Chinese philosophy, is not contrary to the unity of knowledge and action as diatactical or complementary. Indeed, the primacy of the practical must be made a necessary component of the unity of knowledge and action because without it Chinese philosophy would be paradoxical and unable to reconcile itself with its conception of the pinnacle of human existence as social existence. Let me explain. In the first place, the primacy of action over thought does not in the least slight the importance of thought because thought is not just instrumental
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to action. The presence of thought makes action “sincere,” “intentional,” or “purposive.”14 Thought precedes the actual performance of action, and action contains thought as an element in its determination. To deny the presence of thought in action is to deny the existential quality of man as human. For thought is a faculty of every man who belongs to the noble species called human. The ability to think and act as human, however, does not refer to the ability to theorize abstractly or think in abstraction but the ability to make moral judgments based on the sensus communis (as in Socratic or Confucian wisdom, Aristotelian phronesis, or Kantian categorical imperatives). In the second place, the overdetermination of thought or intellectualism whose starting point is the primary of the theoretical is intrinsically and inextricably egocentric. The Scottish philosopher John Macmurray—not unlike Martin Buber, Gabriel Marcel, Karl Jaspers, and Merleau-Ponty—is most forceful in criticizing the egocentric predicament of Western philosophy for unduly magnifying thought over action.15 In modern philosophy Macmurray contends Descartes embodies this theory-centered, egocentric attitude in his philosophy of the cogito. According to Macmurray, the predicament of the philosophy of the cogito is twofold: the dualism of thought and action on the one hand and egocentricity on the other. The philosophy of the “I think” or “I know” is egocentric and dualistic at the same time because the cogito is necessarily and always ego cogito, that is, “I think” or “I know” with capital “I” in isolation from other actors in the social world. The “thinking I” is—to use Jacques Derrida’s expression—“a cemetery sentinel.” In order to avoid this egocentric and dualistic predicament of the cogito, Macmurray proposes, “We must turn from thought to action as our centre of reference, and so make action primary. Then the reflective activities have their meaning in their reference to the practical world.”16 The philosophy of the “I do” contains within itself thought and is also heterocentric because action implies an instantiation of the ‘I’ and ‘You’ (i.e., the personal).
iii. clarification of wang yang-ming’s thought in relation to existential phenomenology Having stated my motives for authoring “Wang Yang-ming and Existential Phenomenology” in 1965 and outlined Wang’s formulation of the unity of knowledge and action as intraphilosophical contribution, this section will reexamine my original thesis and defend it in light of recent scholarship on
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Wang since the publication in 1965 of my essay. In so doing, I will focus on and critically examine in the following pages the writings of three scholars: (1) A. S. Cua, (2) Julia Ching, and (3) Tu Wei-ming. Let me summarize briefly the central themes for weaving the philosophy of Wang Yang-ming and existential phenomenology. First, the concept of the lifeworld is the seminal discovery of Husserl’s phenomenology. It is defined as the most encompassing horizon of preconceptual meaning as projected and lived by men and women in everyday life. It is the founding and funding matrix of all theoretical activities—logic, science, philosophy, and so on. The importance of the lifeworld lies not in its status as knowledge but grounds all that we think and do. In short, it refers to the field of the practical. We say that Wang Yang-ming’s formulation of (preconceptual) knowledge of the good called liang-chih pertains to the everyday lifeworld as the practical world of values and moral ideals. In his phenomenological study of moral experience, Maurice Mandelbaum remarks that the phenomenological method is eductive rather than deductive. Its essential methodological conviction is that a solution to any of the problems of ethics must be educed from, and verified by, a careful and direct examination of individual moral judgments—“an examination of moral judgments that men make [in living their daily lives].”17 To put it in a slightly different way, Wang Yang-ming’s liangchih may be likened to Aristotle’s phronesis. For phronesis is that moral knowledge that is distinguished from procedures of rigorous and exact episteme or scientia. Both liang-chih and phronesis are grounded not in a contemplative or theoretical grasp of the good based on metaphysical elaboration and timeless immutability but rather in the concrete good a person brings to realization in his own everyday lifeworldly conduct. In his study of Aristotle’s moral philosophy with a focus on phronesis, J. Donald Monan concludes, “The reality of [Aristotle’s] moral knowledge is rather a pre-philosophic “given” in a double sense. As an immediate encounter with value in experiential conduct, it is prephilosophic in the sense that it does not presuppose any systematic metaphysic of the good. But as a genuine encounter with value, it does invite one to evaluate this mysterious encounter critically and to seek its ultimate ground. More important, the features revealed in Aristotle’s description of moral knowledge prescribe that the only method capable of seeking that ground is a reflective, phenomenological one.”18 Second, it should be said that the ultimate ground for encountering the good is, for Wang Yang-ming, no other than the sincerity of the will, that is, moral consciousness as intentionality. Since Wang, following his Confucian philosophical forbearers, is concerned with the moral
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direction of human conduct and affairs, it may be called practical or existential intentionality, that is, the directionality of consciousness (hsin) toward the world of human “things” (affairs) or man’s moral encounter with the social world. This is the reason the so-called second school of phenomenology known as existential phenomenology—exemplified in such works as Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (1927), Sartre’s L’Être et le Néant (1943), and Merleau-Ponty’s Phénoménologie de la Perception (1945)—is so germane to the placement of Wang Yang-ming in the context of contemporary Western philosophy. It is interesting to note that Wang’s revolutionary thought or philosophical enlightenment came about in challenging Chu Hsi’s famous doctrine of the “investigation of things” (ko-wu).19 For Wang Yang-ming, investigation (ko) was turned into rectification (cheng), while things (wu) were turned into events or affairs (shih): in short, Wang’s revolutionary enlightenment was the discovery of the internal world of morality as compared with Chu Hsi’s philosophy of the external world of objects. Similarly, the famous phenomenological battle cry “Zu den Sachen selbst” really means the return to meaning(s). More importantly, Heidegger’s “ontological turn” in Being and Time called “fundamental ontology” (Fundamentalontologie) is the phenomenological analysis of Dasein (man’s existence or human reality) as privileged to the disclosure of Being: ontology is for Heidegger possible only as phenomenology. In conclusion, as I said in 1965 and can say again now, the following passage of Wang Yang-ming summarizes his notion of intentionality as well as his entire philosophy: Principle is one and no more. In terms of its condensation and concentration in the individual it is called the nature. In terms of the master of this accumulation it is called mind. In terms of its emanation and operation, it is called the will. In terms of the clear consciousness of the emanation and operations, it is called knowledge. And in terms of the stimuli and responses of this clear consciousness, it is called things. Therefore when it pertains to things it is called investigation, when it pertains to knowledge it is called extension, when it pertains to the will it is called sincerity, and when it pertains to the mind it is called rectification. To rectify is to rectify this, to be sincere is to be sincere about this, to extend is to extend this, and to investigate is to investigate this. These are all means of investigating the principle of things to the utmost so as to develop the nature fully. There is no principle in the world outside nature (and the mind), and there is no thing outside nature. The reason
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why the Confucian doctrine is not made clear and does not prevail is because scholars of today consider principle as external and things as external.20
III.1. In his recent study of Wang Yang-ming, The Unity of Knowledge and Action, A. S. Cua recognizes the unity of knowledge and action as central to Wang’s thought. He advances the argument that it is a contribution to moral psychology: it is in essence “a doctrine of moral psychology that depicts the psychological elements involved in understanding moral achievement.”21 Although it is not altogether clear as to why Wang’s contribution is to moral psychology rather than moral philosophy, the following four passages are hints for Cua’s appellation: (1) moral knowledge is discussed in Wang “without depending on a systematic ontology” (2) ithe unity of knowledge and action pertains to the understanding of “the actuating import rather than the cognitive content of moral knowledge”; (3) being couched in the existentialist language of Kierkegaard, “Wang is not an ‘objective thinker’ concerned with the elaboration of an ethical theory that can serve as a rational foundation for morality; he is a committed thinker interested in the ‘subjective appropriation’ of classical Confucian ideas”—in brief, Wang is a sagacious man of engagement; and (4) the unity of knowledge and action is concerned with moral ideals but not epistemology. Cua sees “a striking affinity” between Wang’s “sincerity of the will” and Kierkegaard’s “purity of heart.” He explains the will (i) as a complex interplay of motive, desire, volition, intention, and even commitment—all of which are taken as psychological categories. Moreover, Cua argues that (moral) knowledge is prerequisite to the performance of (moral) action. Having distinguished between “prospective knowledge,” which is anterior to action, and “retrospective knowledge,” which is posterior to action, he considers the former as a precondition, presupposition, and originating source of the latter.22 Despite producing an edifying, analytical scenario, Cua’s psychological appropriation of Wang Yang-ming’s unity of knowledge and action does not do full justice to the philosophical weight of his thought as a revolutionary reconstruction of classical Confucianism in lieu of Chu Hsi’s doctrine of the “investigation of things.” For Wang Yang-ming does not simply replace (Chu Hsi’s) ontology or metaphysics with (his) “moral psychology.” Rather, his theme of the unity of knowledge and action is a complete
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philosophy—ontological, metaphysical, and ethical. Let me explain further. Because consciousness (hsin) is intentional or is made operational by means of the will (i), it is the originary source of producing knowledge as well as feelings and volitions in the self as agent. This intentionality thesis is what brings Wang Yang-ming’s thought close to phenomenology— Husserl’s philosophy that elevated Franz Brentano’s psychological category to a philosophical one by discovering the general structure of consciousness as the polar unity of (subjective) noesis and (objective) noema: consciousness (as intentional) is always conscious of something, whether it be thinking, knowing, feeling, willing, and so on. In discussing many fine issues relating to intentionality, for example, consciousness, subjectivity, reflexivity, and metaphysics in Western and Indian philosophy, the phenomenologist Jitendra Nath Mohanty writes, “Consciousness is also subjective, but not all that is subjective is consciousness. Consciousness is also intentional. But what defines consciousness qua consciousness, not qua subjective, is its reflexivity, not its intentionality. Subjectivity is a necessary but not sufficient condition of consciousness.”23 From this passage, we may conclude that as there is a radical difference between intentionality and what is called “introspection” in psychology, intentionality defined phenomenologically is not just a state of mind, a mental state, or a psychological category. As such, intentionality may very well be “the corner stone of a descriptive metaphysics of subjectivity.”24 Therefore, neither intentionality nor subjectivity, unlike introspection, is exclusively a psychological category.
III.2. Unlike Cua, neither Julia Ching nor Tu Wei-ming exorcises cosmological, metaphysical, and ontological speculation from her or his discussion of Wang Yang-ming’s thought. Ching’s To Acquire Wisdom is the most definitive account in the English language of the philosophy of Wang Yang-ming as a whole. In its key chapter (chapter 2) entitled “The Starting Point: Hsin,” she remarks that “To him [Wang Yang-ming], the moral dimension of the whole lived world of human relationships and affairs connotes somehow the inseparability of these relationships and affairs with hsin, the source of morality.”25 She approvingly footnotes my statement that “Not withdrawal, but involvement, is the essence of Wang’s philosophy. . . . The mind is of centrifugal character: it extends or directs itself toward the world.”26 She is also to the point in considering Wang’s formulation of the unity of knowledge and action
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as “primarily a moral ideal rather than a principle of epistemology”27—the point Cua approvingly cites in his discussion of Wang’s moral psychology. The philosophy whose starting point or focus is epistemology, as previously noted, is necessarily caught in the egocentric predicament that, in turn, nullifies the very ground of the possibility of moral conduct since moral conduct presupposes the intersubjective encounter with other people. In her discerning article on authentic selfhood, Ching compares Wang Yang-ming with the founder of existential phenomenology, Heidegger.28 She compares Wang’s reforming spirit with Heidegger’s new way of doing phenomenology. She writes, “Heidegger’s research for meaning begins with human existence, as does Wang Yang-ming’s. Heidegger insists upon this approach, departing thereby from his master Husserl, just as Wang Yangming parted company from the orthodox thinker, Chu Hsi, whose interest was more in ‘things themselves’ (Li).”29 Since Heidegger founded existential phenomenology in combining the existential insights of Kierkegaard and the phenomenological insights of Husserl, it would also seem judicious to compare the Wang-Chu relationship with the Kierkegaard-Hegel relationship. For, as Kierkegaard’s affirmation of the subjective thinker is the revolt against the objective thought of Hegel, both Kierkegaard’s and Husserl’s thought signifies the triumph of subjectivity—each in his own way—despite Hegel’s employment of the term phenomenology in his magnum opus. Similarly, Wang’s reformation of Chu Hsi’s ko-wu (investigation of things) into chengshih (rectification of affairs) is a turn for the moral triumph of subjectivity. Despite her own insightful comparison of Wang Yang-ming with Heidegger, Ching contended that much of the so-called common ground between Wang and existential phenomenology as discussed in my “Wang Yang-ming and Existential Phenomenology” is also common to the Chinese philosophical mainstream. Precisely! The most common ground for Chinese thought and phenomenology, I suggest, lies in their mutual respect for experiential knowledge: Tao is indeed everydayness or lifeworldiness. For the reason of intentionality as the overall directionality of consciousness (hsin or, as Ching often translates it, “mind-and-heart”) toward the world (of both persons and things) for the sake of both theoria and praxis, Wang Yang-ming is most conducive to a phenomenological interpretation. The recent literature on Wang Yang-ming’s philosophy—including, of course, Ching’s own article on Wang and Heidegger—still supports my original thesis that there is no other Chinese philosopher who fits the detailed billing of existential phenomenology better than Wang Yang-ming.
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III.3. Tu Wei-ming’s work on the formative years of Wang Yang-ming (Neo-Confucian Thought in Action) and some essays in Humanity and Self-Cultivation best complement or even confirm my existential and phenomenological thesis on Wang Yang-ming.30 Chapter 4 of Neo-Confucian Thought in Action, which was published in the same year as Ching’s To Acquire Wisdom, is entitled “The Meaning” and begins with Wang’s conception of the unity of knowledge and action. In discussing Wang’s transformation of Chu Hsi’s ko-wu to chih hsing ho I at the end of this chapter, Tu footnotes my “Wang Yang-ming and Existential Phenomenology” as “a defense of Yang-ming’s principle of subjectivity from the viewpoint of modern European philosophy.”31 In discussing Wang’s unity of knowledge and action, Tu makes the distinction between his philosophy of subjectivity and the fallacy of subjectivism. In the first place, Tu sees Wang’s theme on the unity of knowledge and action as an attempt to challenge Chu Hsi’s dichotomization of the subject and the object. Tu contends that Wang “eliminated the subjectobject dichotomy inherent in Chu Hsi’s ko-wu by a creative formulation of the principle of subjectivity.”32 Wang’ rejection of dichotomization or dualism encompasses, according to Tu, “a set of four correlations”—each of which is an important aspect of defining the self: “(1) the correlation of body and mind, (2) the correlation of mind and intention, (3) the correlation of intention and knowledge, and (4) the correlation of intention and thing.”33 For Tu as well as for Ching, hsin occupies the central place in Wang Yangming’s unity of knowledge and action. The essence of hsin (mind) lies in its directionality toward knowledge and thing through intention (i) in correlation with body (shen) (i.e., mind as embodied, to use the language of phenomenology). In the second place, Wang’s philosophy of subjectivity is no subjectivism. For subjectivity embodied in liang-chih (the preconceptual knowledge of the good or moral “knowledge by acquaintance” in the sense William James uses it) is identified with, or corresponds to, the “ontological reality” called t’ien-li or the principle of Heaven. Wang Yang-ming’s unity of knowledge and action is, for Tu, the ethics of self-fulfillment, which includes the notion of sincerity most broadly and inclusively conceived of as completion, actualization, consummation, and perfection. Existentialistically speaking, it is, in brief, the ethics of authenticity (Eigentlichkeit). Tu’s employment of the concept intentionality necessary to (moral) knowledge in relation to (moral) action as well as Cua’s “prospective knowledge” may be likened to
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the existential project (Entwurf) found in Heidegger’s Being and Time and Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. For, Tu suggests, “knowing simultaneously transforms one’s present existence into a state of being projected toward the future ideal.”34
iv. conclusion Now, in this concluding section, I propose that sincerity be the moral fiber that produces the fabric of Chinese philosophy or thread that weaves the warp of knowledge and the woof of action in the moral fabric of Chinese philosophy and, for that matter, the Sinistic way of thinking and doing. This proposal, I submit, is quite consistent with and an extension of Wang Yangming’s philosophy because for him, we might say, all the (Confucian) moral virtues—humanity (jen), filiality (hsiao), righteousness (i), propriety (li), wisdom (chih), and fidelity (hsin)—are grounded in the sincerity of the will (cheng i), that is, the performance of an existential project or what Cua calls “prospective knowledge.” I am more and more convinced that ch’eng is the most important moral precept that underpins, motivates, and governs the thought and action of a Sinistic soul. Some years ago, while I was reading Ivan Morris’s fascinating study of the Japanese mind and tradition called The Nobility of Failure: Tragic Heroes in the History of Japan,35 I was profoundly moved by the fact that this is the essence of the Oriental moral soul. This phenomenon emanates from the Confucian moral ideal of sincerity (makoto in Japanese), and one cannot minimize the influence of the philosophy of Wang Yang-ming or O Yomei in Japan.36 The apotheosis of a tragic hero is Saigo Takamori from the Meiji Restoration, who was also influenced by Wang Yang-ming. Saigo was a corpulent, “death-defying” hero whose eyes, legs, hands, and fingers were depicted as ready “tools for action.”37 Sincerity as a cardinal moral virtue means we mean what we say or we perform in action what we promise in words, which spells syntactically word performed. In other words, the word as performed actually embodies an index of value. The keyword in translating the concept sincerity, I suggest, is performance, which has a familiar ring to those of us who read John Austin’s philosophy of speech acts as “performative utterances” or his themes on “How to Do Things with Words.” The idea of performance not only denotes the fulfillment of the spoken word in or as action but also transcends the dualism of mind and body. For performance as the consummation of one’s deed requires corporeal
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execution.33 The Confucian formulation of the “rectification of names” (cheng ming)—calling things by their right names—exemplifies the ethics of language in performance. It is the accountability of speaking as moral performance that is also affiliated with the idea of fidelity or faithfulness (hsin)—etymologically speaking, man standing by his words. Be that as it may, in the Analects, Confucius said, “Without knowing the power of words, it is impossible to know man” (Analects, 20: 2.3). This affirms the following: man as homo linguisticus for whom language is not merely a transparent medium for representing reality, the centrality of language to human conduct, and the ethics of language embodying the humanity of man. Take a few more examples of what Confucius says in the Analects: (1) when the superior man “is heard to speak, his language is firm and decided” (19: 9); (2) “the wise err neither in regard to their man nor to their words” (15: 7); (3) “the virtuous will be sure to speak correctly, but those whose speech is good may not always be virtuous” (14: 5); (4) “the superior man is modest in his speech, but exceeds in his actions” (14: 29); and (5) friendship with the “glib-tongued” is injurious (16: 4).39 Interestingly, moreover, both ideograms to govern and to rectify are pronounced the same (i.e., cheng), and in Chinese ideographic writing, the former contains the latter as its radical. In the end, the rectification of names is a political concept par excellence. Although it is an influential concept in the Chinese body politic and the history of Chinese political thought, it is mentioned explicitly and directly only once—in the Analects—in conjunction with the proprietary conduct of the ruler in the affairs of the body politic: the first necessary thing the ruler (of Wei) had to do in administering the government, Confucius suggested, is “to rectify names,” for “if names be not rectified, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language is not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success” (Analects, 13:3.2–5). As the Chinese syntax itself is action, so are Chinese ideograms performative.40 Indeed, Chinese ideography (calligraphy in particular) is a kinetic art: it is the human body in graceful motion. And the Chinese revere the art of calligraphy as much as painting: calligraphy is the painting of ideograms or—to intimate the spiritual and personal dimension of the artist himself— characters. In very significant measure, Chinese ideography is a choreography of human gestures and, as a family (“nuclear” and “extended”) of signifiers (signs or symbols), “a conversation of gestures” that, because of the presence of meaning, is not the reduction of ideograms to human physiology. The ideogram is indeed “a vortex that responds to lines of force. It is a corporate energy.”41 For the eighteenth-century Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista
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Vico, who had a keen sense of linguistic autopsia or anatomy and to whom Confucian thought was not totally foreign, words are carried over from human bodies to signify nature where the “body language” animates inanimate things and from the properties of human bodies to signify the institutions of the mind.42 Picasso’s Swimmer (1929) and Acrobat (1930), which are the brilliant and elegant strokes of a genius, are two choreographs of the human body in fluent and rhythmic motion that are approaching ideography or calligraphy. They are, in short, dancing anthropograms. R. G. Collingwood observes that every language is a specialized form of bodily gesture and, as such, the dance is the mother of all languages.43 With Samuel Beckett we can conclude that in language as gestures, the spoken and the written are identical.44 In the end, all this is grounded in the notion of embodiment or body as subject rather than merely object—that is, I am my body—is a unique and momentous discovery of phenomenology in an effort to overcome the dualism of mind and body and thus of man and the external world that has plagued Western philosophy particularly since Descartes’ dichotomization of res cogitans and res extensa. This endeavor confirms once more the importance of Wang Yang-ming’s philosophy in which mind and body are, as shown by Tu Wei-ming, one of its four correlations. Now, I think, we have begun, just begun, to appreciate earnestly Wang Yang-ming’s doctrine of the unity of knowledge and action as a profound and momentous idea that, in turn, attests to the intraphilosophical importance of Sinism. To compare and affiliate his philosophy with existential phenomenology is to edify and celebrate both the momentousness of Wang’s philosophy and its intraphilosophical importance. His is the great affirmation that we are, morally and otherwise, what we say and what we do all as performance grounded in the sincerity of the will. Wang’s philosophy is a confirmation of the personal ethics of responsibility—“personal” in the sense of being neither exclusively subjective nor exclusively objective. Let me conclude my remarks by quoting a passage with an analogy to music as a performing art, that is, with an accent on performance as integrating and consummatory from Herbert Fingarette who is a perceptive American interpreter of Confucius and Confucianism: Acts that are li are not mere rote, formula-conforming performances; they are subtle and intelligent acts exhibiting more or less sensitivity to context, more or less integrity in performance. We would do well to take music, of which Confucius was a devotee, as our model
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here. We distinguish sensitive and intelligent musical performances from dull and unperceptive ones; and we detect in the performance confidence and integrity, or perhaps hesitation, conflict, “faking,” “sentimentalizing.” We detect all this in the performance; we do not have to look into the psyche or personality of the performer. It is all “there,” public. Although it is there in the performance, it is apparent to us when we consider the performance not as “the Beethoven Opus 3” (that is, from the composer perspective), nor as a “public concert” (the li perspective), nor as a “post-Mozartian opus” (the style perspective), but primarily as this particular person’s performance (the personal perspective).45
CHAPTER 5
jen an e xiste ntial and p henom enol ogi cal proble m of intersub ject i vi t y
The sentences of the Chinese sages are like blossoms which open and unfold before us and close again when man leaves them, opening anew when he returns. —Max Picard
i. prologue The subject matter of this essay is an existential and phenomenological interpretation of the spirit of Chinese philosophy, through the understanding of the idea of jen as a philosophy of intersubjectivity. As such, the purpose of this paper is to point out a close affinity between Chinese philosophy and existential phenomenology (or phenomenological existentialism) and to contribute ultimately to the understanding of philosophy as a phenomenon and to philosophy itself. Although there is a definite relatedness between existential and phenomenological philosophy and the spirit of Chinese philosophy, practically no comparative analysis exists1—not to mention the almost complete lack of influence of existential philosophy and phenomenology on today’s Chinese philosophy.2
ii. existential phenomenology and chinese philosophy compared The new philosophical style that combines the existential thought initiated by Søren Kierkegaard and the phenomenological thought initiated by Edmund
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Husserl has become known as “existential phenomenology.”3 What unites phenomenology and existential philosophy is an existential interpretation of the intentionality of consciousness (i.e., “existential intentionality”4) and the idea of Lebenswelt (lifeworld) that was developed at the end of Husserl’s philosophical career.5 Existentially speaking, intentionality is a precognitive meeting of the existing self with the world. However, as Paul Ricoeur points out, there is much of existential phenomenology in Husserl’s philosophy, but not everything in it is existential phenomenology. To the extent to which phenomenology is concerned with the “problematic of existence,” it converges with existential philosophy. Phenomenology is the descriptive method that serves an existential intention.6 It thus becomes an indispensable tool in elucidating the modes of man’s existence in the world. Philosophy, in this sense, is viewed as a reflexive activity that is concerned with the meaning that the prereflexive world (vorwissenschaftliche Welt) has for us all.7 Therefore, the central theme of existential phenomenology is not pure description. It never describes for the sake of describing but describes the “various aspects of the insertion of man in the world” and attempts to “discover the place of man in the world.”8 It can be said, therefore, that existential phenomenology is essentially a philosophical anthropology whose concern is man (anthropos) in the world: not the inner man who is withdrawn from the world, but the man who is immersed in the world. It becomes a philosophical anthropology insofar as it studies “the total existence of man in his Lebenswelt.”9 The relationship of Chinese philosophy to existential phenomenology lies in the very fact that Chinese philosophy is a practical humanism. Humanism (or the philosophy of man) is the keynote to Chinese philosophy, whose tradition was set by Confucius when he said, “Jen is to love man and chih is to know man.”10 The central theme of Chinese philosophy is man himself. As Wing-tsit Chan unequivocally states, “Whether a Chinese is a Confucianist or a Taoist, a conservative or a radical, a scholar or an illiterate, he is a humanist. To him, man is the measure of all things.”11 This humanistic bent permeates not only philosophy but government, the arts (poetry, drama, music, painting), and religion as well.12 In Chinese philosophy, man holds a special place in the universe. This is also true for Martin Heidegger, who gives a privileged status to man and his reality (Dasein) and, accordingly, to the study of the being of man (Fundamentalontologie) in his early philosophy. The essence of man for the Confucianist is jen. Jen is what is quintessentially human. Jen as “humanity” does not signify a collectivity of all men but instead “the human quality of man.”13
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It is a constitutive element or ontological structure of man, that is, being human. In this precise sense, Chinese philosophy is a humanism that, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty defines, “confronts the relationship of man to man and the constitution of a common situation and a common history between men as a problem.”14 Chinese philosophy and existential phenomenology, moreover, focus on man primarily as actor; both are philosophies of human action. They are concerned with what man does and affirm the primacy of action (praxis) over thought (theoria), that is, existence (thatness) over essence (whatness). As Heidegger asserts, “The essence of human reality is its existence.”15 Chinese philosophy, as a practical humanism, focuses on what man does. Existential phenomenology also treats the subject primarily as an actor, participant, or agent. The proper starting point of a philosophy of action is “I am the doer” or “active agency.”16 The essence of man’s existence is action, and the primordial and irreducible structure of action is intersubjectivity. The development of post-Husserlian phenomenology shows a main concern for two areas: (1) the Lebenswelt and (2) the problem of intersubjectivity.17 However, these are not separate problems; they are interrelated because the lifeworld is an intersubjective world. Alfred Schutz emphasizes this interrelation when he defines “social reality” as “the sum total of objects and occurrences within the social cultural world as experienced by the commonsense thinking of men living their daily lives among their fellow-men, connected with them in manifold relations of interaction.”18 Jen encompasses these two areas in one, for it refers to the mundane world of man’s action in relation to other human beings and things. Having noted a close relationship between Chinese philosophy and existential phenomenology both as philosophical anthropology and, particularly, as philosophy of human action, one may further demonstrate this connection by examining the place of jen in Chinese philosophy and of intersubjectivity in existential and phenomenological philosophy. “Confucian jen,” writes Wing-tsit Chan, “whether applied to human beings or to things, is essentially social and active. These two qualities—sociality and activity—are its outstanding characteristics, and they can be traced back to Confucius.”19 In the light of the existential and phenomenological analysis of intersubjectivity and the lifeworld, the following paragraphs will examine jen: first, as practical activity (although it is not completely free from a metaphysical and transcendental bent); second, as sociality; and, third, as love or the feeling of commiseration, which also is relational.
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iii. chinese philosophy and existential philosophy The practicality of Chinese philosophy shuns the intellectualist tradition in the West and the barren wasteland of essentialism, and avoids what Kierkegaard called a “chimera of abstraction.” The spirit of Chinese philosophy is mirrored in the primacy of the vita activa over the vita contemplativa. As to the proper relationship between jen (existential) and chih (essential) or action and knowledge, Mencius says that wisdom is to know jen and i (righteousness). Kierkegaard, too, makes the distinctive between “essential knowledge” and “accidental knowledge,” and affirms that the former is knowledge, which has “an essential relationship to existence.” Essential knowledge refers to that knowledge that “has a relationship to the knower, who is essentially an existing individual, and that for this reason all essential knowledge is essentially related to existence.”20 For the yin-yang Confucianist Tung Chung-shu, “Wisdom without humanity [jen] means knowledge not translated into action.”21 It was Wang Yang-ming who perfected the Confucian emphasis on the correspondence of words and action. In his celebrated disquisition on “the unity of knowledge and action” (chih hsing ho yi), he insisted that the finality of knowledge is realized only in action: “Knowledge is the beginning of action, and action the completion of knowledge.”22 Later, K’ang Yu-wei similarly declared, “Both humanity and wisdom are exercise [in action], but humanity is nobler.”23 As Chinese philosophy and the Confucian way are active, so is existence active and so are existential modes of acting. John Wild points out that the philosophy of existence focuses “not so much [on] what he [man] is as how he acts.”24 Jean-Paul Sartre also stresses that existentialism “cannot be taken for a philosophy of quietism, since it defines man in terms of action . . . nor for an attempt to discourage man from acting, since it tells him that the only hope is in his acting and that action is the only thing that enables a man to live. Consequently, we are dealing . . . with an ethics of action and involvement.”25 The subject, as Gabriel Marcel sees it, is engaged in the world qua agent, and his involvement is meaningless unless the self is an agent. Similarly, Chinese philosophy is a telling annal about man’s—to use Henry G. Bugbee’s term—“actual involvement in reality as an active being.”26 Primacy of action over thought connotes that thought is only an intellectual part of reality, which is the total existence of man involved in the world. To say that thought is primary is to inflate thought. As Marcel affirms, “Thought cannot go beyond existence” and “thought is inside existence.”27
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Thought is inactive.28 Action is the home in which thought dwells. To say that man is primarily a thinker is to disengage him from worldly involvement precisely because thought is necessarily an abstraction (i.e., disengagement). In turn, to disengage man from the world is to make him a little abstract effigy, because he is abstracted from the real and is led to the threshold of dehumanization. To be human is to engage actively in the world. Confucian jen “deals with what to do and how to act,” and the Confucian tradition has been a persistent “emphasis on the active relationship in human society.”29 As jen is “a way of action,”30 the world of jen is the mundane and earthly world of everyday action. The character “yung” in the Chung yung (The Doctrine of the Mean) signifies “the everyday life of the ordinary people”31 or “normalcy.”32 It was Confucius who first made jen a serious and important philosophical idea. In him, not only did Chinese humanism, which incorporated jen, reach its climax, but humanism and jen became coeval as well. Jen is the way of human action as well as the way of man, and it is especially the Confucian Way because, as Chan explains, “Confucian jen has been largely confined to the mundane world,”33 and because “no other subject . . . engaged so much attention of the Master and his disciples.”34 Jen became the “center” and “backbone” of the thought and teaching of Confucius, after which it became one of the most significant subjects in Confucianism and thus in Chinese philosophy.35 According to T’an Tsu-t’ung, who wrote the most comprehensive treatise on jen in the history of Chinese philosophy, jen is the element of all elements.36 Mencius emphasized the importance of the application of jen. By so doing, he made jen applicable to various human relations (i.e., the gradation of jen). He considered jen an everyday activity when he wrote, “humanity (jen) is [the distinguishing characteristic of] jen (man). When embodied in man’s conduct, it is the Way.”37 The “protagonist” of Neo-Confucianism, Han Yü, attacked “Taoist inaction and Buddhist silence and annihilation” in defense of “the Confucian Way of having action.”38 Jen is also active and dynamic in that it is the “life-giver.” It is an originating and generating force (sheng). The idea of jen as sheng is found in the I Ching (The Book of Changes) and in the I Li (The Book of Rites). It is said that “growth in spring and maturing in summer: these are like the quality of jen.”39 However, it was the pioneer of Neo-Confucianism, Chou Tun-I, who identified jen with sheng. Later, Wang Yang-ming stated this idea most forcefully when he wrote that jen is “the principle of unceasing production and reproduction.”40
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iv. jen as intersubjectivity Sociality is correlative to action. The field of action demands the reciprocity of the existing self with the other; that is, the structure of action is relational. Jen as sociality is inscribed in the existential and phenomenological notion of intersubjectivity. To say that jen is the essence of human existence is to insist that existence is coexistence. Thus the philosophy of jen is the philosophy of intersubjectivity par excellence. Intersubjectivity so understood is primarily an existential relation in a concrete situation rather than an epistemological concept. It is the direct encounter of one man with another in action. Action in the true sense implies sociality and is always heterocentric. Etymologically speaking, jen is composed of two ideograms: “man,” which is also “jen,” and “two” (i.e., “persons in relation,” “man in society,” or “man in the world”).41 As K’ang Yu-wei explains, “the word jen consists of one part meaning man and another part meaning many. It means that the way of men is to live together.”42 Jen is a nexus of the reciprocal relations of one actor to other actors in the world. As Bugbee remarks, “Not out of this world, but in this world, we are. In and of this world, as fellow creatures.”43 Jen is best described as the “liturgy of intersubjectivity”44 or the “sacrament of dialogue.”45 It is the sacred idea that my world is not exclusively mine, nor is your world exclusively yours; more truly, the world is our world. As J. Quentin Lauer states, I exist because others exist; my being as subject is to be related, not only to objects but also to other subjects—to be with. But, from another point of view I can say: I am because the world is, and the world is because I am. I am not swallowed up in the world; I am not de-individualized. Rather, I am more individualized, because I am in the world—my dignity as a man, as an individual, is not distinct from my being in the world, whereby the world is precisely this world, and I am precisely this man.46 Jen reveals the structure of man as a relational being, and only through the thou is the I discovered.47 “As jen is preserved,” writes Ch’eng Hao, “the self and the other are then identified.”48 Here the Confucian notion of jen is brought together with Buber’s dialogical principle, which regards reality as the mutuality of active relation. “All reality,” writes Buber, “is an activity
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in which I share without being able to appropriate for myself. Where there is no sharing there is no reality. Where there is self-appropriation there is no reality. The more direct the contact with the Thou, the fuller is the sharing.”49 Similarly, interpreting Mencius, Fung Yu-lan says, “Human relations mean to carry on the social relations, and to carry out human relations means the social activities of men.”50 Karl Jaspers correctly interprets Confucian jen as what makes man human, and he brings the Confucian philosophy of jen close to his philosophy of communication. He considers that “to be human means to be in communication” and to remove “a shell of solitude.” For him, furthermore, truth itself is but communicability.51 As for T’an Tsu-t’ung, jen is the encounter of “one thing to communicate with another.”52 Language or, more precisely, speaking is the primordial form of communication, and its structure shows the nature of intersubjectivity. Speaking is a reciprocal relation between the speaker and the listener. As Heidegger expresses it, language is the dwelling place of Being, whose shepherd is man.53 Confucius said, “Without knowing the force of words, it is impossible to know men” (Analects, 20.2.3). Jen itself cannot be understood without language because language is, according to Mikel Dufrenne, “a mediation between others [as well as the world] and myself.”54 Language is a medium of one’s communication with others and the world. However, the problem of language is not a problem of words as such but a problem of speaking man and of encounter. In speaking, as Georges Gusdorf emphasizes, “The we is realized in the union of I and you.”55 Thus, speaking discloses the relational being of man. Jen is an encounter between the existing subject and the other, of which distance is measured not so much by “betweenness” as by “withness”; a we-relation of “I-with-others.” It is a network of interhuman relations (or “the bond between beings”) that suggests immediacy, intimacy, and directness (i.e., “togetherness”).56 Jen is—to borrow John Macmurray’s epigrammatic phrase—“an instantiation of the ‘I and You.’”57 It is an immediate and undifferentiated flow of the reciprocal relation between the I and the you. In this existential relation, “man tends . . . to live more in others than in himself; more in the community than in his own individual self.”58 Insofar as jen demands the immediate intimacy of interpersonal relations, the terms “participation with commitment” (engagement) and “encounter” (rencontre or Begegnung) accurately correspond to the meaning of jen. Furthermore, jen is the source from which all human relationships (jen-lun) originate. There are five human relations (wu lun) that are spelled out in The
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Book of Mencius: (1) father and son, (2) ruler and minister, (3) husband and wife, (4) old and young, and (5) friendship.59 In Confucian literature filial piety (hsiao) is regarded as the basic pattern of the five relations. It is the starting point of human relations. Mencius related the “actuality” of jen with filial piety and the “actuality” of brotherly respect with i,60 whereas Confucius said, “Filial piety and brotherly respect are the root of humanity (jen).”61
v. the concept of jen in chinese philosophy Another important application of jen as intersubjectivity is love or the feeling of commiseration. It is important to emphasize from the outset that emotion or feeling particularly as Kierkegaard and Marcel see it, is the dynamic and enriching element of the world of existence and human action.62 For Marcel, feeling is “a mode of participation,”63 and for Kierkegaard, passion is “the highest expression of subjectivity” and “the culmination of existence.”64 In Chinese philosophy, from Confucius to Fung Yu-lan, jen as the feeling of “love” is “the most persistent tradition” in jen-analysis.65 Han Yü mentions love as one of seven feelings.66 It seems to be no accident that Chinese philosophy, whose concern has been the everyday world of action, stresses the importance of jen as the feeling of commiseration, for an “emotional contact” such as sympathy is “a primary level of intersubjectivity.”67 Jen as the feeling of love demonstrates fully its intersubjective character, for as Robert O. Johann describes it, “human love in its fullest sense is precisely an experience of inter-subjectivity.”68 Jen as love erases all distinction, not only between the self and other human beings, but also between the self and things. Similarly, Buber considers an “I-Thou” relation possible, not only between “man and man,” but also between man and “beings and things.”69 Jen is “the Thou” of Marcel because, for him, “Love moves on a ground which is neither that of the self, nor that of the other qua other; I call it the Thou.”70 Moreover, Max Scheler’s description of sympathy and Edith Stein’s analysis of empathy are illuminating. For Stein, empathy is “an act of feeling,” as it is with Mencius’s commiseration; “we-ness” is a true expression of empathy, and men can experience others only through empathizing: “The feeling of oneness and the enrichment of our own experience become possible through empathy.”71 Tung Chung-shu, the first among Han Confucian thinkers, used “love” as the meaning of jen. The ancient philosophers, such as Mo Tzu and Chuang
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Tzu, used jen as love in several different ways.72 Ch’eng I represents the prevalent view of Neo-Confucianism when he says that “jen is a reality, while love is a function”;73 the substance of jen is universal, while the function of love is particular. Through the philosophical tendency of Neo-Confucianism, therefore, jen obtained a more universal quality whereby jen as love (ai) or affection (ch’in) is interpreted only as its function: the nature of jen is substance, while the feeling of love is function. As Ch’eng I says, “Love is feeling, whereas humanity [jen] is the nature.”74 As for Chu Hsi, “Jen is the principle of love . . . and if there is jen, there is love.”75 It was Mencius who first related jen with the feeling of commiseration or sympathy for the suffering of others. It is a natural tendency in all men in that it has no ulterior motives. It is the natural tendency that cannot “bear (jen) to see” the suffering of others. The empathic feeling is naturally aroused or “born” when one sees “a child about to fall into a well.”76 For Wang Yangming, the feeling of commiseration extended to other animate beings and inanimate things as well: birds, animals, plants, tiles, and stones.77 T’an Tsut’ung, who was under the influence of Buddhism and Christianity, regards the “nature” (hsing) of love as “Buddha-nature” or as “compassion and mercy” (tzu pei) and as the Christ “spirit” (ling hun).78 The importance of jen as love is that it is an intersubjective feeling of the self toward others. It is one’s unconditional care for others. For Scheler, sympathy as an intersubjective feeling of contact is natural, so jen is a spontaneous and natural mode of being in the world. Fellow feeling and sympathy for sufferings are not only natural but also the beginning of jen. Mencius writes, “The feeling of commiseration is the beginning of humanity.”79
vi. the moral virtue of jen The foregoing analysis of jen as activity, sociality, and the feeling of love is not meant to diminish or ignore the importance of the differences between the spirit of the Chinese philosophy of jen and many phenomenological analyses of intersubjectivity or, for that matter, those differences that exist among existential philosophers and phenomenologists themselves, the complexity of which this essay cannot attempt to explain. The following paragraphs will discuss differences, focusing on two themes: first, the philosophy of jen is characteristically deontological or prescriptive; second, it affirms the idea that only in social existence does man acquire his authenticity, which thus
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opens the door for a social and political theory80 and, more significantly, for a program for social action. It will further be maintained that the primacy of responsibility over freedom conveys the genuine spirit of jen. The philosophy of jen is axiology, as is the descriptive phenomenology of values; that is, it is in part the formal description of existential values. However, it goes beyond mere description in that it prescribes existential norms in guiding human action, and it thus becomes distinct from the formal phenomenology of values. It is one thing to say that the world is a world of values and another to say that the world ought to be valuable. In this sense it shares, among others, the thought of John Wild. Jaspers summarizes Confucian jen well when he writes that it is “humanity and morality in one.”81 The realm of values (or virtues) is not a superstructure of existence, nor are norms (the ought) and facts (the is) separated in everyday human existence. Norms are an integrally constitutive element of everyday existence. “In the Lebenswelt,” John Wild stresses, “value is not a later addition. It is constitutive of the thing. . . . A human culture is not a neutral structure with approvals and disapprovals added on. It is a structure of approvals and disapprovals.”82 Value and norm are parts of the given facticity of existence. The purely descriptive and formal analysis of values, that is, value theory, is not the genuine way of jen. For Wang Yang-ming, the man who disengages himself from others is an unworthy man. Thus, the unworthy man is a man without jen,83 and man without jen extols himself, as does Buber’s man of “self-appropriation.” To extol the self is unreal, because this magnifies the self. In contrast to Wang, Heidegger is morally neutral in his phenomenological analysis of “being in the world.”84 Confucius made jen the universal virtue from its pre-Confucian conceptions as the particular virtue of kindness. In this way, jen is regarded as the standard bearer of all other “virtues” in interhuman relations. Jen is also called the perfect virtue because it synthesizes the four other constant virtues: i (righteousness), li (propriety), chih (wisdom), and hsin (faithfulness). As Chu Hsi writes, “Whenever and wherever humanity (jen) flows and operates, righteousness will be fully righteousness and propriety and wisdom will be fully propriety and wisdom.”85 Ch’eng Hao also states, “The student must first of all understand the nature of jen. The man of jen forms one body with all things without any differentiation. Righteousness, propriety, wisdom, and faithfulness are all [expressions of] jen.”86 Moreover, for Confucius, the man of jen must also practice “earnestness, liberality, truthfulness, diligence, and generosity.”87 In summary, jen is the apotheosis of all virtues,
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that is, the moral way of man. Similarly, Remy C. Kwant writes that “beingtogether-with-others is also the fundamental realm in which all other values are disclosed.”88 For Kwant, the importance of reciprocity is that it is “the origin of our world of meaning” as well as “the height of all values.”89 Value itself is relational, because only in reciprocity is value created, and it must be understood in the context of meaning, because meaning is a value and value has a meaning. For Wild, “The very heart and soul of meaning” is “value,” for the lifeworld as the ultimate horizon is “ordered around some project directed toward an ultimate value.”90 Since the lifeworld is the world of action, value is the élan vital of existence and thus of action. Human action is the source of value: “Human action is divine, because it is a creation [of values].”91 Raymond Polin maintains that the phenomenological analysis of values is useless unless it constitutes an introduction to a philosophy of action.92 Meaning is the logos of existence upon which, as Viktor Frankl testifies, human survival depends. Life that is devoid of meaning is not existence but only death. The meaning of life originates in reciprocity or the world. Only in reciprocity is there “self-transcendence.”93 In jen man fulfills existential meaning by going beyond the self. Jen is self-transcendence precisely for the reason that it demands loyalty to a cause greater than the self. The moral and “other-directed” structure of jen can also be found in its two components of chung (conscientiousness) and shu (altruism), which stand respectively for “the center of mind” and “like-mindedness.” Tseng Tzu holds that for Confucius “The Way” is “none other than conscientiousness (chung) and altruism (shu),” and The Doctrine of the Mean states, “Conscientiousness and altruism are not far from the Way.”94 Jen is the unity of chung and shu. As Fung Yu-lan explains, “To say that the all-pervading principle of Confucius is chung and shu, is the same as saying that it is jen,”95 and those who practice the two do practice jen. Furthermore, chung is called the “positive golden rule,” for it is “the doing to others what one likes oneself”; and shu is the “negative golden rule,” for it is “the not doing to others what one does not like oneself.”96 Fung concludes, therefore, that “the virtues of chung and shu both aim at the extension of one’s self to others, so that the one quality can imply the other.”97
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vii. jen as moral responsibility Jen affirms the idea that social existence is authentic existence. Meaning, value, and norm are grounded in the world that is necessarily intersubjective. Intersubjectivity so conceived is a genuine encounter of the existing subject with others, that is, “other-centered” (heterocentric or dialogical). In this way, it closely shares Buber’s dialogical principle. Marcel’s philosophy of participation, Jaspers’s philosophy of communication, Merleau-Ponty’s notion of man in the world, and Ludwig Binswanger’s idea of love. The existential views of Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre are different. For Sartre,98 intersubjectivity as a mutual encounter of two subjects is impossible, because for instance, the other in the “stare” (le regard) becomes objectified; that is, the self petrifies the other as an object rather than another subject. Kierkegaard tends to be self-centered (egocentric or monological) when, for example, he declares that truth is subjectivity, whereas, for Jaspers, it is communicability.99 Although Heidegger declares that the world of human existence (Dasein) is the intersubjective world (Mitwelt),100 his analysis of “being-with” (Mitsein) is essentially self-centered. His analysis of “care” (Sorge) as “being-in-the-world” is, as Binswanger points out, “being of the existence for the sake of myself.” In contrast, Binswanger juxtaposes his notion of “love” as “being-beyond-the-world,” which means “being of the existence for the sake of ourselves.”101 Moreover, in Heidegger, the anonymous public (das Man) is the mode of unauthentic existence, whereas Buber considers that social existence as the genuine “We” is the authentic mode of man’s existence.102 The self who is enclosed in the cell of his own being is deprived of his being in the world. The thinking self is necessarily an enclosed self. In this sense, the philosophy of jen is attuned to Schutz’s phenomenology of the everyday self in the social world rather than to Husserl’s phenomenology of the transcendental ego.103 Freedom and responsibility as two modalities of action are a related issue of intersubjectivity, and they clarify the nature of intersubjectivity. The existential analysis is dominantly but not always marked by the emphasis that existence is freedom. Maurice Natanson epitomizes Sartre’s philosophy when he states that, for Sartre, “the tragedy and dignity of man lie in the dictum, to be is to be free.”104 Although, strictly speaking, freedom and responsibility are not an aspect of jen, it can be maintained that jen is consistent with the idea that responsibility is primary. Indeed, jen is “a spark of responsibility.”105
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To say that freedom is primary is to inflate the self and therefore infract man’s genuine reciprocity and make it “monological,” although freedom is essential in action. Action is freedom only from the standpoint of the self, whereas action becomes responsibility in the presence of others. The primacy of responsibility means to recognize the primacy of the Thou. Viktor Frankl declares that “freedom is necessary for self-actualization; but responsibleness is the location of the meaning of self-transcendence.”106 Freedom is, then, a “quality” that the individual self possesses, while responsibility is a “relation” between the self and the other.107 This is the reason the primacy of responsibility is germane to intersubjectivity and to man’s being in the world. “Only a human being,” Abraham J. Heschel writes, “is said to be responsible. Responsibility is not something man imputes to himself: he is a self by virtue of his capacity for responsibility, and he would cease to be a self if he were to be deprived of responsibility.”108 Infinite or absolute freedom is only an ontological possibility of the self. However, freedom in a concrete situation is finite and conditional,109 because in the field of action others also exert their own freedom. The loyalty to the freedom of others is nothing other than responsibility. Absolute freedom is an unreal abstraction, as is an isolated individual, because the self in the world exists only in relation to others. Absolute freedom destroys not only its own being but also responsibility, and therefore, eventually, the meaning of existence as well. Perhaps in this sense, Georges Gusdorf writes, “The highest freedom begins communally—no longer a freedom that separates, but a freedom that unites.”110 It is more proper to say that the dignity of man lies in responsibility, whereas his tragedy lies in absolute freedom. Responsibility is an obligation, as is jen. Response is the very beginning of responsibility—according to etymology, responsibility is the response (or answerability) to the call of the other. “Genuine responsibility,” writes Buber, “exists only where there is real responding.”111 This is what we must mean by conscience, and responsibility is the call of conscience. Henry G. Bugbee, who takes responsibility as the focal point of human action, considers responsibility “a profound concern of man for man.”112 Jen is responsibility. It is the profound concern of man for his fellow men. It is profound because it is not only the capacity to respond but also the demand to respond, which Bugbee insists are the two aspects of responsibility.113 Intersubjectivity or a nexus of interhuman relations is meaningful only when responsibility takes on a more positive role than freedom. It is the sinew of social philosophy, because authentic existence is always coexistence. As
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John Wild writes, “Freedom is a partial, negative aspect of responsibility which is richer and more complete in meaning.”114 “The ultimate responsibility,” writes George Schrader, “is existence itself. To exist means to be in a world, and in a social as well as a natural world. Man is a responsible being, personally, naturally, socially, politically.”115 Jen is the perfect responsibility because it embraces all of these and more. It demands that, as Bugbee says, “We all stand only together, not only all men, but all things.”116
viii. epilogue The purpose of this essay has been to emulate the spirit of Martin Buber when he says, “I build no towers, I erect bridges.” Chinese philosophy has contributed most significantly to philosophical anthropology, through which it converges with existential phenomenology in the West. Philosophical anthropology is a hermeneutic of everyday existence as it is actually lived by the ordinary man in the world. Philosophy, when viewed in this way, is rescued from the quicksand of a mere technicality vastly irrelevant to the mundane world of living and culture. As John Wild tersely states, “Apart from man, there is no world, no meaning, and no value.”117 Chinese philosophy begins with and ends in man, and the philosophy of jen is a significant commentary on the lived reality of man in the world. Existential philosophy, too, has relentlessly been pointing out the danger of reducing man to mere objectivity and, moreover, of dehumanizing him to the abyss of anonymity.118 In Chinese philosophy man is a harmonious being. In the existential analysis, in contrast, man’s tragic modes of absurdity, estrangement, anguish, dread, despair, and death are often stressed. Consequently, the Confucian view of man is more consonant with the “affirmative” view of Paul Ricoeur119 and Gabriel Marcel than with the “negativistic” analysis of Sartre, who says that man is nothing but “a useless passion.” Man the problematic of existential philosophy and man the harmonious of Chinese philosophy might well be the reflection of different cultural settings: one is largely the phenomenon of industrial culture, while the other the manifestation of preindustrial or traditional culture. The philosophy of jen is impeccably a hermeneutic of social existence as authentic existence. In its truly dialogical form, it departs from the monological view of intersubjectivity. It is therefore most at home with the dialogical philosophy of Buber, for in his thought the essence of man unfolds itself
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neither in the individual alone nor in the collectivity but only in “the reality of the mutual relation between man and man.”120 The philosophy of jen is not an individualistic existentialism but is properly a social existentialism. Moreover, its main contribution lies not so much in its formal axiology as in its existentially normative sociality. It is rooted in the imperative promise that “man will not persist in existence if he does not learn anew to persist in it as a genuine We.”121 The social and political implication of jen is striking in that, like Buber’s dialogical principle, it shuns both the Scylla of extreme individualism, on the one hand, and the Charybdis of collectivism, on the other.122 Philosophy is always perspectival because human existence is. Any ambiguity in jen as a philosophical concept must ultimately be traced back to life itself, which is ambiguous because it is full of overlapping horizons and their unmarked boundaries. Jen is not abstractly conceptualized but is embodied in the personal and mundane existence of the actor who is open to, and participates in, the world as his correlative. Jen must be lived. In conclusion, it must be emphasized that the philosophical spirit of Confucius and that of an existential phenomenologist are similar. For Confucius the “sage” (or the man of jen) is the “apogee in human relations,” and for Husserl the philosopher is the “civil servant of humanity” (Funktionäre der Menschheit). Only with such a view can the philosopher cease to play a game of mere intellectual jugglery, by which he dehumanizes philosophy and in the end man himself. In Chinese philosophy, however, there is no need to celebrate a homecoming of the Lebenswelt, because it has never left its home. Chinese philosophy is a mecca for everyday lived reality, which is its tradition as well as its starting point. Jen can shelter the modern man who seeks refuge from the inferno of homelessness and unauthenticity, for the authenticity of being human must be and can be sought only in genuine reciprocity.
CHAPTER 6
confucianism and existentialism inte rsubje ctivity as t he way of m an
Entre l’Orient et l’Occident, . . . le rapport n’est pas celui de l’ignorance au savoir, de la non-philosiphie à la philosophie. . . . L’unité de l’esprit humain ne se fera pas par ralliement simple et subordination de la “non-philosophie” à la philosophie vraie. Elle existe déjà dans les rapports latéraux de chaque culture avec les autres, dans les échos que l’une éveille en l’autre. —Maurice Merleau-Ponty
i. introduction Jen is a central theme of Confucian philosophy. Since Confucius jen occupied the mind of every major Chinese thinker. It expresses the idea that the truly and uniquely human quality of man (i.e., humanity) is intersubjectivity (or sociality). Man is human by virtue of his sociality, and his existence is social existence. By way of action, man exists in the world in relation to others. In this regard, the Confucian idea of jen shares a major concern of Martin Buber’s philosophical anthropology, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology and Karl Jaspers’s philosophy of Existenz. As Buber’s main theme is the interhuman or the sphere of the between (das Zwischenmenschliche), so are Merleau-Ponty’s and Jaspers’s coexistence and communication. In contrast, however, the idea of jen diverges from the subjective view of human existence in the thought of Søren Kierkegaard. In the following pages, first, I shall briefly discuss an affinity between Confucian philosophy and existentialism. Second, I shall examine the spirit of Chinese philosophy as a
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practical humanism and then jen, which embodies the spirit of this practical humanism in “Jen: Confucius’ Social Way of Man.” Third, I shall consider what I take to be the subjective view of existence in Kierkeggard in contrast to jen in “Subjectivity: Kierkegaard’s Inward Way of Man.” Fourth, I shall describe Jaspers’s view of communication, which converges with jen as sociality in “Existenz: Jaspers’s Communicable Way of Man.” For the purpose of comparing Confucian philosophy with existentialism, it is appropriate to consider Jaspers since, first, he explicitly acknowledges his direct relationship with and yet in an essential way differs from Kierkegaard. Second, although both Buber and Jaspers have made comments on Chinese philosophy from the standpoint of their philosophical views. Jaspers, unlike Buber, recognizes specifically jen as a problem of sociality. Kierkegaard seems to have had some idea of the Orient. He mentioned Ceylon and the attitude of the Tibetans as an example of the crowd mentality in their blind worship for authority. Husserl, who at the end of his philosophical career regarded the everyday lifeworld (Lebenswelt) as the most universal problem of philosophy and as the basic matrix of philosophical and scientific enterprises, spoke of China and India as anthropological specimens. But for him the crisis of philosophy and humanity meant essentially the crisis of European philosophy and European man—European in not a geographical but a cultural sense. However, Chinese philosophy—Confucianism, Taoism, and Zen Buddhism—is not entirely foreign to the twentieth-century existential thinkers, especially to Buber and Jaspers. Buber edited a collection of “Chinese ghost and love stories” in 1911 and “a selection of the parables” of Chuang-tzu in 1914.1 As he himself confesses, Taoism had a place in the early mystical phase of his philosophy. He recognizes an affinity between Zen and Hasidism, their fundamental differences notwithstanding, in their common concern for the “positive relationship to the concrete” and for human “activity in the world.” I think it regrettable, however, that Buber overlooked Confucianism and its persistent tradition of jen that, as sociality in the everyday action of man, is attuned to his dialogical philosophy. In his address delivered at the conference of the China Institute in Frankfurtam-Main in 1928, Buber doubted any contribution of the Confucian culture of China to the living forces of the West, although he noted the teaching of Laotzu as “something genuine and deeply Chinese.” Sometime later, Buber spoke of “the exalted, but to me somewhat alien, Confucian teaching.”2 Throughout his writings Jaspers often mentions Oriental philosophy, Chinese and Indian, and recently wrote of Confucius and Lao-tzu.3 The sense of
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openness that keynotes his philosophical attitude indicates that he would not likely bypass Oriental philosophy although he once came to the conclusion that it “seems far inferior to Western philosophy in scope, in development, and in inspiring formulations.”4 In his discussion of Confucius, Jaspers is highly critical of the followers of Confucius for their rigid formalization and dogmatic canonization of his teachings, of their making a “god” of the man who wanted to remain just a philosopher of the common man and “a simple man of the people” and of their turning his philosophy into a “utilitarian” and a “pedantic pragmatism.” As for Taoism, Jaspers exalts Lao-tzu for his profound and humble concern for the Tao in the world. Although they had different views, Confucius and Lao-tzu nonetheless stood on the same ground in which “the Chinese wisdom of a life” is illuminated by their thought. Jaspers comments that Confucius detoured the “Encompassing”—an obvious reference to his own philosophy—“by way of the human order” whereas Lao-tzu spoke “from the Encompassing to the Encompassing.” Moreover, Jaspers points out that Lao-tzu was no more a mystic than Confucius. It might be added that Taoism, however different it may seem from Confucianism, is still the product of the Chinese mind and is grown in Chinese indigenous soil. Only in this sense can one agree with Buber that there is “something genuine and deeply Chinese” in Taoism. However encompassing the Tao may be and whatever else it may imply, it is still grounded primarily in the world and, as “the Way” of man, is in the world, not beyond or outside of it. Confucianism sees the engagement of man in the mundane world by action and Taoism by nonaction. It is obvious that there are divergences within the movement of existentialism. Despite their divergences, all the existential thinkers have one essential theme in common—essential to a comparison between existentialism and Confucianism. Existentialism is above all a critique of theoria or speculative philosophy. The existentialist shuns what Kierkegaard called the “chimera of abstraction” in favor of a concrete analysis of human experience as man lives it. Kierkegaard refused to accept the idea that man is merely an abstract system objectified by thought. Man is not a “little abstract effigy.” Existentialism and Eastern philosophy have in the past been compared on the basis of Zen (or Ch’an in Chinese) as known in the West especially through the writings of Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki.5 At once it must be pointed out that Suzuki himself and Hajime Nakamura6 have attempted to show that Zen is a uniquely Chinese or “Sinistic”7 phenomenon, for it is a phenomenon of the acculturation of Indian Buddhism by the practical and concrete mind of the Chinese people. Nakamura takes Zen or the transformation of Indian
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Buddhism in China as the crucial indictor of the Chinese way of thinking. Significantly, Suzuki emphasizes in his discussion of Zen that the Chinese people, unlike the Indians, “are rather practical and devoted to worldly affairs; they are attached to the earth, they are not stargazers.”8 He also cites Kierkegaard who rejected speculative philosophy that builds a conceptual palace that is doomed not to be lived in.9 The Zen spirit, which expresses the unique Chinese mentality of practicality, also shuns empty speculation in philosophy—empty speculation in the sense that philosophical conceptualization is unrelated to the everyday life of man—and attempts to go beyond intellectualism, logicism, and sheer verbalism. If Zen is an embodiment of the Chinese mentality, then the Chinese way of thinking is existential, for it is concerned with the everyday experience of man as he lives it. The practically minded Chinese would therefore agree with Merleau-Ponty who says that “the world is not what I think but what I live through” in association with others and the world as man perceives and lives it precedes the conceptualization of it.10 The Zen spirit is characterized by “teaching by action” and “learning by doing.” The common and sufficient denominator of comparison between existentialism and Confucianism, whose tradition of practicality is the main spring of what Suzuki calls the Zen spirit, is the idea that philosophy is not an abstract body of doctrines but a concrete analysis of the ordinary existence of man in the world. Unlike Kierkegaard who revolted against the tradition of theoria, Confucius took this concrete role of philosophy for granted simply because there was no tradition of intellectualism and rationalism to revolt against. After Confucius, however, Confucianism tended to become more speculative, and there was a period when Neo-Confucianists revolted against otherworldly and contemplative Buddhism. Moreover, this Neo-Confucian revolt is another indication that the Confucian tradition has been this-worldly and practical. The difference between Confucianism and existentialism stems from their different cultural roots and perspectives. One is deeply rooted in agricultural society and the other in the background of the scientific and technological culture of the modern West. Confucianism stresses order and harmony in the universe, whereas one of the most persistent and dominant themes of existentialism is alienation or the loss of man’s identity as human being. In a sense existentialism is a philosophy of revolt against “mass” man and society as a result of modern science and technological industrialization. It is a revolt against the other-directed or market personality of modern man. Kierkegaard’s condemnation of “the present age”11 was that of the leveling
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process of individuals in the nineteenth-century industrial society of Europe. Similarly, Martin Heidegger’s existential analysis of the “anonymous public” or “they” (das Man) as the inauthentic mode of human reality reflects the prevailing condition of man in this century; Jaspers, Marcel, Berdyaev, and Ortega all express their concern for depersonalization and dehumanization in modern “mass” man and society.12 The twentieth-century existential thinkers are uniformly opposed to a thaumaturgy of science, including naturalism and logical empiricism as its philosophical expressions. As to how to overcome man’s alienation in the modern age, existential philosophy attempts to offer at least two solutions. One is the individualistic solution Kierkegaard suggests, which has had considerable influence on later existential thinkers. The other is the idea of reciprocity as stressed by Buber and Jaspers. The first resorts primarily to the awakening of subjective inwardness as the authentic mode of human existence, whereas the second stresses the bond of one individual with another as the key to the overcoming of modern anonymity. Confucian jen applied to the modern condition of man sides with the latter view.
ii. jen: confucius’ social way of man13 Chinese philosophy, whether it be Confucianism, Taoism, or Ch’an Buddhism, is essentially a practical humanism. The Chinese way of thinking, as Nakamura shows, is practical, concrete, particular, and perceptual. This is not only the typical expression of Chinese philosophy but also the general expression of the Chinese people themselves. It is safe to say without falling into a relativist position that philosophy is a specific modality of culture (i.e., it is a cultural fact) and as such is a specimen of the total cultural phenomenon called a lifeworld. As a practical humanism, Chinese philosophy focuses its attention on man and what he does. Its radical premise is that the root of man is man himself. Chinese philosophy begins with and ends in man. Unlike Heidegger, Confucius saw fundamental ontology as an end in itself in his philosophical analysis rather than a basic means to disclose the hiddenness of Being (Sein). For Confucius, there was no going beyond humanism. He said, jen is “to love all men” and knowledge is “to know all men” (Analects, Book 12: Chapter 22).14 Jen is the pillar of the practical humanism of Confucius. It is most commonly agreed that Chinese philosophy, especially its Confucian tradition, is practical and that practicality represents the unique quality
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of the Chinese mentality. To be practical, philosophy is concerned primarily with “man the actor” rather than “man the thinker,” with the everyday world of the common people as they live it, and in terms of normative ethics, with how they ought to live. Wing-tsit Chan states that Chinese philosophy “is dedicated to everyday life and ordinary action. Consequently, the Chinese did not develop a special terminology for philosophy different from everyday language and beyond the understanding of the simple man.”15 To be radical, the philosopher must get at the root of things, and this root is the everyday action of man living with other men in society. The basic premise of this radical philosophy is the primacy of practice over theory, and it is the idea that man is ultimately judged by what he does rather than by what he thinks. The question of the unity of knowledge and action has been a central and perennial issue in the history of Chinese philosophy, which emphasizes the priority of action over knowledge. This issue goes back to the ancient Book of History (Shu Ching) where it is said that “it is not the knowing that is difficult, but the doing” (The Books of Shang, Book VIII). However, the most systematic formulation of this question is found in the sixteenth-century Neo-Confucian philosopher Wang Yang-ming in his celebrated doctrine of “the unity of knowledge and action” (chih hsing ho yi): “knowledge is the beginning of action, and action the consummation of knowledge.”16 The same question continually occupied the mind of Chinese philosophers and political leaders in this century such as Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek, and the Marxist Mao Tse-tung.17 As a thoroughgoing practical humanism, Confucianism affirms thisworldly life. When he was asked about the spirits of the dead, Confucius answered, “While you are not able to serve men, how can you serve their spirits?” (Analects, 11: 11). Concerning death, unlike many existentialists, he queried, “While you do not know life, how can you know about death?” (Ibid.). Confucius did not talk about “extraordinary things, feats of strength, disorder, and spiritual beings” (Analects, 7: 20). The primary concern of Confucius is what is immediate here and now with man in the mundane world, which overshadows the question of the beyond, the far and the transcendent. The Tao is essentially the way of man, and it “is not far from man.” When man practices the principle of reciprocity “he is not far from the Tao” (Doctrine of the Mean, 13: 1 and 2). Moreover, to be practical (or to act) implies morality or how man ought to act. As man lives in relation to others, the practical world has “a structure of approvals and disapprovals” as its indispensable element.18 The question
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of moral norms arises only because man lives in the world with others. Take the example of sincerity as a practical virtue in everyday Chinese life. It is the correspondence between speaking (verbal act) and doing (nonverbal act). To be sincere, man must carry out in action what he says he intends to do; and their discord is bad faith. The primary importance of sincerity as a practical virtue lies in the actual performance of deed, which is consistent with the Confucian idea of the unity of knowledge and action. Spoken words have their practical imports as a prelude to the performance of action. For Confucius, words have a performatory function. Only in this sense, must we understand Confucius who said, “Without knowing the force of words, it is impossible to know men” (Analects, 20:2.3). Moreover, take the following examples of what he says in the Analects: (1) When the superior man “is heard to speak, his language is firm and decided” (19: 9); (2) “The wise err neither in regard to their man nor to their words” (15: 7); (3) “The virtuous will be sure to speak correctly, but those whose speech is good may not always be virtuous” (14: 5); (4) “The superior man is modest in his speech, but exceeds in his actions” (14: 29); and (5) friendship with “the glibtongued” is injurious (16: 4). Confucius also suggested that the first necessary thing the ruler (of Wei) had to do in administering the government is “to rectify names,” for “if names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success” (Analects, 13:3.2–5). Unlike Wittgenstein who was obsessed with the bewitchment of language in philosophical analysis, Confucius saw the importance of ordinary language in its performatory value. The finality of words is achieved in the performance of action, and thus the actual performance of action is higher in value than words themselves. Confucian philosophy as a practical humanism is based in the premise of the primacy of praxis over theoria, and praxis is a social event as man lives his everyday life with others. In this sense, as has been said earlier, jen embodies the practical humanism of Confucian philosophy. Mencius clearly stated that jen is the “distinguishing characteristic of man” (Works of Mencius, 7.2:17). Confucius himself considered jen as an “all-pervading unity” of his philosophy (Analects, 4:15.1). The way of jen is found in the encounter of the common people living their lives in association with others. He insists on his association with the common people. All anyone can hope to achieve in his or her lifetime is to practice jen: jen is “a rule of practice for all one’s life” (Analects, 15: 23). Jen is the ultimate concern of every man.
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The composition of the Chinese character “jen” itself suggests its central meaning. Jen is composed of two ideograms, “man” (also pronounced jen) and “two.” It suggests sociality or reciprocity in the everyday action of man. It is an all-encompassing network of social relationships. Man is involved in mankind and lives his everyday life in relation to others, that is, in the family, in the community, and in the nation. Man lives in an atmosphere of humanity. Man in isolation is not only a fiction but also an infraction of being human, and reciprocity constitutes the very humanness of man. Only through sociality does a man become a man. Thus, for Confucius, jen is the primary existential index of human reality. It is the sacrament of coexistence, and man’s ultimate concern is coexistence. As it is the way of everyday action and sociality in one,19 jen entails morality. As Jaspers succinctly puts it, jen is “humanity and morality in one.”20 From the very start, the question of morality assumes the existence of relationships. To be a man of jen, one has to practice it. It is accessible to not just the privileged few, but, on the contrary, the privileged few are determined by their practice of jen. Anyone is superior when he or she practices jen. Man’s superiority is determined not by his intelligence alone, as Plato claimed, but also by the practice of jen of which every man is capable. Jen is the element of all moral elements. It is often translated as “universal virtue,” “benevolence,” “golden rule,” “love,” “compassion,” and so on. As the apotheosis of all moral virtues, jen encompasses the other virtues such as righteousness (i), propriety (li), wisdom (chih), and faithfulness (hsin). And it is also the unity of conscientiousness (chung) and altruism (shu). As Fung Yulan states, “To say that the all-pervading principle of Confucius is chung and shu, is the same as saying that it is jen,” and to practice the two is genuinely to practice jen. Moreover, chung is called the “positive golden rule” for it is “the doing to others what one likes oneself,” whereas shu is the negative golden rule for it is the not doing to others what one does not like oneself. Thus Fung concludes that “the virtues of chung and shu both aim at the extension of one’s self to others, so that the one quality can imply the other.”21 To say that jen is the standard-bearer and consummation of all human relationships is not to ignore other human virtues and relationships. To reach the peak and go the farthest, one has to start from the bottom and the near. That is to say, jen must be grounded in the primary type of human relationships, for “to go to a distance we must first traverse the space that is near, and in ascending a height, . . . we must begin from the lower ground” (Doctrine of the Mean, 15). Among five types of human relationships (i.e.,
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political, matrimonial, fraternal, friendly, and filial), the filial relationship is the most basic and primary. Before jen is fulfilled, first one must fulfill filial piety (hsiao).22 To summarize, jen has the central place in the practical humanism of Confucian philosophy. Jen is the encompassing way of man in the world. It refers to the way of everyday action of man in relation to others in his lifeworld. What stands out in jen is the idea that sociality is the primary index of man’s existence, and as such it entails morality and is regarded as the highest moral norm attainable to man. Jen epitomizes the human lifeworld as the very structure of both sociality and values.
iii. subjectivity: kierkegaard’s inward way of man To show a subjective tendency in existential philosophy, there is no more appropriate starting point than the thought of Kierkegaard who is not only the founder of its movement but also the unswerving dramatizer of subjectivity. For Kierkegaard, the attainment of man’s inward subjectivity is, religiously and ethically, the quantum satis of every individual as his lifetime task, whereas for Confucius, in contrast, it is the fulfillment of jen or reciprocity as the lifetime task of every man. It is obvious that Kierkegaard is a Christian existentialist while Confucius is a nontheist humanist or, as Karl Barth calls him, “pagan.” Both the source and end of Kierkegaard’s existential ethics is the Christian faith, and his ethics of individualism is derived from what he calls the Christian principle. Nonetheless, the primary concern for both Kierkegaard and Confucius is ethics rather than the theory of knowledge. They are concerned with the existential question of how to live rather than what to know. To become a man of jen (or a sage) for Confucius and a Christian for Kierkegaard is the ultimate goal of man, including the philosopher. Kierkegaard is an apostle of subjective inwardness: inward subjectivity is both the truth and reality of human existence. “Existence,” he writes, “constitutes the highest interest of the existing individual, and his interest in his existence constitutes his reality.”23 The focal point of his philosophy is theocentric subjectivity, for the Christian principle, as he sees it, is nothing but an expression of the inward subjectivity of an existing individual. The religious and ethical principle demands that each individual must exist for himself alone. Even loving another person is accidental because the essence of love is the lover’s own inwardness. The religious man is “that individual who is alone, alone in
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the whole world, alone—before God,”24 and “the result of divine providence is to make everything more inward.”25 To be religious, the existing individual must relate himself to the unconditional in the deepest sense of his inwardness. However, it is also true that for Kierkegaard to be an individual man has also to fight against “every tyranny,” even the tyranny of the unconditional: “To live in the unconditional, inhaling only the unconditional, is impossible to man; he perishes, like the fish forced to live in the air.”26 For Kierkegaard there are two kinds of unforgivable crimes against being human (i.e., humanity), both of which are equally serious: (1) the reification of objective thought over the existence of an individual, which reduces man to the abstract “It” and (2) the reduction of a particular existing individual to the mere numerical or crowd. First, as a philosopher, Kierkegaard expresses his individualism when he says, “For me—not personally, but as a thinker—this matter of the individual is the most decisive thing.”27 Subjectivity is not primarily an epistemological notion but rather the capacity of a particular individual to exist inwardly, which includes his thinking. Kierkegaard insists that the existence of a particular individual is never reducible to abstract thought. He does not reject thought as such but rejects the abstract thinker who deserts existence. In contrast to the abstract or objective thinker, the subjective thinker is the one who is deeply interested in and relates his thought to his existence as an individual. Second, Kierkegaard equally rejects the idea of the “crowd” as a “glittering illusion” of the modern age. The victory of the crowd is the victory of an abstraction over the individual. In The Present Age, Kierkegaard attempts to reveal the ills of man’s anonymity in the modern age or, more exactly, in the nineteenth century. It is the phenomenon that demoralizes individuality by the rise of the “mass,” which is vociferous, “apathetic,” “indolent,” “unrepentant,” “superficial,” and “formless.” The phenomenon of the crowd is that which reduces man to nobody. It is a phantom because it does everything but actually nothing and because it is talkative but says nothing. The phenomenon of the crowd is an immoral confusion because it deprives the moral character of the individual, that is, it takes away the inwardness of individuality that constitutes man’s very moral character. Subjectivity alone is the truth, whereas the crowd is the untruth. The victory of an existing individual over anything numerical is an ethical victory. The human sense of responsibility is diminished when the individual is reduced to a numerical fraction. The multitude makes the individual impenitent and irresponsible. Every responsible man thus stands alone for himself
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in private. Moreover, for Kierkegaard, to be an individual means to become as impolitic as possible. It is the individual who stands firmly against the “unholy political attitude,” as the inward truth of subjectivity cannot be decided by “ballot.” “The witness of the truth,” he stresses, “has nothing to do with politics.”28 It is interesting to note how Kierkegaard compares religion with politics in terms of the symbols of a martyr and a tyrant. On the one hand, the martyr is one whose duty is “to prevent the hordes from forcing their way through that narrow pass of the individual and to make every one become an individual.” He is “the suffering individual who educates others through his Christian love of mankind, translating the masses into individuals—and there is joy in heaven over every individual whom he thus saves out of the masses.” On the other hand, the tyrant is “egoistically the individual who inhumanly made the others into ‘the masses,’ and ruled over the masses.”29 Despite his religious and ethical edification of a single existing individual, Kierkegaard is no more a solipsist than he is an egotist. Nor does he preclude the possibility of communication as such. Rather, he insists that first and primarily man must be recognized as “this” or “that” individual and should not be reduced to the “they” or for that matter, an object. His primary task is to build “a sanctuary for the divine growth of inwardness” in each individual and “it is only after the individual has acquired an ethical outlook, in face of the whole world, that there can be any suggestion of really joining together.”30 The self as “this” or “that” individual is always in the singular, never in the plural. On the basis of this concrete particularity of an individual, Kierkegaard asserts that human equality is absolute. Human equality is not numerical or mathematical equality. The basis of absolute equality is the idea that “every man, absolutely every man, inasmuch as he is a man, can be, indeed must be, an individual.”31 The principle of this absolute equality is found in the Christian principle of the essential likeness between men only as individuals before God. Kierkegaard maintains that to love or honor a neighbor is compatible with the Christian principle of individualism. To honor one’s neighbor is to honor him as a unique individual. The idea of “neighbor” is the “absolutely true expression for human equality.” “Neighbor” (or religious “congregation”) is not a collective term, for to love one’s neighbor does not imply that man should love the crowd, which means for Kierkegaard the abasement and denial of man as an individual and destroys the very Christian principle itself. Concerning communication, he is opposed to, for example, superficial talkativeness of the crowd that jabbers on constantly but says nothing. He values silence over
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talkativeness (publicity or advertisement), for silence shows a truer picture of man’s inwardness whereas talkativeness “is afraid of the silence which reveals its emptiness.”32 And he says that the “exteriorized caricature of inwardness is vulgarity and talkativeness,” and “silence is the condition sine qua non of all educated social intercourse.”33
iv. existenz: jaspers’s communicable way of man The idea of communication has a central place in the philosophy of Jaspers as has jen in the philosophy of Confucius. In this respect, where Kierkegaard’s philosophizing leaves off, Jaspers’s begins. Their essential continuity lies in avoiding what Jaspers calls “intellectual acrobatics” or what Kierkegaard calls “abstract thought.” Insofar as the question of communication is concerned, there is a radically new beginning in Jaspers. What Kierkegaard excepted from his philosophical questioning constitutes the very beginning or condition of Jaspers’s philosophy. Kierkegaard’s philosophizing started and ended in Denmark, whereas Jaspers’s started in Germany and continues to the world. This is in part why Jaspers says that communication is not only a philosophic task but a historic one as well. For the purpose of this essay, it suffices to note only one essential difference between the two: for Kierkegaard truth is the inwardness of subjectivity and is enclosed in subjectivity, whereas for Jaspers truth is communicability and is infinitely open. For the former the fact of every man existing for himself is his “gift” and “benefaction” (Kierkegaard’s own terms) whereas for the latter communication is uniquely a human necessity. The contrast is between the abyss of inwardness and the openness of communication. For Jaspers, the “philosophical faith” as the boundless openness to communication (or the total will to communicate) is “the decision to follow a human road.” What, for Jaspers, is this infinite openness? It is both the loving search of men for mutual communication, which reaches no termination and the indeterminateness of knowledge. Openness is the reasoned search for everything that can possibly be encountered in the world, that is, the ultimate road to humanity whose horizon is never closed off. Knowledge itself is impermanent because it is grounded in the historicity (or self-becoming) of Existenz. Openness is also the road through which men may reach “a genuine Transcendence” and “the One.” Only when openness itself reaches its own limit, then can we say with Jaspers that “the ultimate in thinking as in communication is silence.”34
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In Jaspers’s philosophy, “communication,” “Existenz,” “truth,” and “reason” are all related terms in which the first permeates each of the others, and through communication a nexus of human meanings is woven. The business of philosophy is to elucidate Existenz and the manifold possibilities of communication. Truth cannot be separated from communication, for “abstracted from communication, truth hardens into an unreality.”35 Moreover, truth itself is grounded in Existenz, as communication is the very “condition of one’s Existenz” and “Existenz is only real in communication.”36 Existenz is an index by which man’s authentic being is catalogued, and the very being of man is defined in terms of communication: “communication is every form is so much a part of man as man in the very depth of his being.”37 Man is not human if he is to live for himself alone as a mere individual. Without communication, humanity is abandoned. Also, community is “the condition for the actualization of Existenz.” A new life begins in communication and humanness surges out of man’s communication with others. Man is not dehumanized, but his humanity is more elevated by his capacity to communicate and to live in a community. Jaspers says that “to be self and to be true are nothing else than to be in communication unconditionally.”38 The self finds its own being through his or her communication with another Existenz. “Existential communication” involves all the modes of the “Encompassing” (das Umgreifende), which includes what Jaspers calls “empirical existence,” “consciousness as such,” and “spirit.” Each of the three has its own mode of communication and stands on its own right: “There is no truth without some kind of communicability, and what is communicable always belongs on many levels to the various modes of the Encompassing in their interrelations, and always has its meaning within its sphere, not outside of it.”39 However, the unity of communication in Existenz is possible in the unity of these three modes of communication. Furthermore, reason becomes an encompassing bond for all modes of communication in the Encompassing. Reason and Existenz are inseparable and interdependent. One cannot exist without the other. Reason is the source of communication in Existenz; it wills Existenz to communicate, while Existenz is absolutely irreducible to and irreplaceable by another. Reason binds these distant and independent Existenzen into communication. Because of reason, therefore, Existenz is not a self-enclosed monad, but it opens itself to the world. Reason becomes the necessary medium for existential communication, and the selfhood of Existenz is fulfilled by communication through reason. Like the principle of “distance” and “relation” in Buber,40 every Existenz not only is independent
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in the sense that it keeps its distance from another Existenz before coming together in a mutual relation but also presupposes equality as a necessary step for communication. “The unlimited will-to-communicate,” Jaspers says, “never means simply to submit oneself to the other as such, but rather to know that other, to hear him, to will to reckon with him even unto the necessity of a transformation of oneself.”41 In this way, the self-becoming of Existenz is enriched by coming into contact with others, and possibly it transforms itself into a better self. As self-becoming is the endless openness to communication with others, so is the knowledge about Existenz and the world is never finished. Indeed, the scope of philosophy is perennial.
v. conclusion Like Kierkegaard, one may insist that to be authentic human existence must be primarily subjective or, like Confucius and Jaspers, he or she may emphasize the idea that sociality is a primary aspect of human reality. Despite his critical insights into man’s anonymity, Kierkegaard only saw human existence exclusively in terms of a polarization of “either/or”: either the individual or the crowd. The one is the authentic mode and the other the inauthentic mode of human existence. As a result, he failed to see fully the genuine possibility of human reciprocity as a way out of the crowd and yet capable of preserving man’s individual identity. Kierkegaard overlooked the possibility that, as Buber puts it, “A man is truly saved from the ‘one’ not by separation but only by being bound up in genuine communion.”42 The fact about human existence, whether one wants to face it or not, is that man is not and cannot be the prisoner of his own self or, for that matter, of the crowd. He is not enclosed in his own subjectivity and secluded from the world. Man is open to the world, and as Merleau-Ponty sees it, man as an intentional being is nothing but a network of relationships. Man exists, and he knows himself, in the world, never apart from it. The other is his twin and the flesh of his flesh. The self and the other are like interlocking gears.43 To exist means to coexist, and man is involved with mankind. Alfred Schutz affirms that “as long as man is born of woman, intersubjectivity and the we-relationship will be the foundation for all other categories of human existence.”44 Sociality is as central to ethics and moral philosophy as it is to social philosophy simply because individuals exist not independently of but in relation to others. As I have indicated in the introduction of
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this chapter, Confucian philosophy and existentialism share their concern for the world of everyday life as we live it. However, unlike the existential movement, Confucian philosophy is free of a subjective tendency. Jen expresses the view that human existence is (and ought to be) social, which is closely shared by the existential philosophers of coexistence. One cannot easily dismiss Confucian philosophy as a rural philosophy irrelevant to the modern conditions of urban and industrial civilization. For one thing, precisely because jen is an expression of concern for humanity, it has a cosmopolitan outlook and a universal appeal for modern man. The truth about “the Way” of man is that there is no privileged position, Western or Eastern; there is neither superiority nor inferiority of one to the other but only convergences, divergences, and finally the hope for conciliation. However, there can be no conciliation of the truth about man but only a conciliation of different philosophies and philosophers.
CHAPTER 7
heidegger’s way with sinitic thinking
Only connect! —E. M. Forster By “way,” or “how,” we mean something other than manner or mode. “Way” here means melody, the ring and tone, which is not just a matter of how the saying sounds. The way or how of the saying is the tone from which and to which what is said is attuned. —Martin Heidegger
i. prologue The influence of Heidegger on twentieth-century thought has been immense, pervasive, and immeasurable. The German critical theorist Jürgen Habermas, though he was by no means totally sympathetic to Heidegger’s thought, once summarily acknowledged him as the most influential thinker since Hegel. Heidegger’s intention is to deconstruct or subvert the hegemony of the metaphysical or logocentric tradition of the West from Plato to Nietzsche. By deconstruction, Heidegger means a critical procedure in which the accepted concepts are traced back to their sources for the sake of reconstruction. This deconstructive thought poses challenges for an epoch that has experienced the planetarization of Western science and technology, that is, the global domination of what Heidegger himself calls “calculative thinking.” Of course, there has been a long German tradition in the comparative study of intercultural thematics from Wilhelm von Humboldt and Johann Gottfried Herder to Forke. Since Leibniz, however, there has never, I think, been a mood of Oriental étrangisme in philosophy more favorable than the
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one engendered by Heidegger. According to the legendary report by William Barrett of Heidegger’s reaction to reading D. T. Suzuki, Heidegger remarked that he was trying to say exactly what Suzuki had said in his writings on Zen. And it is Japan—Suzuki’s birthplace—that has been most receptive to Heidegger’s philosophy in Asia.1 In fact, Heidegger’s famous “Conversation on Language” (1953–54) was occasioned by the visit of a Japanese scholar— Professor Tezuka—and it shows the filiation between Heidegger’s thought and Japanese toward the affirmation of poetic language, as well as his keen interest in Japanese thought. Heidegger frequently expressed his bewilderment that the Japanese tend to forget the beginnings of their own thinking in their pursuit of the newest and latest trends in European thought.
ii. introduction of heidegger’s thought to the east This chapter is an exercise in what Giambattista Vico calls ingenium, that is, the power of connecting separate and diverse elements in Heidegger and Sinitic thinking. There are formidable, if not insurmountable, difficulties in comparing Heidegger’s thinking with Asian thought in a short essay. First, it is obvious that Heidegger himself is a prolific and difficult writer. Second, there is the famous “turn” or “divide” (Kehre) between the early and the later Heidegger or, to use William Richardson’s expression, “through phenomenology to thought.” There is the left-handed (that is, sinister) compliment— certainly in favor of our present study—that Heidegger’s Being is really the Chinese Tao, for which there is no comparable term in Western thought. Even concerning Heidegger’s Being and Time, there are two diametrically opposed or conflicting interpretations: some view it as historicist because it fails to advance the timeless or eternal truth beyond all ages and cultures, whereas others conclude that it is ahistoricist because in it the structures of human reality are meant to be true of all ages and cultures. Both aporetic views are wrong because they misunderstand—each in a diametrically opposing way— Heidegger’s conception of historicity (Geschichtlichkeit): one ignores it as the redemption of eternity while the other as the recovery of time. Third, there is a multitude of philosophical thoughts, methods, and approaches in Asia, and several writers have proposed the compatibility of Heidegger’s thought with various aspects of Eastern thought. There have been important studies that compare Heidegger with individual oriental thinkers: the favorite comparison, for good reason, is between Heidegger and Kitarō Nishida.
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The broadest thematic category of East Asian thought comparable to Heidegger’s thought would probably be Sinism—the title of the early and pioneering work of Herrlee G. Creel. Sinism was meant to accentuate what is peculiarly or uniquely Chinese in Confucianism, Taoism, and Ch’an or Zen Buddhism and was formulated to encompass the important aspects of philosophical, religious, and ethical thought of both Japan and Korea as well as the Chinese language or ideography. From the perspective of Heidegger’s early thought, the only legitimate way to comparative philosophy is the identification of the philosophical universe as pluralistic. Heidegger indirectly intimated this when he expressed bewilderment that the Japanese chased after everything new in European thought. Why such a rush for (Western) truth unless they believe that it is superior to their own? Nishida—the most important twentieth-century Japanese philosopher who did more than any other thinker to integrate Western and Oriental thought—also believes in cultural pluralism in that the unity of a world culture would be based on the specificity of an individual culture. Parenthetically, it must be pointed out from the very outset that from the standpoint of Heidegger’s thought there can be no separation between truth and method, as there is equally no separation between language and thought on the one hand and between language and reality on the other. After all, Heidegger himself advances the notion in Being and Time that ontology is possible only as phenomenology. The separation between truth and method has been consummated with the rise of positivism or scientism, while the unitary philosophical claim that the methods of the natural sciences, especially physics, are paradigmatic to all truth claims has been contested by Hans-Georg Gadamer in Truth and Method, which makes an effective argument within the context of Heidegger’s philosophical hermeneutics. Let us transpose the notion of what the one-time student of Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, calls “human plurality” (in her seminal work The Human Condition) on to cultural pluralism. According to Arendt, human plurality is the basic condition of both speech and action, and it has the twofold character of equality and distinction. The first refers to the existence of commonality among human beings and human cultures without which we would not be able to understand one another, whether they be primitive and modern or Western and Eastern. On the other hand, without distinction we would need neither speech nor action to make ourselves understood. This is in essence, I propose, the principium of “ontological difference” in Heidegger’s thought. The true merit of this philosophical pluralism—the Heideggerian principle
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of “ontological difference” and the Chinese idea of the complementarity of the two opposites (yin and yang)—lies in a logic of correlation.2 Following cues from Hayden White, I have also called this logic of correlation “diatactics.” White wishes it to replace—appropriately, I think—the term dialectics in order to avoid the ideological overtone of Marx and the transcendental tone of Hegel’s thought: diatactics is neither paratactical (conceptually underdetermined) nor hypotactical (conceptually overdetermined). As a nonreductive method of correlation, diatactics confirms the complementarity of any two given disparate phenomena. It is also tactile to the extent to which it arouses the intimate sense of touch and accentuates the dialogic, pragmatic side of language in use. In this regard, the principle of diatactics, as we will later see, is fundamentally Heideggerian as well when Heidegger defines thinking as a “handicraft.” Ultimately, in the logic of correlation—unlike the dialectics of Hegel and Marx—the positive (yang) and the negative (yin) are not resolved categorically or otherwise in terms of a higher synthesis but preserve the unending flow of their opposition as complementary. In short, the conceptual advantage that diatactics proffers is the following: it rejects the facile monism and dualism as well as the reductionism of all kinds that are likely to fall into the dichotomy of superiority and inferiority in grafting knowledge and action, mind and body, subjectivity and objectivity, language and reality, speech and writing, man and nature, and so on.
iii. heidegger’s affinity to sinism Questioning, Heidegger declares, is the “piety of thinking” (Frömmigkeit des Denkens). Indeed, questioning has been the quintessence of phenomenology as a philosophical movement. Phenomenology is neither a school, a set of dogmas, a method, nor a technique in the same way that mathematics is a technique for the physical sciences today. The founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, who is also Heidegger’s mentor, himself conceives of philosophy as a perpetual beginning, as Socratic ignorance. For the true thinker, philosophy never ceases to be a riddle and wonder to itself. As a vigilance, philosophy seeks the source of knowledge in the “things” themselves. Husserl often used the term “introduction” to characterize a new beginning of phenomenology in his work. Maurice Merleau-Ponty was fond of using the term “interrogation” for his philosophical research to insist that the questioner himself is “always already” (immer schon)—to use Heidegger’s
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expression—implicated in the question he raises. To paraphrase MerleauPonty slightly in order to accent this genealogical spirit in phenomenological thought, the end of phenomenological philosophy is the account of its beginning. In essence, the true phenomenologist is necessarily a perpetual beginner. In this selfsame spirit, Heidegger too defines phenomenology as the possibility of thinking. The “piety of thinking” is the thematic abecedarium of comparing Heidegger with Eastern thought in this essay. As the principium of this essay, it heralds the voice of poetic language in the conversation of humankind and ultimately acknowledges the thinking poet as the legislator of the world. By delimiting our discussion to the single theme, the piety of thinking, we do not betray Heidegger’s spirit but instead uphold it when he himself affirms that “to think is to confine yourself to a single thought that one day stands still like a star in the world’s sky.”3 In the crisis of man and (his or her) humanity, foremost is the crisis of thinking. We prefer the word “thinking” to “thought” for the simple reason that while the latter is a passive end-product, the former denotes the active process of unending activity: it is indeed wayward, on the way. It is, in other words, the Tao—the unending, often meandering road. In What Is Called Thinking? Heidegger himself explains the twofold meaning of participles that participate or take part in two meanings in which the one refers to the other as a pair. In this case, thinking—like blossoming—is an ongoing act. Be that as it may, what is most needed in our time is a way to think appropriately. There is interest in thinking today as it is engendered by thoughtprovoking events. Paradoxically, however, Heidegger rightly observes that in our age the most thought-provoking event is that we are still not thinking, a dangerous condition that leads itself readily to the “banality of evil”— [to borrow a phrase from Hannah Arendt’s controversial reporting of Adolf Eichmann after the model of Heidegger’s anonymous “they” (das Man)]. In such an impoverished state of thinking, we must first clarify the condition of our thinking: this is the primary function of philosophy. The opposite of thinking or thoughtfulness is, of course, thoughtlessness. The banality of evil refers to the unprecedented phenomenon of evil deeds committed by Eichmann on a gigantic, hideous scale that cannot be traced to any wickedness, pathology, or ideological conviction but to the extraordinary shallowness that is neither monstrous nor demonic but rather the authentic inability to think. What Arendt is interested in pointing out here is not our ability to theorize abstractly or think in abstraction but our ability to make moral
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judgments based on the sensus communis (as in Socratic wisdom, Aristotelian phronēsis, or Kantian moral judgment) as the abode of man’s humanity. It is thinking as a natural necessity or duty of the examined human life that is a faculty of every man who belongs to the species called human. To talk about thinking as the pillar of morality is not to neutralize it but to dig its arche (origin) itself: thoughtlessness is indeed a moral latitudinarianism. On the other hand, to moralilze is to trivialize the essence of human thinking. According to Heidegger, thinking as an autonomous activity is distinguished from both knowing (in an epistemological sense) and acting (in a pragmatic sense). For it neither produces solely epistemological truths nor is merely instrumental to action whose manifest aim is measured by its pragmatic cash value. Rather, knowing and acting presuppose thinking. Thinking as alētheia is presupposed in both knowledge and action. As such it is neither scientific, technical, nor utilitarian. In short, genuine thinking is not calculative. The alternative to calculative thinking (rechnendes Denken) is for Heidegger meditative thinking (besinnliches Denken). In the following pages, I will try to show the meaningful nexus of thinking as poiēsis (the poetic), praxis, and technē (the artistic) in the original Greek sense of the terms. In Heidegger’s ontology, thinking and language are inseparable: language is the house of Being whose guardian man is. We always already find ourselves in the midst of language: we are attuned to language as reality rather than as a surrogate of reality. To think of language is to think of reality. Let us call man’s attunement to language “linguisticality” (Sprachlichkeit)—that which makes thinking possible. By linguisticality we denote the following four inseparably related properties: (1) language is intrinsic to human specificity as social; (2) it is inseparable from our conception of reality, that is, it is not a mirror to reflect, copy, or represent it but is reality itself; (3) it is the primary medium of human communication; and (4) it is an embodied phenomenon. In this connection, the most revealing challenge Heidegger poses for comparative philosophy in relation to thinking and language concerns whether Western languages are ineluctably tied to Western metaphysical thinking or instead offer other possibilities of thinking. In Heidegger’s thought one would suspect that they are more or less two sides of the same coin. For Heidegger, our attunement to language and thus to the world is not simply rationalistic in the traditional sense of Western metaphysics. Instead, language is an embodied phenomenon, for which reason, as I have already intimated, I use the term diatactics. In the West, it was Giambattista Vico’s linguistic autopsia (or anatomy)—in the sense of seeking the evidence
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of the senses—which discovered language originally as embodied speech (Sprachleiblichkeit). For Vico, words are carried over from human bodies to signify nature, where the body language animates inanimate things and from the properties of human bodies to signify the institutions of the mind, including, of course, what we call the rhetoric and grammar of language. For Heidegger, too, the hand is more than an organ, altogether it is peculiarly human, that is, the quiddity of being human. In Heidegger’s What Is Called Thinking? occurs a marvelous passage concerning the many ways of the hand that culminate in thinking as a handicraft in the same way that the use of language—both speaking and writing—is the technē (art) of the body. It defies paraphrasing and is worth quoting in full: We are trying to learn thinking. Perhaps thinking, too, is just something like building a cabinet. At any rate, it is a craft, a “handicraft.” “Craft” literally means the strength and skill in our hands. The hand is a peculiar thing. In the common view, the hand is part of our bodily organism. But the hand’s essence can never be determined, or explained, by its being an organ which can grasp. Apes, too, have organs that can grasp, but they do not have hands. The hand is infinitely different from all grasping organs—paws, claws, or fangs— different by an abyss of essence. Only a being who can speak, that is, think, can have hands and can be handy in achieving works of handicraft. But the craft of the hand is richer than we commonly imagine. The hand does not only grasp and catch, or push and pull. The hand reaches and extends, receives, and welcomes—and not just things: the hand extends itself, and receives its own welcome in the hands of others. The hand holds. The hand carries. The hand designs and signs, presumably because man is a sign. Two hands fold into one, a gesture meant to carry man into the great oneness. The hand is all this, and this is the handicraft. Everything is rooted here that is commonly known as handicraft, and commonly we go no further. But the hand’s gestures run everywhere through language, in their most perfect purity precisely when man speaks by being silent. And only when man speaks, does he think—not the other way around, as metaphysics still believes. Every motion of the hand in every one of its works carries itself through the element of thinking, every bearing of the hand bears itself in that element. All the work of the hand is rooted in thinking. Therefore, thinking itself is man’s simplest,
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and for that reason hardest, handiwork, if it would be accomplished at its proper time.4 In Heidegger, therefore, thinking, speech and the hand form a filial unity. He unifies the sayings of Anaxagoras and Democritus, which may appear contradictory at first glance: Anaxagoras, who said that man is intelligent because he has a mouth rather than hands, and Democritus, who said that human progress depends on the working of the hand rather than the mind. Heidegger’s thought is indeed the diatactics of Anaxagoras and Democritus. As the hand is tactile, so are thinking and speaking. If thought is a handy craft, its opposite, thoughtlessness—which is pervasive and rampant in the modern world, as evidenced in the disembodied (alienated) language and behavior of Eichmann—is an infliction of cutaneous alagia, the condition of feeling no pain in the skin. The “thinking hand” or thinking as a “handy work,” of which Heidegger speaks, confers upon us the work of the hand as embodied conduct. As such the hand is not just an extension of the body but is the body incorporated. The hand is the lived body; it is an organized “corporation.” As embodied conduct, the hand is pansensory and synesthetic. It cultivates the workings of the other senses, for example, hearing, seeing, saying, and singing. Indeed, it embodies the sociability of the senses. The import of Heidegger’s diatactics of thinking and language—especially speaking—is, I submit, enormous for comparative philosophy. As Heidegger himself is an etymological master, the etymological and paleographical study of Chinese ideography, known as “etymosinology,” which began with Ernest Fenollosa and influenced later the poetry of Ezra Pound (for example, in the Cantos), should not be left unnoticed. Doubly important, as we will later see in detail, is Fenollosa’s view of the Chinese ideogram as an authentic medium of poetry or the poeticized language par excellence. If the notion of “economy” betokens the genius and gift of Chinese ideograms, Chinese ideography is the exemplar of poetic language. Etymosinology is a dazzling display of the ideogrammic abracadabra by means of which Fenollosa tried to celebrate the meeting of the yin of the markedly feminine East and the yang of the markedly masculine West. Although the feminine and masculine allusions may not be totally appropriate, the correlative logic of the yin and the yang as one unity is brought close to Heidegger’s “ontological difference.”5 Chinese ideography—calligraphy in particular—is a kinetic art: it is the human body in graceful motion. The ideogram as metaphor or imagery of the body is indeed “kinaesthetic,” to use Kenneth Burke’s phrase. And the
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Chinese revere the art of calligraphy as much as painting: calligraphy is the painting of ideograms or—to intimate the spiritual and personal dimension of artists themselves—“characters.”6 In the genealogy of form, calligraphy is indeed prior to painting. In very significant measure, Chinese ideography is a choreography of human gestures and, as a family of signifiers, a conversation of gestures that, because of the presence of meaning, is not the reduction of ideograms to human physiology. The rhetoric of an ideogram, whether it is tree, sun, moon, stream, man, male, female, smile, or cry, lies in its status as a “speaking picture.” For instance, the ideographic gesture of human expressivity (for example, “smile” and “cry”) is indelibly pantomimic—beckoning for a similar response in return. Picasso’s “Swimmer” (1929) and “Acrobat” (1930) are two choreographs of the human body in fluent and rhythmic motion that are approaching ideography or calligraphy. They are, in short, balletic and frolicking anthropograms. Stéphane Mallarmé speaks of the dance as the “visual embodiment of idea” (l’incorporation visuelle de l’idée).7 In The Principles of Art, R. G. Collingwood observes that every language is a specialized form of bodily gesture and, as such, that dance is the mother of all languages. In Not I, the Vichian Samuel Beckett choreographs the dramaticity of speaking as the dance of the mouth. With him we can say that in language as gestures the spoken and the written are identical.8 Since the dance is the motion of the body in time and space, it may legitimately be claimed as the birthplace of all visual and auditory arts (for example, painting and music). Moreover, Marshall McLuhan, who had the romantic vision of writing his antitypographic treatise, The Gutenberg Galaxy, in the ideogrammic medium, thought of the Chinese ideogram as a vortex of corporate energy— corporate in the twofold sense of being bodily and collective. Several years ago, the Japanese journalist Takao Tokuoka reported with humor in the editorial column of the New York Times the inventive word towelket—a shop sign written in Japanese phonetic characters (kana)—which is a combination of the two English words “towel” and “blanket” (towelket = towel + [blan] ket). What born Joyceans the Japanese are! Of course, what I have in mind is Joyce’s talent or inventiveness for composing chordal vocabularies in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. The Joycean decomposition or musicalization of the “abced-minded” world or the “popeyed world” of the “scribblative” has its structural parallel in Fenollosa’s deconstruction or demystification of Chinese ideograms as simple or complex “corporations.” Joyceanism or Joyce’s unique stylistic stands out for its tremendous proclivities for making visible words chordal and for thinking in chords after the acoustic model of music,
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that is, for the production of chordal meanings by obliterating (auditory) content and (visual) form: thornghts (thorn + thoughts), rhythmatick (rhythm + mathematics), paupulation (paucity + population), evoluation (evolution + evaluation), cerebration (cerebrum + celebration), and so on. If Fenollosa’s etymological and paleographic deconstruction of Chinese ideograms (kanji) is correct, the composition of “towelket” is a result of the natural habitus of the Japanese mind—in fact, of the Oriental mind that is accustomed to the vorticism of Chinese ideograms. I find the etymolinguistics of Chinese ideography both enlightening and fascinating. Consider the following examples of “hypograms” as the corporate insemination of other ideograms: “East” is an entangling of “sun” with “tree” (i.e., the sun entangled in the branches of a tree in the early morning or at sunrise); “old” or “ancient” is a composite of “ten” and “mouth” (“ten” over “mouth,” presumably referring to what has come down through the mouth for ten generations); and “truth” or “faithfulness” is a composite of “man” and “word” (man standing by his word). Two of my favorite characters are “humanity” and “sage.” The former is a composite of “man” and “two” (two men standing together) and the latter is a composite of “ear,” “mouth,” and “king.” As the king is the unifier of heaven, man, and earth, the sage is the unifier of heaven, man, and earth by speaking and hearing truthfully. Having shown the correlative logic of thinking and language as embodied phenomena in Heidegger and Chinese ideography, we should go one step further in characterizing language as performance. As the poetic is for Heidegger paradigmatic to all thinking, doing, and making, so poeticized or aestheticized language is performance par excellence. This view is of the utmost importance, as we will later show, for accounting for man’s conduct. Heidegger regards written language as inferior to or a poor substitute for direct conversation because in writing thinking easily loses its flexibility, and it becomes difficult to retain the multidimensionality peculiar to thinking: he is an aural or auditory thinker.9 Ralph Waldo Emerson, who spoke eloquently of thinking as a pious reception, also thought that (written) language is fossil poetry.10 For the same reason, Heidegger rejects the spectatorial view of knowledge embedded in the Cartesian cogito—the logocentric kernel of modern Western philosophy, that is, thinking as disinterested, distanced, and detached. In his studies of Renaissance art and poetry, Walter Pater views music as the “consummate art,” in that all art aspires to attain the condition of music. In The Birth of Tragedy (1967), Friedrich Nietzsche—the last metaphysician of the West, according to Heidegger—echoes and rejoices in the voice of
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Orpheus, the singer who moves “a world in darkness”: “it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.” So the Nietzschean aesthetic is epitomized by music: music is for Nietzsche one way to make the aesthetic intelligible and grasp it directly: “Quite generally, only music, placed beside the world, can give us an idea of what is meant by the justification of the world as an aesthetic phenomenon.”11 The prevailing use of auditory metaphors in Heidegger’s thought is congruent with his critique of the modern age as the age of “world picture” (Weltbild), his general conception of language, thought, and the world in relation to Being: for example, “mood” or “disposition” and “attunement” (Bestimmtsein). There is indeed the semantic kinship or filiation of the German words “to hear” (hören), “to hearken” (horchen), “to belong” (gehören), and “to obey” (gehorchen). Moreover, “hearing” and “obeying” have the same etymological root: the Latin obaudire, to listen from below, is to obey. In Being and Time, Heidegger conceives of mood (Stimmung) as a primordial, existential character of man. As a factum brutum, mood (Stimmung) has an ontological bearing because it is a basic mode of “There-being” (Dasein). It is the basic way of finding ourselves in the world. Through it, we attune ourselves to the world: that is to say, we lend a musical ear to and obey it at the same time. As disposition, mood is not just the sensitive and emotional side of human consciousness but rather the essential nature (animus) of man. “Mood,” Heidegger writes, “is never merely a way of being attuned, and letting ourselves be attuned, in this or that way in mood. Mood is precisely the basic way in which we are outside ourselves. But that is the way we are essentially and constantly.”12 No wonder, being outside ourselves, mood—both sorrowful and joyful alike—is highly contagious in a small circle of spouses and close friends and relatives. In short, mood is the tonality of Dasein as “Being-inthe-world” (in-der-Welt-sein). The structure of oral poetry is indeed paradigmatic to language as performance. Oral poetry is rhetoric par excellence because rhetoric, as one author defines it succinctly, is “the signifying act that values oral performance.”13 Emerson captures the performative spirit of language when he describes words as actions and conversely actions as a kind of words. In oral poetry, poiēsis, praxis, and technē are rolled into one. In the genealogy of language (as communication), oral poetry is the first language, and the oral poet is the first born. The persona and (oral) poetry of Homer signify the dawn of Western thinking itself. Like Hermes, Orpheus, and even the Muses (the daughters of Mnemosyne or Memory), Homer was a singer or bard. The name of the
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god Hermes, in whose name hermeneutics celebrates the sacred and magical canon of his spoken words, stems from herma, the mute stone monument that also corresponds phonetically to the Latin sermo (speech)—as we know, muteness or silence is the mother tongue. Hermes was the inventor of language and the magician of spoken words who was spellbinding. According to the Homeric “Hymn to Hermes,” the Hermetic legend is synonymous with the discovery of the universe (uni-verse) as the sounding orbit. Hermes was a herald (keryx): he was a virtuoso of sound making whose kerygma (message) was aired by and encoded in the sound of spoken words. The term “herald” is related to the Latin carmen (song) and the Sanskrit karuh (to sing) and karus (bard), whose sole virtue scales the pitch of the signifying excellence of voice. As the master of speech, Hermes was the messenger of Zeus; in his capacity as a herald he gave Pandora her voice. No wonder, then, this genuine Olympian was “the friendliest of the gods to men.” The tintinnabulation of oral poetry is consonant with the poetic voice of Heidegger, which is resonant with the poet Rilke: Gesang ist Dasein where poiēsis, praxis, and technē—the sung word, the deed, and the art of word making—come together as unity in the organization of existence or Being.14 First, oral poetry is oral and auditory (acoustic), that is, in it the mouth and the ear are the main organs of communication. In Homeric oral poetry as shown in the works of Milman Parry, Albert B. Lord, Marshall McLuhan, Eric A. Havelock, Walter J. Ong, and others, speech and music are inseparable simply because it is sung. Second, in oral poetry there is no separation between composition and performance: composition is spontaneous performance. The oral poem—like jazz or any improvised music—is composed not for but in performance. Third, in the Homeric culture the oral technē of poetry was the instrument of preserving the dynamic flow of a collective life. Poiēsis was technē, and mimēsis was the poetic technique of communication to preserve the acoustic effects (pragmata) of an oral culture. Poetry is an oral performance in the service of the acoustic effects of culture. The dynamic flow of this oral culture was preserved in the cornucopia of poetry, that is, in its repetition, redundancy, and verboseness. The Homeric epic was metaphorically called a river of songs. In essence, oral poetry is speech sung as performative utterances. When a person is making a performative utterance, he is doing something rather than merely saying something that may be true or false, that is, describing or reporting the state of affairs. In language as speech acts, performance and promise are no longer antithetical lexicons. The spoken word as performative utterance becomes an index of moral value
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once it is extended to the realm of human conduct: we are, morally or otherwise, what we say (as a performative act). The Chinese syntax itself, as etymosinologists have tried to show, is action or performance. The Chinese cardinal moral virtue called “sincerity” is spelled syntactically “word-performed” (for which the Japanese tragic heroes from ancient to modern times sacrificed their lives). As it means what we say or perform what we promise in words, it personifies the Chinese conception of the circular unity of knowledge and action in the sense that knowledge is the beginning of action and action the completion of knowledge. There is, of course, a union or family of moral notions connected with sincerity— jen, piety, faithfulness, rite, and so on. Faithfulness or fidelity literally means “man-standing-by-his-word,” and it refers to the responsibility of the speaker to his word as ethical performance. The Confucian formulation of the rectification of names (cheng ming)—calling things by their right (rite) names—exemplifies the ethics of language-in-performance. In the Analects, Confucius said, “without knowing the (performative) power of words, it is impossible to know man.” This affirms the following: the centrality of language to human conduct, the ethics of language embodying the humanity of man, and the spoken word as prescriptive. The following passages from the Analects express the same idea: (1) when the superior man “is heard to speak, his language is firm and decided”; (2) “the wise err neither in regard to their man nor to their words”; (3) “the virtuous will be sure to speak correctly, but those whose speech is good may not always be virtuous”; (4) “the superior man is modest in his speech, but exceeds in his actions”; and (5) friendship with “the glib-tongued” is injurious. It should not be left unnoticed that in recent years Western grammatologists in literary theory have become fascinated with Chinese ideography because it is perceived mistakenly to have the character of pure writing (écriture)—the writing that exorcises the phonetic or is devoid of phonetic genealogy. They echo the voice of Oswald Spengler (the author of The Decline of the West). Spengler acknowledges writing as an entirely new kind of language that brings about a complete change in the conscious relationships and associations of men and women. The cardinal virtue of writing, as he sees it, is the liberation of human consciousness from the bondage and tyranny of the present embedded in speech. Writing resembles architecture, monument, pyramid, tapestry, cathedral, or the Acropolis where the immortal god of abstraction resides. It is the idea of writing as immortal that Spengler wishes to propagate. Timeless truths are embodied not in speech but only in script.
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He emphasizes that writing is “the grand symbol of the Far”—the Far East, perhaps—and the will to eternity. In search of the karma of the ideogram, the thirteenth-century Chinese scholar Tai T’ung wrote Six Scripts after, by his own admission, thirty years of arduous thinking and strenuous work. It is the exegesis of the six different etymological and paleographic roots of Chinese ideography whose tradition has been continued and preserved in the works of Bernard Karlgren. For our analysis here, we ought to mention only the phonetic principle or rootage of Chinese writing, which traces the origin of written figures to spoken sounds. Tai is critical of those etymologists who knew nothing of the principle of phonetic composition. According to him, the written is preceded by the spoken in Chinese: writing makes speech visible. The invisible vapor of speech is distilled, as it were, in visible writing. Chinese ideography is a silent speech as performative. This does not mean, of course, that Chinese writing is reduced to the physiology of phonation. Rather, it only means that Chinese writing is, in important measure, the abstract form of the concrete speech. It is no accident that the Chinese expressions that denote linguistic activity contain the radical for word. Correlatively, however, without the written, the spoken could not be represented to the eye. The circle of language, whose epicenter is sociality, is made up of the spoken yin and the written yang as complementary.
iv. heidegger’s thought and sinism by way of piety What is piety? How can piety be related to thinking in this comparative study? To answer these questions, we must return to the idea that the opposite of thoughtlessness is thoughtfulness. Discussing Eichmann’s real thoughtlessness, which led to the “banality of evil,” Arendt contends that it was his inability to think from the standpoint of somebody else. That is to say, Eichmann was not thoughtful. He lacked receptive reciprocity for the thought of the other, which is tantamount to the absence of genuine communication. “No communication,” Arendt writes, “was possible with him [Eichmann], not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.”15 The definition of piety as receptive reciprocity is like the yin principle as contrasted with the yang principle of the I Ching. In his illuminating discussion of Greek and Roman religion, C. Kerenyi relates the Latin pietàs to
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religio. In fact, some writers (for example, Cicero) used the former synonymously with the latter. For the ritually performed act (rite) belongs to the sphere of pietàs. By examining the legend of the temple that was built in Rome for the goddess Pietas, Kerenyi observes that on the site of this temple, so it was related, a mother had once been imprisoned and had been kept alive by the milk of her own daughter’s breast. The story may have been adapted from a Greek original, though this is by no means certain. But it would have been pointless, had it not represented pietas in the ideal form in which it appeared to the Romans. The special thing which here stands out is something bodily and spiritual at the same time. Pietas here shows itself as a form of absolute reciprocity in nature, a completely closed circle of giving and receiving. In some variants of the story, the mother’s place is taken by the father. But the example thus revered is always this same natural circle of reciprocity. While aidos presupposes that one can also stand outside it, pietas as a matter of course unites those who give nourishment with those who in uninterrupted thankfulness return it, unites the source of life with its creatures from which its sources receive life. The pii and piae are completely enclosed in this circle.16 It is no accident that economists discuss exchanges as the reciprocal relations of economic life both primitive and modern, and modern sociologists and anthropologists recognize the gift as an anthropological specimen for obligatory reciprocity in human relations. Marcel Mauss’s classic study of the gift of archaic societies such as Polynesia, Melanesia, and Northwest America is relevant to the understanding of reciprocity in its primordial form. As a form of obligation, the gift is the necessary form of exchange and one of the bases of social life as carried out by the people on the communal basis in the form of courtesies, entertainment, ritual, dances, feasts, military assistance, marriages, succession to wealth, and so on. For Heidegger, too, thinking as pious is receptive and reverential. It is a receptive response to the call or voice of Being: authentic thinking hears the voice of Being and belongs to it. What must be made absolutely clear from the outset concerning piety as reciprocity is this: like “mood” as the “attunement” or “being attuned” (Bestimmtsein), it is not egocentric (autocentric) but heterocentric (allocentric). For Heidegger as for Kerenyi, piety
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as absolute reciprocity approximates—as milking nourishes and is being nourished—the touching sense of intimacy and thus stands for the incorporation of the spiritual in the corporeal. For, after all, thinking is for Heidegger a handicraft. There is in Heidegger as in Kerenyi—each in his own different way—a filiality between the piety of thinking and thanking. For Heidegger, the old German word Thanc is memory, and thinking that recalls is thanking. Moreover, Cicero, who associates pietàs with religio, enshrines the ears, not the eyes, as religious (i.e., the aures religiosae of the Attic orators). Although the scriptural words are the best guide for the understanding of God’s divine purpose in the universe, St. Augustine, who knew Cicero’s writings well and from whom we inherited some of Cicero’s lost writings, thought that arts such as music and painting contribute to it. In De Musica, however, he contended that music (invisible) is a better guide than painting (visible) for the attainment of man’s religious spirituality and the understanding of the divine order. Thus, the former is a higher art than the latter. Piety, associated with hearing, signifies nearness, whereas theōria, associated with vision, implies distance. It is no accident, therefore, that Heidegger, who regards speaking as the primary essence of language and resorts frequently to aural or auditory metaphors, relates reciprocity to the sense of hearing, hearkening, belonging, and obeying. Hearing is by nature socializing or reciprocating, whereas vision is inherently narcissistic and isolating.17 Piety as reciprocity is also genuinely Sinitic—Confucian, Taoist, and Zen. Indeed, it is the thread that weaves all the Sinitic fabric of such important moral notions as humaneness, filial piety, propriety, and rite as neighboring concepts. Piety as reciprocity signifies the sacrament of coexistence or, as I call it elsewhere, “social principle.”18 The social principle has two distinguishable but inseparable elemental components: (1) homopiety and (2) geopiety. Homopiety refers to the convivial relationships between (wo) man and (wo)man, which may also be called “sociopiety,” whereas geopiety is that part of the “social principle” that is concerned with the connatural reciprocity between (wo)man and nature or the earth.19 Homopiety is dominantly a Confucian principle, whereas geopiety is a Taoist and Zen principle. One may hastily conclude, therefore, that the early humanistic Heidegger would be closely Confucian, whereas the later ontological Heidegger would be closely Taoist and Zen. Besides the Tao Te Ching, to which Chung-yuan Chang has made numerous allusions to Heidegger’s “new way of thinking,” there are the sayings of Chuang-tzu: man is truly a “cosmion”—“Heaven and earth were born at the same time as I was, and ten thousand things [that is,
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Nature as material world] are one with me.” However, Confucianism does not exclude geopiety, nor do Taoism and Ch’an or Zen Buddhism exclude homopiety. In Li Chi, Confucius writes, “To fell a single tree, or kill a single animal, not at the proper season, is contrary to filial piety”—the subject matter that is also taught through the text Hsia Ching in the classical education of the Chinese language at early childhood. In this way, the moral objective of filial piety is not confined to the effect of one man’s conduct on another but is extended to the effect of man’s conduct on other nonhuman beings and things.20 Conversely, there is no shortage, in Taoism and Ch’an or Zen Buddhism, of allusions to human reciprocity. By the same token, it is wrong to associate the early Heidegger with homocentricity or the later Heidegger with the renunciation of man as such. After all, the fundamental ontology of Being and Time is the affirmation of man as an earth dweller; homo is rooted in humus. As Erazim Kohák put it recently, “To recover the moral sense of our humanity, we would need to recover first the moral sense of nature.”21 Harmony, which is the pitch of musicality and the paradigm certainly of all performing arts and perhaps of the aesthetic itself, underscores the piety of thinking and thus the performances of both homopiety and geopiety. It is a gathering of many as an ordered whole: it is, musically speaking, a chorus, polyphonic chord, or orchestration of the differentiated many or, as the Chinese would say, “ten thousand things”—including the making of our thoughts. Therefore, reciprocity that generates and sustains harmony requires the simultaneous weaving of both equality and distinction (difference). For reciprocity without distinction reduces itself to the relationship of indolent anonymity, whereas reciprocity without equality brings about the relationship of rigid hierarchy. To gather our thoughts is to be thoughtful. Gathering denotes nearness, which approximates auditory rather than visual space.22 There is an episodic account by J. Glenn Gray of the German word Heidegger uses: versammeln, which was translated after considerable deliberation and with Heidegger’s own approval, as “to gather.” It is rooted in the old German gattern (to couple, to espouse, or to join in marriage), which in turn was related to the Greek to agathon (the good).23 The Greek logos originates from lego (to speak) and the root leg- is “to gather.” Logos, like the Hebrew dabhar, originally meant to gather, to speak, and to think. The Neapolitan philosopher Vico, who heralded poetry as the “first language” and poetic wisdom as the fountainhead of philosophical thought and to whose rhetorical tradition Heidegger himself belongs, notes the rustic
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origins of the Latin lex as “gathering” or “collecting” and then later “law,” the “assemblage” of people, and “reading” (legere or “collecting letters”).24 In Sinism there is a filiality between the aesthetic and the ethical: the beautiful and the good are synonymous. In characterizing Asiatic thought simply as aesthetic in The Meeting of East and West, F. S. C. Northrop was not far from describing its essence. Since the seventeenth century many European minds often created the image of the Orient as the aesthetic paradise on earth. As the aesthetic is the connatural harmony of man and the wilderness of nature (that is, geopiety), so is the good the convivial relationship between (wo)man and (wo)man (that is, homopiety). Harmony is the essence not only of the aesthetic but also of the social, that is to say, it is both geopious and homopious. It cannot be overemphasized that serenity, releasement, or repose (Gelassenheit) is the keyboard on which the idea of harmony—both connaturality and conviviality—is being played out. For it “poeticizes” or “aestheticizes” man and the earth. From Li Chi, we also find the ancient Chinese sense of things as an ordered whole in which music plays an integrating role: There are heaven above and earth below, and between them are distributed all the (various) beings with their different (natures and qualities)—in accordance with this proceeded the framing of ceremonies. (The influence of) heaven and earth flow forth and never cease; and by their united action (the phenomena of) production and change ensue—in accordance with this music arose. The process of growth in spring, and of maturing in summer (suggest the idea of) benevolence; those of in-gathering in autumn and of storing in winter, suggest righteousness. Benevolence is akin to music, and righteousness to ceremonies.25 Meditative thinking is characterized by serenity—the receptive reverence of things as they are in themselves—while calculative thinking implies dominance, manipulation, and utility. Serenity is a nonwilled, nonforced, and nonconcerned activity, that is, an active responsiveness in man to the “natural light” of a thing. It is then “a will-less letting in of everything,” the spontaneity that sets a thing free to be nothing but itself. “A higher acting,” Heidegger writes, “is concealed in releasement that is found in all the actions within the world and in the machinations of all mankind.”26 Here Heidegger’s notion of serenity or releasement parallels the Taoist idea of wu wei and the Zen way of thinking and doing—the way of refraining from thinking and doing
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contrary to the natural and spontaneous way of things. Just as Heidegger’s serenity is a higher acting, so is wu wei both nonanthropocentric in man’s relationships with nature and nonindividualistic in our multiple relationships with one another (that is, it is both geopious and homopious). It is like the flow of a river that meanders unconcernedly along the contours of the landscape or the splitting of a bamboo with its natural grain rather than against it. The Zen way of perfecting archery, as shown in Eugen Herrigel’s classic study, lies in the unconcernedness or “purposeless detachment.” It is the artless, effortless, and self-forgetting immersion in the archer in his performance without any ulterior, utilitarian ends in view. The notion of Nature—tzu-jan in Chinese, ji-nen in Japanese, and ja-yun in Korean—signifies a “serene” or “reverential” composure for the “natural spontaneity” of all things, the “thisness” or “thatness” (or “thusness”) of everything living or nonliving. As it is affiliated with serenity, the poetic discloses or discovers the topology of Being—the topology that tells the whereabouts of Being’s presence. The poet is destined to discover Being— the ultimacy of thinking—and its true nature, which has too long been hidden in the metaphysical closet of Western philosophy. He is the thinker personified who advocates the quadrate (das Geviert) of sky, earth, gods, and mortals, which allows their free interplay. In the Tao Te Ching, the same unity is expressed in the circular chain of man that follows the earth, earth that follows heaven, heaven that follows the Tao, and, finally, Tao that follows Nature or the natural order of things (tzu-jan).27 This splendid, simple gathering of the elements in serenity is expressed in a haikuesque quality of meaning, style, and subjects in the last lines found in Heidegger’s discussion on “The Thinker as Poet”: Forests spread Brooks plunge Rocks persist Mist diffuses Meadows wait Springs well Winds dwell Blessing muses.28 Compare Heidegger’s lines with the famous haiku of Bashō, “Furu ikeya/ Kawazu tobikomu/ Mizu no oto,” which should be read and heard as “the
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sound of a frog jumping in the water of the old pond,” as a concordant continuum of the natural elements in harmony. So the simplicity and wilderness of oto (sound) is the elemental, all-embracing principium of the haiku. The Zen splendor of the simple and wild in Bashō’s haiku airs and echoes the sonorous mood that is being attuned to the seasonal serenade of Being or Nature. The harmony of the elements is the great topological chain of Being where the reverberation of the water’s sound is perceived—better, “conceived”—by the poet in the little creature’s consonance with nature or the whole universe as the sounding background of tranquility or beatific repose. The poetic, which is attuned to the topology of Being, is the acme of thinking. It does not surmount the earth in order to exploit and conquer it, but rather it brings man on to, and makes him belong to, the earth: it brings him dwelling on earth. The poetic embodies the quintessence of geopiety. The aesthetic or poetic may now be contrasted with the technological: it is a stark contrast between Gelassenheit and Gestell in Heidegger’s thought. One is meditative (spontaneous and natural), whereas the other calculative (exploitative and utilitarian). Very few, by now, argue against the conclusion that technology is the consummation of modern civilization, East or West, South or North. It destroys both homopiety and geopiety. Technology is, as it were, the ontological fix of modern man everywhere. Thus Heidegger writes, What now is, is marked by the dominance of the active nature of modern technology. This dominance is already representing itself in all areas of life, by various identifiable traits such as functionalization, systematic improvement, automation, bureaucratization, communications. Just as we call the idea of living things biology, just so the presentation and full articulation of all beings, dominated as they now are everywhere by the nature of the technical, may be called technology. The expression may serve as a term for the metaphysics of the atomic age. Viewed from the present and drawn from our insight into the present, the step back out of metaphysics into the essential nature of metaphysics is the step out of technology and technological description and interpretation of the age, into the essence of modern technology which is still to be thought.29 Heidegger contends that we have not yet come fully to grips with the nature of modern technocentric or technomorphic culture in which man himself is the functionary of technology. To say that the essence of technology is
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not technological is to deny the idea that technology is merely instrumental. The lethal network of globalized technology or, as Heidegger calls it, technological frenzy, is a historical nightmare from which we all wish to awaken or a narcolepsy from which we would never awaken. Its unthinkable potential lies in bringing the entire earth into a necropolis. For Heidegger, it is infinitely inadequate to view modern technology merely as instrumentum or instrumental facilitation. For it has now acquired the ontological priority over every form of thinking, making, and doing—including scientific activity. The worst consequence of misunderstanding the true nature (essence) of technology merely as instrumental rationality is bound to neutralize it as amoral. Heidegger proposes the idea of “autonomus technology” in place of instrumental technology to understand the essence of technology itself. Technology as autonomous is no longer simply a means to human activity. For it is not merely the application of mathematical physical science to praxis but is an autonomous praxis itself. The traditional rationale of technology as instrumentum that serves the telos of man is obsolete and anachronistic. Means has indeed become end. This, in fact, is the categorical imperative of technology as autonomous. “Representation” is the epistemological keyword, after the Cartesian legacy of the mind’s unblinking gaze, in the metaphysics of technology as autonomous. This representational metaphysics of technology may be best shown in the television technology that enframes modern society. It epitomizes man’s channeled existence and his visual narcissism in the modern age as the age of world picture (Weltbild). Representational metaphysics is a continuation or an extension, therefore, of the Cartesian cogito in which the subjective (“I”) and the visual (“eye”) viewpoint are brought together in the absolute affirmation and certainty of cognition as “clear and distinct ideas” (i.e., the Cartesian legacy of visual and narcissistic metaphysics).30 The world viewed as picture in television is an aspect (idea) of Gestell (enframing). The essence of technology is Gestell that, as “to set in place” (stellen), is eminently spatial and visual. Television both spotlights and highlights this enframing in our age as the age of world picture. As the essence of all technology as enframing is representing, television too represents as picture or structured image (Gebild), the original presence of the world as it is in itself. To be sure, there is the fundamental distinction between “seeing” and “seeing as,” that is, seeing a real object and seeing it as a picture, an image, or a mirror. One is fully visual, fully thought, whereas the other only half visual, half thought. We must understand here that to capture the essence of reality by means of
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representational metaphysics, that is, an anthology of images, is a forever Sisyphean task, for image has only a semblance of knowledge, subtraction of reality, and an appearance of participation.31 The advent of technology, as we have stressed, begins to destroy both geopiety and homopiety. For technology scatters rather than gathers things and our thoughts. The mathematical is basic to the grammar of modern technology as autonomous praxis. However, the language of modern mathematics or of the mathematical sciences has little in common with the original expression of the mathematical by Pythagoras or the ancient Pythagoreans—“All is Number” or “Number is all things.” With them it was meant to express the perfect, ontological ordering of invisible (temporal) harmonia but not visible (spatial) equations, that is, universal harmonia embodied in the mathematical. In the Renaissance, too, the Vitruvian figure inscribed in a square and a circle was a symbol of sympathy (symphonia) between microcosm and macrocosm, and Leonardo da Vinci obtained a harmonious smile in La Gioconda by means of the geometry of a circle. So with Pythagoras the ratio or harmonic proportionality of the octave (2:1), of the fourth (4:3), and of the fifth (3:2) was meant to perfect the ordering of the mathematical. The sum of the numbers used in these ratios—1, 2, 3, and 4—is 10, which is for Pythagoras the perfect number. To Pythagoras, this mathematical order came as a revelation of the harmonia of the natural (heavenly) and the moral world, each individually and both together. The celestial harmonia is the sound or music of the heavenly bodies. However, we do not hear this harmonious sound of music only because from our birth we hear it constantly. What happens in the modern mathematical sciences with and since Galileo and Descartes, however, is another story. With them the Pythagorean mathematical became converted into a technical method rather than an ontological ordering of the universe. For Husserl, modern mathematics or the mathematization of nature by Galileo into the geometric boxes of triangles, circles, and squares inscribed in the Book of Nature is a garb of ideas (Ideenkleid) in which true being (or reality) has been taken for a method. It is the mathematical sublimation of nature that mirrors and represents, that is, falsifies reality, nature, and the world—it falsifies because what is mirrored or represented is only half true. In modern mathematics and the mathematical sciences, the ontological generality of the mathematical has been replaced by the generality of method: the birth of methodolatry or the mathematical truth sublimated in method. For this reason, it is often said that the invention of method but not the use of mathematics is the hallmark of modern science.
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v. epilogue In 1969 an important conference on Heidegger and Eastern thought was held at the University of Hawaii to honor Heidegger on the occasion of his eightieth birthday; the invited speakers included the late J. Glenn Gray, Calvin O. Schrag, and J. L. Mehta.32 Following Heidegger’s own hint that a dialogue between him and Eastern thought was inevitable, the conferees expressed a strong sentiment that not only might Heidegger serve to build a bridge between East and West but also his thought might, more importantly, serve as the basis of uniting world philosophies. Today, after seventeen years, a conclusive study on this projected task remains unavailable, and many hard years of work on it are already cut out for students of comparative philosophy and culture. The manifest kinship between Heidegger’s thought and Sinism can, of course, be stretched to include the philosophical landscape not only of China as a region but also of the other regions of East Asia where Chinese ideography—the indispensable signpost of Chinese influence—has long been accepted as their regular linguistic diet. Heidegger is truly a philosophical deconstructionist33—in exactly the same sense as he himself defines the term—who reenvisions and subverts the longcherished metaphysical tradition of the West—logocentrism that coincides often with ethnocentrism or Occidentalism of one kind or another (for example, Hegelianism). It is that tradition of inherited thought that is at the brink of unleashing awesome, destructive forces ranging from thermonuclear power to cybernetics—that almighty tradition of calculative power that may summarily be called “politology.” An alternative to illusionary and fateful politology is the piety of thinking as an ultima philosophia that may serve as the yarn to weave the woof of Heidegger’s own thought and the warp of Eastern thought— Confucianism, Taoism, Ch’an or Zen Buddhism, and others.34 Thought-provoking events should, according to Heidegger, insure the provocation of eventful thought. The eventful decades in which we live would certainly provoke serious thinking. As such, Heidegger’s conception of the piety of thinking is a seminal thought that teaches us both what and how to think, where truth and method are integrated into one unity. It is the pathway to gather or orchestrate our thoughts—both Eastern and Western. Pious thinking is all poetic thinking that leads both to homopiety and geopiety. This poetic thinking may be against humanism or the homocentric view of the world but is never against man as such, that is, for the abolition of man.35
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Following the poet Hölderlin, Heidegger is convinced that what saves grows out of danger, impending danger or what the Chinese call “crisis”—that idea that combines danger and opportunity or proposes an opportunity in the presence of danger. This saving power does not occur haphazardly or by makeshift. Rather, it emanates from a radical turn of the mind by being attuned reverentially to Being or what the Orient calls Nature. This saving power is predicated upon the ready acknowledgment and pious reception of the poet as the supreme and consummate legislator of the world. By speaking the voice of poetry in the conversation of humankind, the thinker as artist is able to subvert the monopoly of established reality by virtue of the reversibility of Heidegger’s thought and the thought of the East or Orient that, as Heidegger calls it, is the “land of dawn.” Mutantis mutandis, “belonging” (as reciprocity)—two in one and one in two—is also “be-longing.”
PART IV
Phenomenology, Literary Theory, and Comparative Culture and Politics
CHAPTER 8
reading/misreading the sinogram f rom f e nollosa to de rri da and m cl uhan
Ex litterarum studiis immortalitatem acquire. —Andrea Alciati A linguist deaf to the poetic function of language and a literary scholar indifferent to linguistic problems and unconversant with linguistic methods are equally flagrant anachronisms. —Roman Jakobson
i. fenollosa’s introduction of sinograms to the west Many years ago T. S. Eliot spoke enthusiastically of Ezra Pound as the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time. Eliot had to have in mind the ideogrammic method employed, for example, by Pound in The Cantos whose alphabetic architecture is marked by the soaring columns of Chinese ideograms that are read hierarchically, from top to bottom. These columns shine like the glittering rays of the sunrise (East) visible in and through the tree’s branches and leaves in the early morning. The origin (arche) of Pound’s invention of Chinese poetry and subsequently of his ideogrammic method is traceable directly to the etymosinology of Ernest Fenollosa whose literary executor he was. If Pound is the “inventor of Chinese poetry for our time, then Fenollosa deserves to be called its “arche-inventor.”1 In the double sense of philia and phobia, the ebb and flow of Orientalism is nothing new in the habitus of Western intellectual and practical thought. Indeed, it has been chameleon-like. Early European Catholic missionaries in Japan expressed their unqualified and unrestrained admiration for the
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Japanese kanji (ideograms) as being superior to Greek and Latin. The degree of difficulty in learning it did not deter or dampen their admiration. The ontological difference, as it were, between the alphabetic and the ideographic deepened the aura and mystery of those little iconographic pyramids. The newly initiated or neophyte would naturally be enchanted by the ideogrammic abracadabra and its poetic alchemy. This is so despite the judgment of the grammatologist Hegel who, perfectly consonant with his general view of world history, was convinced of the superiority of abstract alphabetic writing over concrete ideographic writing in the historical development of human linguistic systems. Hegel is worth being noted here because Fenollosa went to Japan to teach philosophy with a favorable disposition for his thought. Fenollosa’s youthful literary environment was the American Renaissance whose masters were Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville.2 The American hypnotic fascination with Egyptian hieroglyphics came from the work of Jean-François Champollion—the Frenchman who deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphics with the aid of the Rosetta stone in the 1830s. We do not have to stretch our imagination too far to connect Egyptian hieroglyphics with Chinese ideograms. The enthusiasm for one can easily be transferred to the other. In Fenollosa’s case, his etymosinology has been related to Emerson’s conception of nature, language, and poetry, which we shall explore later. Fenollosa’s fascination with Chinese ideograms is certainly comparable to Emerson’s enchantment with Egyptian hieroglyphics: they all are the emblems of nature beyond whose visual veil there are inscrutable golden secrets that are not readily decipherable to ordinary people. Whoever unveils or deciphers the emblems of nature is a magician of some sort—like an ancient Egyptian scribe. In the long cherished tradition of the American fascination with the mysterious and exotic land of Japan, it is not surprising to see the fantastic success of James Clavell’s Shogun on television and in classrooms for teaching modern Japanese history. Conversely, Occidentalism has faced the same kind of fate in the Orient—particularly in Japan. The Japanese, I think, are notorious for their Occidentalism (especially in their linguistic Anglophilianism) since the time of the Meiji Restoration in the last quarter of the nineteenth century during which time Fenollosa spent his most energetic and productive years in organizing Japanese art and propagating its importance to the indigenous population.3 Some years ago the Japanese journalist Takao Tokuoka reported on the Japanese inventive word towelket (tsukuriji) that refers to a large beach towel. Towel and Blanket are made into towelket, into a kind of
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Joycean chordal wordsmithing. Fenollosa’s decipherment of the golden nuggets of Chinese ideograms (kanji) as emblems has its structural parallel to the chordal composition of James Joyce in the Ulysses and the Finnegans Wake [e.g., “cerebration” (cerebrum + celebration) and “paupulation” (paucity + population)]. Fenollosa’s etymological deconstruction of Chinese ideograms as cultural hermeneutics is interesting as it is revealing in understanding East Asian cultures whose daily linguistic diet consists partly or wholly of ideograms. He himself offers one interesting example among many of decomposing the ideogram East, which is a pictogram of the “sun” skewed into the branches of “trees” at the sunrise. Two of my favorite Chinese characters are “humanity” and “sage.” The hypogram of “humanity” (i.e., “two men” standing together or side by side) is made of two satellite ideograms together: “man” and “two.” The hypogram of “sage” is a complex composite of “ear” and “mouth” on top of “king.” As “king” can be read as unifier (signified by a vertical line) of heaven, man, and earth (three horizontal lines), “sage” is read as one who unifies heaven, man (humanity), and earth by listening and speaking truthfully. Corresponding to the rules of Chinese logic and aesthetics, I, too, invented my own tsukuriji: “jungle.” The ideogram tree is a pictogram of one tree; the ideogram woods spells “two trees” standing side by side; the ideogram forest is a composite of three “trees,” that is, one “tree” on top of two “trees” (i.e., “woods”); and the ideogram jungle (my own tsukuriji) is a composite of four “trees”: two “trees” (i.e., “woods) on top of two other “trees” (i.e., “woods” × “woods” or “forest” + one more “tree”). Furthermore, for the Chinese “nature” is signified by the ideograms: “ten thousand” and “things” (i.e., it is “ten thousand things”). From the very outset, it must be said that the importance of Fenollosa’s etymosinology cannot be underestimated. It is an archaeology of linguistic terms in the sense of tracing backward. Moreover, etymosinology implies the inseparable connection between the Chinese language and culture in their historical patterns.5 Since time immemorial the Chinese have acknowledged the interrelatedness of external reality and the language that describes it. Things of nature become real for men by acquiring names. From the “rectification of names” (cheng ming) emerges the unique conception of language as both performative and intrinsic to our conception of the world and our conduct in it. By defining language as intrinsic to our conception of the world, I mean to stress the idea that language is not merely an object among other objects in the world. For it makes all other objects transparent, that is, an object becomes for man an object by acquiring a name for itself.
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ii. fenollosa’s etymosinology The main topic of our discussion is Ernest Fenollosa’s An Essay on the Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, which was posthumously published by Ezra Pound in 1920 in his befittingly titled Instigations.6 To be truthful to the carefully phrased title, there are three important issues to be considered: (1) the nature of poetry (Section 2), (2) the conception of Chinese ideograms (Section 3), and (3) the question of language as a medium of communication (Section 4). The controversial nature of Fenollosa’s essay and Pound’s use of Chinese ideograms as a medium for his poetry need no elaboration—especially the pros and cons by sinologists. What is interesting is the fascination with Chinese grammatology of nonsinologists such as Jacques Derrida and Marshall McLuhan, who are primarily interested in advancing their own theories of language and literature. Emerson’s influence on Fenollosa’s conception of poetry seems undeniable and clearly visible. Emerson’s essay “The Poet” (1844) is singularly important for our discussion of Fenollosa. There are two issues we must analyze: (1) the relationship between poetry and language and (2) words as actions. 1. Poetry and Language. Poetry is for many the “first language” of humanity and the poet is the “first man.” This may be the reason why the “first (oral) poet” Homer has agelessly been revered in the West. Before Emerson and Fenollosa, the eighteenth-century Neapolitan philosopher and philologist Giambattista Vico advanced the idea that poetry is the “origin” (arche) of human language: in the beginning of human language was poetry. Emerson’s “The Poet” echoes the Vichian philosophy of language: according to him, the poet first made words which became the “archives of history,” and thus “language is the fossil poetry.”7 Following Emerson, Fenollosa regards Chinese characters as the medium of poetry because they are a kind of shorthand way of converting “material images” into “immaterial relations.”8 What Egyptian hieroglyphics are to Emerson, Chinese ideograms are to Fenollosa: for example, straight means right, whereas twisted (or crooked) means wrong.9 When we were elementary school children in Korea, our Japanese teachers encouraged us to emulate tall straight bamboos in the bush rather than a lone crooked pine tree on the roadside. 2. Words as Actions. Words, according to Emerson, are also performatives, and actions are a sort of words performed.10 In the tradition of Emerson, Fenollosa views ideograms as shorthand pictures of actions, when nouns
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are converted into verbs or action words.11 By the same token, poetry gives us “more concrete truth in the same compass of words” than prose.12 It brings language close to things themselves in nature. We can exemplify what Emerson is alluding to here by way of Japanese haiku composition, which is the perfectly compact economizing of words more than any other form of poetry writing I know of in both East and West: writing haiku is done with no more and no less than 17 syllables—within the specified limit of 5, 7, and 5 syllables in three lines altogether. Brevity, in short, is simply the most rarified and elegant quiddity of haiku writing. Moreover, ideograms are performative, that is, they are kinetic. Indeed, Chinese ideography (calligraphy in particular) is a kinetic art: it is the human body in motion.13 In very significant measure, Chinese ideography is a choreography of human gestures or, to use the phrase of George Herbert Mead, “a conversation of gestures.”14 However, it is not simply physiographic or pictorial, because to be ideographic the pictures of human gestures or things must reach the proper level of signs or symbols: as a sign or symbol, the ideogram must have twofold unity of external indication and meaningful expression. Be that as it may, I am always impressed with the fact that such Chinese ideograms as “anger,” “sorrow,” and “smile” depict the contours of those facial expressions themselves. In this sense, Picasso’s Swimmer (1929) and Acrobat (1930) are two choreographs of the human body in motion or kinegraphs that are approaching ideography or calligraphy. Thus Samuel Beckett is absolutely right when he says that in language as gestures the spoken and the written are identical.15 R. G. Collingwood too makes the perceptive observation that every language is a specialized form of bodily gesture, and thus the dance is the mother of all languages.16 Similarly, Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker declare that “In contrast to phonetic letters, the ideograph is a vortex that responds to lines of force. It is a mask of corporate energy.”17 In essence, each ideogram is the frolicking of a thing or body. Speech itself is the dance of the tongue and the lips to the ethereal tune of breath. No wonder the ancients—in Greece as well as in China and India—considered music, dance, drama, and (oral) poetry as a familial union of performing arts. Poetry is the primordial union of the word and the deed. It is of no surprise to know that saying or naming is performative. For this reason cheng ming (the rectification of names) has such an important niche in the fabric of Chinese and moral thought.18 Likewise, music too approaches and corresponds to human morality in Chinese thought: its nomos and ethos constitute morality.
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iii. fashioning fenollosa’s anatomy of sinograms Fenollosa’s conception of the written Chinese characters is based on the idea that they are ideographical, that is, the highly stylized pictures of things in motion as symbols or ideas. Following Fenollosa, Pound too views the Chinese ideogram not as “the picture of a sound” but as “the picture of a thing.”19 Thus, every ideogram is a kind of ars poetica or, better, confirms the Horatian precept ut pictura poesis. Nonetheless, Oriental children do not learn how to read, write, or decipher the meaning of an ideogram by decomposing or dissecting it into a picture or into a composite of simpler characters or radicals. An ideogram is learned as a whole script or a Gestalt: first, how it is pronounced and then how to identify its given meaning or meanings. The Orientals also learn how to write not in terms of a character as the moving picture of a thing but in terms of a number or combination of strokes.20 This is not to say, however, that Fenollosa’s and Pound’s etymopoetics of the written Chinese characters is valueless, uninteresting, or uninformative. On the contrary, I find the “decompositional” or “deconstructive” etymolinguistics rather enlightening and fascinating.21 Recent grammatology as the literary theory of writing has acquired its preeminence with Jacques Derrida who considers Hegel as the first (Western) philosopher of writing. With Of Grammatology22 he holds the most recent copyright on grammatology and may even be cast as the visionary father of a new grammatology. It is a seminal work in the critical philosophy of language in general and of writing in particular—writing in the current French sense of écriture as an act autonomous or independent of the spoken or the phonetic. It is a deconstruction of photocentrism or logocentrism and ultimately of the (Western) metaphysics of presence since Plato. It is not wrong to say that Derrida’s deconstructive grammatology is leaning toward the superiority of Oriental hieroglyphic or ideographic writing over Occidental alphabetic writing. Near the end of an important chapter “Of Grammatology as a Positive Science” in Of Grammatology, Derrida has a passage that refers to Fenollosa’s and Pound’s etymopoetics. To quote Derrida’s passage fully, “This is the meaning of the work of Fenollosa whose influence upon Ezra Pound and his poetics is well-known: this irreducibly graphic poetics was, with that of Mallarmé, the first break in the most entrenched Western tradition. The fascination that the Chinese ideogram exercised on Pound’s writing may thus be given all its historical significance.”23 Furthermore, Derrida uses some Chinese ideas in his Dissemination.24
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As Derrida’s deconstructive grammatology, like Fenollosa’s and Pound’s etymopoetics, seeks an absolute interiorization of writing as an autonomous act, and because all three found in Chinese ideography what they regard as a perfect example of such interiorization, it is worth comparing the foundation of their poetic and linguistics. I suggest that this foundation is based on the issue of sound and sense in language and poetry. It is important to note that Derrida’s grammatology, which focuses on the idea of the text and the decipherment of its (conceptual) signification rather than on the voice and sense, is perfectly consistent with his conceptualist thought. In the international symposium “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man” organized in 1966 by the Johns Hopkins Humanities Center, Derrida denied in no uncertain terms the existence of any perception whatsoever, for “perception is precisely a concept.”25 The contrast between Derrida’s grammatology and Chinese writing is in a significant way the same as the contrast between the poetics of Mallarmé and that of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Interestingly enough, Pound himself declares in his ABC of Reading that “Music rots when it gets too far from the dance. Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music.”26 The ultimate paradox—I say paradox because such concepts as “trace” and “différance” (deferment) indispensable to Derrida’s grammatology are “time” concepts—of Derrida’s grammatology lies in the fact that when it murders the voice and resurrects the text, it tends to shrink time and stretch space. Admiring the poetic geniality of Shakespeare and the sense of musical delight—the rich sweetness of sound, rhythm, and melody—Samuel Taylor Coleridge declared, “‘The man that hath not music in his soul’ can indeed never be a genuine poet.”27 In recent decades it was Roman Jakobson who established systematically for the first time the structural interrelatedness between poetics and linguistics: as poetics is concerned with verbal structure and linguistics is the global science of verbal structure, the former is an integral part of the latter.28 Similarly, Fenollosa too argued, “My subject is poetry, not language, yet the roots of poetry are in language. In the study of a language so alien in form to ours as is Chinese in its written character, it is necessary to inquire how these universal elements of form which constitute poetics can derive appropriate nutriment.”29 Jakobson further mentions paronomasia as a technique of poetry (in alphabetic writing), that is, the use of words similar in sound that are drawn together in meaning as well: dove-love, light-bright, place-space, name-fame, and so on. Of course, the use of homonyms is an important part of Chinese poetry. It is a technique
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of utilizing the same or similar sounds of multiple characters with different meanings. To accentuate the sound quality of poetry, we can conjecture that man’s first poetry was a kind of music, while his first speech was a kind of song. While T. S. Eliot spoke of the “music of poetry,” the composer Igor Stravinsky talked about the “poetry of music” that, when desophisticated, is rooted in folksong or oral poetry.30 It seems quite natural to discover, therefore, that since time immemorial music has been the nomos and ethos of Chinese culture, and its composition and performance correspond to the prescription of human conduct in the “rite” order.31 It is worth noting that speaking of the art of Chinese poetry, James J. Y. Liu points out that Western translators and students of Chinese poetry totally ignore its tonal, acoustic, and auditory effects. Though admittedly it is difficult to translate the musical quality of poetry, reading a Chinese poem in translation resembles looking at a beautiful woman through a veil or a landscape through a mist. The veil or mist of Chinese poetry is monosyllabic sound, homonym, rhyme, tone, pitch, alliteration, onomatopoeia, metric, consonance, assonance, and so on. In accordance with the singing effect of the Chinese language in general, most Chinese readers chant rather than merely read verse aloud; and the Chinese syllables tend to produce a staccato effect rather than the legato rhythm of English or French verse.32 In our critical commentary on Chinese grammatology and on grammatology as the study of language as writing, we would be remiss if we were to ignore thirteenth-century Chinese scholar Tai T’ung’s Six Scripts (Lio Shu Ku),33 which he confessed was a product of thirty years of hard work. The work in question deals with the six cardinal principles of Chinese ideographic writing. In his short but laborious work on Chinese writing, Tai produced what I. A. Richards has called “multiple definitions.” One of these principles is the tracing of the phonetic or oral from which the written or chirographic developed in the Chinese language. This is the principle of ideographic writing as the articulation of speech. When applied, it becomes a deconstruction of grammatology by rhetoric or the study of language as speech acts. From this perspective, Fenollosa, Pound, and particularly Derrida are not so much wrong as one-sided, however seminal their grammatologies may be. In the first place, one script or principle of Chinese writing that Tai discusses is called pictorial, because the written characters are really the copies of the physical forms of objects in depiction. In addition, there is another script or principle called a “suggestive compound” or, better, an “associative compound,” which is a “union of figures” in order to express an idea. These two
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principles govern Fenollosa’s and Pound’s analyses of Chinese etymopoetics. The other four scripts are called “indicative,” “deflected,” “adoptive,” and “phonetic.” Among these six principles of Chinese writing, the most important is the phonetic principle for our critical analysis. According to Tai, this principle says that “Written figures spring from spoken sounds.”34 Therefore, it is one-sided to say that Chinese writing in its total structure is a purely autonomous act independently of the phonetic. As a matter of fact, Tai is critical of those etymologists who knew nothing of the principle of phonetic composition. Ultimately, Tai proposed the idea of the Chinese language as the “diatactics”35 of the spoken and the written. In other words, (Chinese) writing is the abstract form of concrete speech. As Tai wrote, “The Sonant Form precedes, the Written Form follows; but as without written signs, spoken sounds could not be represented to the eye, I place first the written form and subjoin the spoken sound. The spoken sound is the yang . . . , the written sign the yin . . . , the spoken sound is the warp, the written sign the woof: the spoken sound is the circle, the written sign the square: the spoken sound is complete, the written sign incomplete.”36 In essence, according to Tai, the principal aim of Chinese writing is simply this: “to make speech visible.”37
iv. sinograms as a medium for the poetics of relation Fenollosa is not concerned with defining the concept of language as a medium, although it is a key word in his work in question. Understandably so, because he is concerned primarily with the nature of poetry and how the written Chinese character is in itself poetry. The question of language as a medium of communication is a natural result of the development of highly sophisticated communication technologies.38 Marshall McLuhan must be singled out as a high priest of the “medium” age who heralded the advent of recent electronic communication technologies. For our purpose here, two things must be noted. First, McLuhan is an antivisualist, and his opposition to typographic man and culture is vividly evidenced in his magnum opus, The Gutenberg Galaxy.39 For him, typography epitomizes visualism and scales the height of “eye culture,” and electronic technology is the second coming of (Homeric) oral culture accompanied by the intimate sense of touch. Oral culture is preliterate, whereas the advent of electronic technology is postliterary in that it surpasses the world of literacy or writing. Second, McLuhan has, rightly or wrongly, a romantic sense of the Chinese ideogram as a vortex
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of corporate energy. Not unlike electricity, the Chinese ideogram arouses the sense of touch rather than that of sight. McLuhan reportedly said that the ideal form of his antitypographic treatise, The Gutenberg Galaxy, would have been ideograms or it would have been written as a galaxy of ideograms. While Derrida is a conceptualist who seems to have been attracted by the abstract aspect of Chinese ideography in order to substantiate his philosophical grammatology, McLuhan is, in contrast, a congenital perceptualist who seems to be attracted by the sensorial aspect of Chinese ideograms as the medium of communication. No doubt both of them are interested in (Oriental) ideographic writing as opposed to (Occidental) alphabetic writing. For Derrida ideographic writing is purged of phoneticism, while for McLuhan it is antivisual and tactile. As a philosophical grammatologist, Derrida has no use for writing as a medium of communication. McLuhan’s message and flamboyant style are unmistakably clear in the following passage from his interview with Playboy in 1969: Any culture is an order of sensory preferences, and in the tribal world, the senses of touch, taste, hearing and smell were developed, for very practical reasons, to a much higher level than the strictly visual. Into this world, the phonetic alphabet fell like a bombshell installing sight at the head of the hierarchy of senses. Literacy propelled man from the tribe, gave him an eye for an ear and replaced his integral in-depth communal interplay with visual linear values and fragmented consciousness. As an intensification and amplification of the visual function, the phonetic alphabet diminished the role of the senses of hearing and touch and taste and smell, permeating the discontinuous culture of tribal man and translating its organic harmony and complex synaesthesia into the uniform, connected and visual mode that we still consider the norm of “rational” existence. The whole man became fragmented man; the alphabet shattered the charmed circle and resonating magic of the tribal world, exploding man into an agglomeration of specialized and psychically impoverished “individuals,” or units; functioning in a world of linear time and Euclidean space.40 McLuhan was initially trained in English literature. As we have already noted, he is interested in Chinese ideography as a unique medium of communication, although he has no direct reference to Fenollosa as far as I can
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determine.41 However, it is worth noting that in The Gutenberg Galaxy McLuhan pays a high tribute to his Canadian predecessor and the pioneering philosopher of the medium, Harold A. Innis, when he acknowledges that it is “a footnote of explanation” to Innis’ work. The Bias of Communication by Innis42 pertains to the cross-cultural theory of communication in the fast moving context of history in which the medium or the technology of communication itself is a determining factor. Relying on the work of the French sinologist Marcel Granet, Innis observes that the Chinese are not noted for formulating concepts and doctrines discursively, and by the same token, the Chinese ideogram too is not conducive to abstraction or generality, but instead it evokes a multitude of concrete images. Neither time nor space is abstractly conceived by the Chinese: time is circular or round, while space is square. Innis quotes the idea of Fenollosa that poetry, like music, is a time art.43 As we have already noted, Tai too used the circle and the square as metaphors of describing the spoken sound and the written sign, respectively. For McLuhan as for Innis, the idea of language as a medium of communication is singularly important. McLuhan single-handedly sloganized the highly charged idea that “the medium is the message.” For McLuhan (as for Innis), it is the medium of communication that shapes and controls the structures of the human mind, sensorium, and association. “For,” McLuhan explains, “the ‘content’ of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.”44 Moreover, the content of any medium is always another medium. For Fenollosa the Chinese written character is a medium or vehicle for poetry, whereas in the language of McLuhan it is poetry. A critical point must be made here. Certainly the way of language is the unity of meaning and the medium itself that are inextricably linked. To dichotomize the message and the medium or to reduce one to the other is to misunderstand this inextricable linkage between the two. In a very significant sense, however, language is not merely a medium of communication if by the medium we mean the “third factor” that facilitates human communication (i.e., instrumental artifact). For, indeed, it is communication. To understand the extent to which language is an instrumental artifact of communication, we must distinguish writing from speaking. Writing is an artifact, whereas speaking is not. Speech becomes an artifact only when it is transcribed in visible marks. To be an artifact, writing must be supplemented by other artifacts (e.g., papyrus, paper, printing, tapes, television screens). Writing, in essence, is a mediated medium, whereas speaking is an unmediated medium for human communication.
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v. concluding remarks Fenollosa’s etymolinguistic analysis of Chinese ideograms has produced many ripples and waves in the contemporary philosophy of reading, writing, and communication. Whether Chinese ideography is just a grammatology or a unique medium of communication is the question that has been essential to the critical understanding of Derrida’s philosophical grammatology and McLuhan’s “medium” theory of communication. Whether Fenollosa’s influence has been a joy or an anxiety, the important point to be made here is the fact that in its ultimate efficacy misreading is also a form of reading. We have attempted to show that Chinese ideography is not a grammatology as the pure and simple act of writing purged of the phonetic (contra Derrida). Nor is it a medium devoid of symbolic contents (contra McLuhan). First, poetry needs music to become alive as does dance. Second, the ideogram is iconographic; that is to say, it is not just physiographic or the mirror image of a thing in motion as in painting or choreography. As Fenollosa put it, it is the verbal idea of action in that it converts material images into immaterial relations: in every ideogram, which is also a metaphor, the pictorial becomes the symbolic. As a proper sign or symbol, every ideogram has a double feature: external indication and meaningful expression. Like the Jaina parable of five blind men each of whom touches only a portion of an elephant and claims that his description of the beast is right and the others are wrong and ignorant, Chinese ideography has had different appeals to and sometimes blinding or hypnotizing effects on different theorists—among whom Derrida and McLuhan are a striking contrast—who siphon from it only what is useful or acceptable for validating and advancing their own theories of language and communication. Their readings are not so much wrong as one-sided. In the end we need a method of multiple definitions after the fashion of Tai T’ung in order to remedy this one-sided reading or misreading, that is, to comprehend the composite picture of Chinese ideography as a whole tapestry with a mosaic of icons woven into it.
CHAPTER 9
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[T]he problem of the reality of the body is shown to be the central problem and upon its solution everything else depends. —Gabriel Marcel [T]he body is our anchorage in a world. —Maurice Merleau-Ponty Don’t bleach language, savor it instead. Stroke it gently or groom it, but don’t “purify” it. —Roland Barthes
i. prologue This essay explores the idea that the embodiment of language, spoken or written, is the fundamental precondition of global communication. Because of the ever-accelerating development and expansion of communication technology and media, the world is at our “touching” distance. As the Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan put it, today’s shrinking world has turned into “a global village,” which invokes the image of communicative praxis in Homeric oral culture in the development of Western history and civilization. In the globalizing world of multiculturalism, the embodied networking of more than one language as a medium is a prerequisite for global communication. What follows is divided into three main topics. In “Fenollosa’s Etymosinology,” I will explore the importance of the discovery by the American philosopher Ernest Fenollosa of Chinese
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grammatology or sinography whose etymological anatomy became known as “etymosinology.”1 As language, thought, and culture constitute an inseparable whole, etymosinology is the way of deciphering Sinic thought and culture by the etymological composition and decomposition of sinograms: it is indeed a genre of cultural hermeneutics. In “Carnal Hermeneutics and McLuhan’s Philosophy of Global Communication,” I will discuss McLuhan, whose catch phrase “the medium is the message” was written after the fashion of Fenollosa’s ars poetica. McLuhan fancied writing his magnum opus, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962),2 in the medium of sinograms or in a galaxy of sinograms, as it were. For him, sinography embodies a vortex of corporate energy (qi) in the double sense of the term corporate—bodily and collective at the same time. Thus McLuhan opens up a gateway of the “New Science”—in the spirit of Giambattista Vico3—of cross-cultural communication for the world, which has become “a global village.” His theory of embodied communication, just as Fenollosa’s etymosinology, has a cosmopolitan outlook in that it not only emulates the performative kinaesthetics of sinography but also is pursued in the posthumanist venture of the body as a “new media.” In “Critical Reflection on Embodiment in the Philosophy of ‘New Media,’” I will be concerned with critical reflection on embodiment in philosophy of new media in terms of two issues: (1) the body as a social phenomenon, that is, the skin as a passage, not as a barrier, to the outside world and (2) phenomenological critique of new media as technoromanticism.
ii. fenollosa’s etymosinology Fenollosa was an American philosopher who went to Japan to teach Hegel and Herbert Spencer in particular at Tokyo University in 1878. The twentieth century was, as he reflected later, “a time of re-union for civilizations.” The sense of world community led him to reject “cultural parochialism.” He anticipated a “relational pattern of thinking” that is uniquely Sinic. With his passage to Japan, “he was prepared to find the cosmos in a blade of grass and to seek cosmopolis in every village and town,” the phenomenon of which is known today as “glocalism” or “cosmopolitanism.”4 While Fenollosa was in Japan, he became fascinated with sinography (kanji in Japanese) and wrote a gem of a work, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry (1964),5 with which he became the “inventor”
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of etymosinology. It is not trite to emphasize that, because the language of ideograms embodies the karma of Sinism, it should be called sinography. Language is a product of culture as much as culture expresses itself by the communicative medium of language. They are inextricably intertwined. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty puts it judiciously, what the mind is to the body, thought is to language.6 Fenollosa’s work appealed to and attracted poets such as Ezra Pound (his literary executor) and T. S. Eliot. Eliot spoke enthusiastically of Pound as the inventor (in the West) of Chinese poetry for the twentieth century. Eliot, of course, had to have in mind the “ideogrammic method” by Pound in, for example, The Cantos (1969),7 whose alphabetic architecture is sporadically adorned by the columns of sinograms. These columns purportedly shine like the glittering rays of the sunrise (East) visible in and through the branches and leaves of trees in the early morning that signifies a new dawn of poetics or poetic hermeneutics in the West. This new dawn points to Confucius’s performative notion of the “rectification of names” (zheng ming) in all human conduct and endeavors, that is, in speech, morals, as well as grammatology. As Confucius emphasized in the Analects (Book XX, ch. iii, para. 3), “without knowing the power of language, it is impossible to know humans.” The motto of Paideuma, the journal devoted to Pound scholarship, is zheng ming as “a new paideuma.” “Sinism” is the term that was coined in 1929 by the American sinologist H. G. Creel (1929)8 to specify that cluster of characteristics that are peculiarly Chinese or the Chinese habitus of thinking and doing. Despite its origin in China, however, it is not confined to China alone. It encompasses Korea and Japan as well—namely, the geographical region called East Asia, where sinograms have been and are in use. The sinographic disposition is embodied and exemplified in Confucianism, Daoism, and the hybrid religion of Chan/Sun/ Zen Buddhism in Korea and Japan as well as in China. It is manifestly thisworldly, practical, concrete, and particular rather than otherworldly, speculative, abstract and general.9 For our purpose here, Sinism may be summed up in the two-fold proposition: (1) where there is no social process, there is no reality and (2) as the body is the material condition of our interbeing in the world, social reality is necessarily an embodied and intercorporeal phenomenon. From the very outset, it must be said that the importance of Fenollosa’s etymosinology is an archaeology or genealogy of linguistic terms in the sense of tracing backward. Moreover, etymosinology implies the inseparable
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connection between the Chinese language and culture in their historical patterns. Since time immemorial the Chinese have acknowledged the interrelatedness of external reality and the language that describes it. Things of nature become real for men and women by acquiring names. For the rectification of names emerges the unique conception of language as both performative and intrinsic to our conception of the world and our conduct in it. By defining language as intrinsic to our conception of the world, I mean to stress the idea that language is not merely an object among other objects in the world. Rather, it makes all other objects transparent; that is, an object becomes for humans an object by acquiring a name for itself. Fenollosa’s youthful literary environment was the American Renaissance or the golden age of American literature whose masters were Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Poe, Hawthorne and Melville. The American hypnotic fascination with Egyptian hieroglyphics came from the work of Jean-François Champollion—the Frenchman who deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphics with the aid of the Rosetta stone in the 1830s. We do not have to stretch our imagination too far to connect Egyptian hieroglyphics with sinograms. The enthusiasm for one spills over to the other. In Fenollosa’s case, his etymosinology has been related to Emerson’s conception of nature, language, and poetry. Fenollosa’s fascination with sinograms is certainly comparable to Emerson’s enchantment with Egyptian hieroglyphics: they all are the emblems of nature beyond whose visual veil there are inscrutable golden secrets that are not readily decipherable to ordinary people. Whoever unveils or deciphers the emblems of nature is a magician of some sort—like an ancient Egyptian scribe. Emerson’s influence on Fenollosa’s conception of poetry seems undeniable and clearly visible. Emerson’s essay “The Poet” (1844)10 is singularly important for our discussion of Fenollosa. There are two issues we must analyze: (1) the relationship between poetry and language and (2) words as actions.
II.1. Poetry and Language It is not altogether surprising that many poet-critics have come to the conclusion that poetry is the first language of humanity, and the poet is the first human. For Fenollosa, poetry and language grew up together as twins. Long before Emerson and Fenollosa, the Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico, who made no distinction between Egyptian hieroglyphics and sinograms, propounded the view that poetry is not only inseparable from language but also is the “origin” (arche) of language itself. The following
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passage from “The Poet,” one of the most eloquent passages in the entire corpus of Emerson’s writings, echoes Vico’s philosophy of language: “The poets made all the words, and therefore, language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses. For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry (emphasis added).”11 For Emerson, language is the very special gift of humans. It is the milieu that connects invisible spirit and visible nature: it is the sign or emblem of nature. Following him, Fenollosa too comes to view that sinograms convert material images into immaterial relations. In this sense, every sinogram is a metaphor whose function is absolutely indispensable to poetry and poetic imagination. For Emerson, the words that express our intellectual or moral facts are rooted directly in “material appearance”: “Right originally means straight; wrong means twisted. Spirit primarily means wind; transgression, the crossing of a line; supercilious, the raising of the eye-brow. We say the heart to express emotion, the head to denote thought; and thought and emotion are, in their turn, words borrowed from sensible things, and now appropriated to spiritual nature.”12 What Emerson saw in hieroglyphics is what Fenollosa saw in sinograms. I find the “decompositional” or “unpacking” of sino-etymology rather enlightening and fascinating. Take the following examples of “hypograms” as the corporate and concrete insemination of other sinograms (sinograms upon and by sinograms) provided by Fenollosa himself: “East” is an entanglement of “sun” with “tree” (i.e., the sun entangled in the branches of a tree in the early morning or at sunrise); “ancient” is a composite of “ten” and “mouth” (“ten” over “mouth,” that is, presumably referring to what has come down through the mouth for ten generations); and “fidelity” is a composite of “human” and “word” (i.e., the human standing by his or her word). Two of my favorite characters are “humanity” or humaneness and “sage” (shen ren). The former is a composite of “human” and “two” (i.e., “two persons” standing together) and the latter is a composite of “ear,” “mouth” and “king.” As the “king” is the unifier of heaven, man, and earth, the “sage” is the unifier of heaven, man and earth by speaking and hearing truthfully. Furthermore, for the Chinese “nature” is also concretely signified by two sinograms: “ten thousand” (man) and “things” (wu) (i.e., it is “ten thousand things”).
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II.2. Words as Action According to Emerson, “Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words.”13 By the same token, the poet is one who can articulate the word in terms of “nouns” and “verbs.” In this Emersonian tradition, Fenollosa describes sinograms as “vivid shorthand pictures of actions and processes in nature.”14 Sinograms are the “concrete pictures” of things in nature. As the sinogram is an idea in action, there is no separation between thing and action. Poetry as well as art is concerned not with “the general” and “the abstract” but with “the concrete of nature, not with rows of separate ‘particulars’. . . . Poetry is finer than prose because it gives us more concrete truth in the same compass of words.”15 Poetry brings language close to things. If, in sinography, words are the concrete pictures of nature, nouns are things in motion and verbs motion in things. Moreover, sinography—its calligraphic form in particular—is kinetic: it is the human body in motion. Thus its calligraphs are kinaesthetic. And the Chinese revere the art of calligraphy as much as painting: calligraphy is the ritualized as well as the stylized painting of sinograms or—to intimate the personal dimension of artists themselves—characters. In the genealogy of form, calligraphy indeed precedes painting. In very significant measure, sinography is a choreography of human gestures and, as a family of signifiers, “a conversation of gestures” that, because of the presence of meaning, is not the reduction of sinograms to human physiology. The American literary critic R. P. Blackmur is most persuasive in arguing for gesture as indigenous to language: as he stresses, “Gesture is native to language, and if you cut it out you cut roots and get a sapless and gradually a rotting if indeed not a petrifying language.”16 What he has in mind is spoken language accompanied by gestures. There is a humorous story about an Italian walking down a New York City street with a friend on a cold winter day who tries to carry a conversation with him. As Italians are known rightly or wrongly for their gesticulation, the Italian told his friend that he could not talk because his hands were in his pockets. Sinic grammatology, that is, writing itself is an expression of human gesture. The sinographic gesture of human expressivity (for example, “smile”) is indelibly pantomimic and performative. Every language, says R. G. Collingwood, is a specialized form of human bodily gesture.17 With Samuel Beckett, we can also say that in language as gesture, including sign language and sinography, the spoken and written are identical.18
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There is a Chinese dance troupe that performs “cursive” dancing, that is, it performs calligraphy as the art form of dance. There was a legendary Chinese calligrapher who claimed that the performance of his calligraphy markedly improved after watching the masterful performance of a great female dancer. Picasso’s Swimmer (1929) and Acrobat (1930) are indelibly calligraphic and thus performative. Speaking of their performative qi (energy), Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker remark that in contrast to phonetic letters, sinographic calligraphy is a vortex and mask of bodily energy.19
iii. carnal hermeneutics and mcluhan’s philosophy of global communication Technology—including media technology—is an inseparable part of ourselves; as Werner Heisenberg put it some time ago—the snail’s shell is to its occupant or as the web is to the spider. Human communication is inconceivable without the mediation of technology as the instrumentum of communication. Marshall McLuhan may be singled out as an eloquent high priest of electronic media technology for whom “the medium is the message” and “the electric light is pure information.” Following the footsteps of his compatriot, Harold A. Innis, McLuhan has the gift of interpreting the course of Western civilization in terms of the medium of communication. He proposes the way of conceiving the interplay between the medium and the sensorium in which the periodization of Western civilization is characterized as (1) tribalization in oral and auditory culture, (2) detribalization in alphabetic and typographic (i.e., hegemonically visualist or “popeyed”) culture, and (3) retribalization in electronic culture, which is quintessentially tactile. The culture of the electronic media has triggered in earnest a movement toward the creation of the world as a global village at an unprecedented pace. McLuhan became fascinated and attracted by the audio-tactile morphology of Chinese ideograms or sinograms, which were introduced by way of the “etymosinology” of Ernest Fenollosa, whose literary executor was the American poet Ezra Pound. For McLuhan, the Chinese ideogram or sinogram unleashes a vortex of corporate energy and arouses the audio-tactile sense rather than that of sight. He reportedly said that the ideal form of his antitypographic treatise The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) should have been sinographic. As an apostle of electronic technology, his thought represents a retrieval of oral and
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auditory culture and thus the reversal of typographic, visualist culture. He even associates himself with Heidegger, who allegedly surfboards on the electronic waves. Heidegger, who is familiar with Eastern thought and embraces it in his planetary thinking, also brings thinking and the agency of the hand together to a reciprocal relationship. A decade ago I introduced the neologism carnal hermeneutics as a paradigmatic revolt against the condition of Western modernity, for which the body is a philosophical orphan ever since Descartes and his preoccupation with epistemocracy. By carnal hermeneutics, I mean that interpretive art that reads ways of embodiment as the factum fundamentum et primus or silent spring of everything we do and think. It reads the body as social inscription in the world. It is not enough to say that the body is the medium of communication: it is communication itself. Carnal hermeneutics is thus a way of conceptualizing multiple performative roles of the body.20 Its arrival signifies a sharp turning point in our thinking. As the body is our familiar and primordial way of inhabiting and mediating the “parliament of things” both human and nonhuman alike in the world, carnal hermeneutics means to celebrate what Pierre Bourdieu calls “the performative magic of the social,”21 in which the body is “the inseparable dancing-partner of the mind.”22 It is our common knowledge that language is, and the body expresses itself as, the medium of communication. What is not common, however, is the notion that the body is the material condition of all communication as the active way of relating ourselves to the world both human and nonhuman. That is to say, the body is indisputably the ontological factum of our very being in the world. We exist as body, as flesh. To exist means first and foremost to be corporeal, and to be social is thus to be intercorporeal. Body matters encompass a multiple and multilateral array of issues ranging from silence and gesture to language (both spoken and written), from laughter to violence, from tattoo to torture, from eating and dieting to speaking, from nudity to clothing as the body of the body or the second body, from boxing to feminism, from health care to immortality, and many more. McLuhan’s communication paradigm in the direction of creating a brave new world as a global village is already imbricated in the phenomenon of postmodernity, which attempts to transgress and transcend the very limits of the modern world whose political soul is the inviolable sovereignty of nationstates since the time of Machiavelli. In other words, the postmodern phenomenon of a global village is foreign to modernity governed by nation-states. McLuhan’s posthumous work The Global Village: Transformations in World
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Life and Media in the 21st Century23 is evidence of his later attempt to make the world global rather than national and ethnocentric (e.g., Eurocentric and Sinocentric). The “new science” of Laws of Media,24 after the fashion of the Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico, also contains McLuhan’s attempt at transversalizing the East and the West based on audio-tactile space in sinography in opposition to the Western hegemony of visual space as a side effect of “the uniform, continuous, and fragmented character of the phonetic alphabet.”25 McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) is an antivisualist and antitypographic treatise that embraces the poetics of electronic media in which “the electric light is pure information.” Television embodies tactility, which becomes the organizing principle not only of the ecumenism of the senses but also of the globalization of humankind in the age of electronic technology. In the pioneering spirit of Fenollosa’s globalism, McLuhan declares that “[i]n the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin” (emphasis added)26 beyond Eurocentric ocularism, which according to McLuhan, is attributable to the invention of the alphabet in ancient Greece and intensified with the Gutenberg revolution of printing technology. For McLuhan, electronic technology challenges and deconstructs the hegemony of vision. For him, acoustic space is round, whereas visual space is linear. Sound or acoustic space is itself all relational: it is an unvisualizable field of simultaneous relationships. In The Medium Is the Message, McLuhan and Fiore declare the following: The ear favors no particular “point of view.” We are enveloped by sound. It forms a seamless web around us. We say, “Music shall fill the air.” We never say, “Music shall fill a particular segment of the air.” We hear sounds from everywhere, without ever having to focus. Sounds come from “above,” from “below,” from in “front” of us, from “behind” us, from our “right,” from our “left.” We can’t shut out sound automatically. We simply are not equipped with earlids. Where a visual space is an organized continuum of a uniformed connected kind, the ear world is a world of simultaneous relationships (emphasis added).27 There is a close connection between globalism and the synaesthesia of the senses in his philosophy of embodied communication amply and vividly evidenced in The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) in which he fancied writing in
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sinograms. And the sense of touch initiates and consummates the synaesthetic interplay of all the senses. Tactility is no longer a pariah sense: it is the elemental form of the sensorium upon which the development of the other senses depends. Here McLuhan draws our attention to the testimony of Jacques Lusseryran who “saw” light without the sense of sight. Lusseryran’s infirmity of blindness enhances and amplifies his other senses. “Like drugs,” he writes in And There Was Light, “blindness heightens certain sensations, giving sudden and often disturbing sharpness to the senses of hearing and touch.”28 It sharpens and accentuates what he calls an audible and tactile alliance. Of course, there is the most noted case of Helen Keller who lost sight and hearing at an early age and who, like Lusseryran, “saw” by touching the bearable “lightness of Being” in the world. She spoke of “a chant of darkness.”29 Keller’s hand sees and hears as well as touches. “Hearing views,” “seeing tones,” “tasting music,” “smelling storms,” and so on are nothing but a bundle of “digitalia” to the hand’s touch. She intimates that the sense of touch by hand is her reality. The hand is the conductor, as it were, who orchestrates her body and its sensorium. We would be remiss if we fail to acknowledge Merleau-Ponty’s illuminating phenomenology of perception or sensorium. Only in terms of the body as the global and participatory locus of perception, according to him, do we come to grips with the deep notion that the world is made of the same stuff as the body. In each act of perception, the body participates in the world. Each perception is an instance or moment of the sensory unity, and it is enclosed in the synergic work of the body, that is, it is intersensorial. The body is the carnal field (champ) in which perception, as it is witnessed by Lusseryran and Keller, becomes localized as seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching this or that. Merleau-Ponty, therefore, contends, “perceptual consciousness is not a mental alchemy; it is global, total” (emphasis added), that is, synergic.30 The synergic organization of perceptual acts is unimaginable without one of the most important discoveries by Gabriel Marcel and Merleau-Ponty of twentieth-century phenomenology: the notion of the lived body (corps vécu) or the body as subject. The body-subject is never an inert matter or mass (res) but rather a sentient subject. As such, the body is capable of “authoring” the world first before “answering” it. Merleau-Ponty writes with a touch of eloquence: “my body is not an object, but a means, an organization. In perception I organized with my body an association with the world. With and through my body, I inhabit the world. The body is the field in which perceptions localize themselves” (emphasis added).31 Not unlike electricity,
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sinograms for McLuhan arouse the sense of touch rather than that of sight. McLuhan is a congenital perceptualist who seems to be attracted by the sensorial synaesthesia of sinograms as the medium of communication in contrast to sensorial anaesthesia or fragmentation. For him, in short, sinographic writing is purged of ocularcentric focus and fragmentation: it is antianaesthetic and tactile. It is worth noting that in The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) McLuhan pays a high tribute to his Canadian predecessor and the pioneering philosopher of communication, Harold A. Innis’s The Bias of Communication, which had a great deal of influence on McLuhan, relies on the findings of the French sinologist Marcel Granet. Innis observes that the Chinese do not formulate abstract concepts discursively but, instead, they evoke a multitude of concrete images, which also tend to be metaphorical: for the Chinese, time is circular or round, while space is square. McLuhan’s message is unmistakably clear in the following passage from his interview with the Playboy magazine in 1969. McLuhan’s message is unmistakably loud and clear in his interview with the Playboy magazine in 1969: every culture is ordered by way of sensory preferences from touch to taste, hearing, smell and sight. In the alphabetic culture of the West from ancient Greek to typographic culture of the West, sight has been the ruling and aristocratic sense in the hierarchy of senses and as the norm of “rational” sense.32 McLuhan’s later philosophy of communication, that is, his “New Science” of communication that not only is interdisciplinary but also has an implication for global or cross-cultural communication where, when the embodied language of sinography is taken into account, intercultural communication becomes a question of translation. In tune with building the world as a global village, we are in dire need of a cross-cultural perspective in communication theory. Varela et al.’s The Embodied Mind (1991) is a groundbreaking work in cognitive science that rediscovers that very idea in Asian philosophy, particularly in (Tantric) Buddhism.33 They call this rediscovery “a second renaissance in the cultural history of the West, with the potential to be equally important as the rediscovery of Greek thought in the European renaissance.”34 So is the discovery by Fenollosa of etymosinology, which includes an embodied dimension of sinography or, as McLuhan characterizes it, a vortex of corporate energy or a galaxy of teletactile “kinetograms”—to borrow the language of posthumanist “new media.” Varela, Thompson, and Rosch interchangeably use “enaction” as embodied cognition and “cognition” as embodied action.35
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Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical insight into the openness of “a middle way” (entredeux) provides for them a circular continuity rather than a discontinuous divide between the inner and the outer or the self and the world.36 Accordingly, Varela et al. are able to negotiate or compromise “a middle path between the Scylla of cognition as the recovery of a pregiven outer world (realism) and the Charybdis of cognition as the projection of a pregiven inner world (idealism).”37 Merleau-Ponty upholds the negotiated middle path of phenomenology against intellectualism on the one hand and empiricism on the other. Both are one-sided: one has too much consciousness and the other too little. This compromised middle path in Buddhism is known as the way of Maitreya (the future “Awakened One,” Bodhisattva).38 In his posthumously published work Laws of Media (1988) as well as The Global Village (1989), McLuhan undauntingly seeks and weighs evidence in support of his “New Science” of media from the findings of contemporary post-Newtonian mechanics and neurology. He pays special attention to Milic Čapek’s Philosophical Impact of Contemporary Physics (1961)39 and Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics (1975).40 One is interdisciplinary and the other cross-cultural. McLuhan’s “New Science” of communication strikes a sympathetic chord with Čapek’s thesis that establishes the dynamic nature of (physical) reality in terms of auditory models or polyphony as opposed to pictorial or visual ones. What seems to be most objectionable to Čapek in contemporary physics, as McLuhan notes, is the idea that time is regarded as another dimension of space or the “fourth dimension of space.” As a result, time’s kinesis is reduced to timeless stasis (of visual) space, that is timeless spatialization. Most importantly, in the context of our discussion here, McLuhan recognizes Capra’s The Tao of Physics as a kindred of corpus callosum, which is capable of dialogizing the East with his own (Western) “New Science” of media relying on the acoustic functions of the brain’s right hemisphere. What the right hemisphere and the nonalphabetic (sinographic) East is to the acoustic, the left hemisphere and the alphabetic West is to the visual. One is simultaneous and synaesthetic, while the other is linear and sequential. The patterns and operation of electronic media themselves are properties of the right hemisphere. McLuhan relies heavily on the findings of Capra that dissolve the difference or tension between physics and metaphysics in the ineffable mysticism of the East, that is, Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, and Zen by networking of the two radically different systems of thinking.
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In passing, it is worth noting that Capra takes to the heart the intimation of the physicist Werner Heisenberg, who is at ease with Chinese Daoism as with modern physics: “It is probably true quite generally that in the history of human thinking the most fruitful developments frequently take place at those points where two different lines of thought meet.”41 “By turning in on the new audile-tactile awareness made available by our electric ground,” McLuhan remarks, “Fritjof Capra found that modern physics was, unwittingly, retrieving a world-view harmonious with ancient Eastern wisdom.”42 Nonetheless, McLuhan is afraid that “the modern Chinese courtship of the alphabet,” or alphabetic literacy endangers the acoustic function of the right hemisphere in favor of the visual operation of the left hemisphere.43 Again, McLuhan emphasizes, In The Tao of Physics, Fritjof Capra remarks the similarities between the forms of awareness implicit in modern physics and the traditional philosophy of Eastern, non-alphabetic cultures. The East bypasses hardware and absolute concepts in favour of percepts, that is, a “direct, non-intellectual experience of reality.” “The most important characteristic of the Eastern world view—one could almost say the essence of it—is the awareness of the unity and mutual interrelation of all things and events, the experience of all phenomena in the world as manifestations of a basic oneness. All things are seen as interdependent and inseparable parts of this cosmic whole; as different manifestations of the same ultimate reality.”44 The name given to the interrelatedness of all things and events in the old Chinese Book of Changes (Yijing) is synchronicity. The recent work and practice of the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh sums up the quintessence of Eastern thought in a single word, “Interbeing,” which is necessarily and inescapably intercorporeal simply because, but for intercorporeality, there would be no interconnectedness.45 In the end what Hans-Georg Gadamer calls “the fusion of horizons” (Horizontverschemelzung), of cultural horizons, will enable us to cross a threshold into another future, into the future of planetary thinking. To sum up, communication is the sinew of humanity’s existence and coexistence between heaven and earth: the need and necessity of communication verifies the commonplace notion that to be alone is not to be. Global communication now affirms humanity’s global coexistence beyond cultural, ethnic, and national boundaries.
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iv. critical reflection on embodiment in the philosophy of “new media” We have come a long way to make the embodied mind a philosophically legitimate discourse. The body has been, by and large, an orphan child of philosophical and theological discourse in the West because of Greek idealism, Christian theology, and Cartesian epistemocracy. The alleged dark grotto or continent of corporeality has castigated and even crucified as an ephemeral and perishable substance (res) in favor of incorporeal immortality in the mainstream of Western thought. Origen, the stern Christian ascetic and theologian who voluntarily castrated himself—for that matter, castration was not an uncommon practice in his time—depicted corporeality or, more specifically, sexuality as a passing phenomenon and alluded to the eschatological hope of purifying the soul from the flesh. As Peter Brown elucidates, “Human life [for him] was but the last dark hour of a long night that would vanish with the dawn. The body was poised on the edge of a transformation so enormous as to make all present notions of identity tied to sexual differences, and all social roles based upon marriage, procreation, and childbirth, seem as fragile as dust dancing in a sunbeam.”46 One wonders what Origen would say about the world in which sex is not even for procreation but for pure pleasure and about embodying prosthetics or cybersex in the age when the boundary between real and virtual sex is claimed to be a thing of the past, that is, when reality and virtuality are folded into one flesh fold. The canonical institution of Descartes’s cogito is deeply rooted in Western modernity, which is marked by the civilization of printing technology. It is valorized as disembodied, monological, and ocularcentric: it is the mind (res cogitans) “transcendentalized” from rather than “immanentized” in the body (res extensa). As “thinking substance,” the cogito is inherently monological because it is always and necessarily ego cogito (the “I think”) in isolation from others, both other minds and other bodies. The mind is independent of the body, and it needs nothing more than itself to think. As Merleau-Ponty puts it concisely, Cartesianism is “a philosophy of reflection [philosophie réflexive] which identifies my being with what I think of it,” that is, a reflective narcissism.47 As such, it scandalizes sociality. Moreover, the mind as cogito for Descartes erects the privatized, insulated, and echoless chamber of “clear and distinct ideas.” Thus Cartesian metaphysics is identifiable with the ocularcentric or panoptic hegemony of vision. Panoptic metaphysics goes hand in
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hand with the monologism of the cogito because vision is not only isolating or distancing but also anaesthetic in denying sociability with other senses: there is a narcissism and social amnesia of and in all hegemonic vision. There is indeed an identity between the “I” and the “eye.” The cogito is video ergo sum, or the mind’s I is the mind’s eye. Heidegger contends that the “I” (or the “eye”) of the cogito as substance becomes the center of thought from which the “I-viewpoint” and the subjectivism of modern thought originate: “the subjectivity of the subject is determined by the ‘I-ness’ (Ichheit) of the ‘I think’.” For him, the “I-viewpoint” of the Cartesian cogito highlights the modern age as “the age of the world picture” (Weltbild).48 The American pragmatist Richard Shusterman, who is deeply immersed in both Eastern and Western aesthetics, has coined the interesting term “somaesthetics.”49 Not unlike a phenomenologist of the “lived body,” he speaks of sentient soma in order to emphasize the body as an unmediated subject rather than as an objective body. As a matter of fact, Shusterman’s somaesthetics takes seriously Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological conception of the body as “a work of art.” What is most important for our discussion here is the fact that Shusterman takes a cue, as does McLuhan,50 from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s precocious observation that the human body is “the magazine of inventions” and that “[a]ll the tools and engines on earth are only extensions of its limbs and senses.”51 Shusterman, furthermore, recognizes the body as the “most primordial tool of tools,” that is, the “most basic medium for interacting with our various environments.”52 In a nutshell, the body is or acts as “urmedium.” He celebrates the body as medium. Etymologically defined, the medium (meson, medius, Mittel, moyen) is something that “stands between two other things between which it mediates. Being in the middle, an interface with two faces, a medium connects the mediated terms, yet also separates them by standing between them.”53 The mediatic function of the body is unquestionably plural or multiple. As such, it is portrayed as “a multimedia conglomerate of different sensory modalities and technologies.”54 Shusterman comes to view that somatic selfconsciousness points to “the vision of an essentially situated, relational, and symbiotic self rather than the traditional concept of an autonomous self grounded in an individual, monadic, indestructible, and unchanging soul,”55 which is undeniably Cartesian. On the question of the body-media relationship, Shusterman concludes that, at the hub of the media revolution, the “central medium” of the body gets elevated to “the status of constructor
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and locus of the real.” “Once reality is seen as a construction,” he continues, “the media that construct it can no longer be disdained.”56 Couched in the language of “somaesthetics,” Shusterman, I think, authenticates and refashions McLuhan’s quintessential expressions: “the medium is the message” and “the electric light is pure information,” in which the reality of the message is not separated from its medium. However, McLuhan goes further than Shusterman in discriminating the multiple mediatic sensory functions of the body in favor of the audio-tactile over the purely visual in creating a symbiotic self in a global village in the age of electronic information. In connecting McLuhan’s philosophy of communication equipped with knowledge of Sinic “kinetograms” to philosophy of “new media,” Bernadette Wegenstein’s Getting Under the Skin: The Body and Media Theory (2006), which contains the chapter entitled “The Medium is the Body,”57 is most interesting and relevant. It is the most erudite and well-read work on the question of embodying new media with an allusive title and with an elegant introduction by the avant-garde philosopher of new media, Mark Hansen.58 Wegenstein considers that her work is “an inverse complementary” to Hansen’s call for a new philosophy based on the body. Her insight demands that embodiment be framed in terms of new media. Thus embodiment and new media for Wegenstein and Hansen go hand in hand. Wegenstein describes her experience of body discourse as gotten under the skin. She soon moved to cognitive science, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, literary and cultural studies, and so on. And she learned from Heidegger’s extensive commentaries on Nietzsche that the body belongs to the order of “Being” rather than that of “Having,” in the same way that Merleau-Ponty’s phemenology, whose “Archimedian point” is body-consciousness, was learned from Henri Bergson and Gabriel Marcel—the body is not an object but a subject (i.e., lived body, corps vécu). Wegenstein begins her work with a long epigraph from the German Tantric philosopher Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which happens to be the most poignant passage in all the literature of body politics: “body am I entirely, and nothing else; and soul is only a word of something about the body.”59 When Merleau-Ponty speaks of the body as “a work of art,” he is echoing Nieztsche. For Merleau-Ponty, moreover, the carnal landscape is the presupposed foundation of conceptual geography.
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IV.1. Tactility and Embodied Sociality By embodying media, “new media” thinkers have overcome the Cartesian view of the disembodied mind. Unfortunately, however, they bring Cartesian monologic cocoon back from a back door. The title of Wegenstein’s work throws some light, though perhaps unintentionally, on the question of monologism or narcissism. When she speaks of “under the skin,” she is concerned with happenings or phenomena only internal to the body by being oblivious to the fact that the skin is the initiating point of social contact or of tactile sociality, including what Claudia Benthien calls “teletactility.”60 As the skin is “profoundly shaped by history and culture,” she characterizes— rightly, I think—the skin as the “cultural border” between the self and the world.61 “For the newborn (as well as the unborn),” she stresses, “the skin is the most important [as well as the most primordial] organ of communication and contact.”62 It has no walls to shield us from the outside world. As the skin covers the entire surface of the human body, it organizes the entire body, the inside out and the outside in. It serves not only as a protective shield but also, most importantly, as the Archimedian frontier of social contact. It is a DMZ, as it were, between the inside and the outside. As such, tactility (tactus) is the most primordial site of social contact in which the skin defines the boundary (horismos in Greek) of what is the inside or the outside of the body. The breast-feeding by a mother of an infant stands for the pure joy of tactile sociality. What we need here is a phenomenological sociology of the body that regards the body as a social phenomenon, the discussion of which is missing from the theory of “new media.”63 There is indeed a strong tradition in phenomenology of the body, which regards the body as the umbilical cord to the social, particularly in works by Merleau-Ponty, Erwin W. Straus, and Alfred Schutz. Merleau-Ponty is pithy when he declares that Cartesianism is a scandal for communicability and sociality, for the social dwells in intercorporeality. But for the body, there would be no conception of space at all, including social space. The body is the spatial axis to determine what is right and left, up and down, far and near, and so on. The cultural sociologist Norbert Elias has the most intriguing way of defining speech: it is nothing but social relations turned into sound.64 To emulate him, sexuality, too, is nothing but social relations turned into carnal contact. The body covered with the skin is our social placement in the world. In defining the social, Straus favors the primacy of the body over that of the mind because “the body of
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an organism is related to other bodies; it is a part of the physical universe. The mind, however, is related to one body only; it is not directly related to the world, nor to other bodies, nor to other minds.”65 The mind itself becomes a relatum only because the body is in the world with other bodies. Looking at the inside of the skin, whatever that might be, would court a disaster for the social and hence the ethical. To explore the inside under the skin is antisocial and antiethical unless we are looking for a hobgoblin in our consciousness or conscience. Merleau-Ponty speaks of the “fulguration of coexistence.”66 Auguste Rodin whose sculptural handiwork The Cathedral is the unsurpassable artistic rendition of sociology of the body or of the “sacrament of coexistence,” which portrays the rite of two right hands coming together. The psychotherapist Adam Phillips points out that the pleasure of tickling, which is a skin contact, cannot be produced in the absence of the other because it requires “the enacted recognition of the other.”67 Indeed, tickling is a contact sport. The sociologist David Sudnow, too, describes playing and performing (improvised) jazz on piano as the socialization of the hand.68 His sociological description of the hand was inspired by Heidegger’s telling passage, which describes the ecstatic quality of the human hand in the following exquisite way: The hand is a peculiar thing. In the common view, the hand is part of our bodily organism. But the hand’s essence can never be determined, or explained, by its being an organ which can grasp. Apes, too, have organs that can grasp, but they do not have hands. The hand is infinitely different from all grasping organs—paws, claws, or fangs—different by an abyss of essence. . . . The hand does not only grasp and catch, or push and pull. The hand reaches and extends, receives, and welcomes—and not just things: the hand extends itself, and receives its own welcome in the hands of others. The hand holds. The hand carries. The hand designs and signs, presumably because man is a sign (emphasis added).69 To be sure, Heidegger’s description of the human peculiarity of the hand is not out of the arrogance of humanism but a description of the existential facticity of being human in the world (in-der-Welt-sein). Chapter 4 of Wegenstein’s work entitled “The Medium is the Body” is most relevant to relating McLuhan’s philosophy of communication to new media. In case of sign language, McLuhan’s formula that “the medium is the
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message” is right: if the medium is the message and the body is the medium, then the body is the message! Both Hansen and Wegenstein repeatedly place emphasis on the body as mediality: as Hansen puts it, “the history of the body [is] a history of mediation.”70 “Wegenstein’s argument,” comments Hansen, “marks a triumphant return to McLuhan’s understanding of media as prosthesis to the human body, and understanding that has yet to exercise its full force and significance.”71 Wegenstein interprets McLuhan’s dictum that the electric light (medium) is pure information (message) as “a medium without a message, as it were, unless it is used to spell out some verbal ad or name.”72 It seems that McLuhan here is using a rhetorical device to shorten the circuit of the message and the medium to emphasize the inseparability of one from the other.73
IV.2. Critique of “New Media” Theory The propagation of technology has unquestionably globalized communication. However, the world whose dominant prose is written in the language of technology with “lifelike qualities”—to use the posthumanist term—and the condition of humanity thereof enframed by the hegemony of technology including informatics, cyberneticization of knowledge, and the computerization of society is a mixed blessing. We are all wired to, and become hostages of, the network of technology from which there is no exit in sight. In this setting, it is reasonable to suggest with the late German philosopher of technology, Friedrich Dessauer, that in addition to the three classic Kantian forms of critique, there should be the fourth, that is, the critique of the technological. It is quite clear that this new critique will become the most important form of critique in the epoch when technology, including informatics, is totalizing, one-dimensional, planetary, and terribly banal and normalizing; when the fundamental project of macrotechnology threatens to create a vast necropolis for the entire earth and its by-products in the form of global warming, and climatic change bring the entire earth to the brink of collective extinction; and when microtechnology claims to have created and cloned our “new self” with “new media” whose soul and body may soon, if it has not already, become imprisoned behind the invisible walls of the gigantic technological Panopticon. Indeed, the specter of Orwell’s 1984 has resurfaced. This specter was questioned by the previous generations of philosophers such as Heidegger, Herbert Marcuse, Jacques Ellul, Lewis Mumford, and Merleau-Ponty, who is a hero figure of new media thinkers. Unfortunately,
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however, media technomatics—embodied and disembodied—has not erased this specter, which new media thinkers have not yet seriously and systematically questioned. It is a “technoromanticism” pure and simple. In one of his Collège de France courses between 1952 and 1960, Merleau-Ponty prophetically spoke of the unholy alliance of naturalism and artificialism, as “a new prometheism”: “An extreme naturalism and an extreme artificialism are inextricably associated, not only in the myths of everyday life, but also in the refined myths which arise, for example, out of the theory of information or neo-Darwinism.”74 Merleau-Ponty was well aware of the manipulative and destructive power of technology, although he developed no explicit and systematic philosophy of it. True to his conception of philosophy or philosophical critique as the perpetual vigilance on everything we do and think, he begins his seminal essay, “Eye and Mind,”75 with a contrast between the concrete art of living and the abstract character of science that manipulates things and rarely comes in contact with the real world of men and women. He observes the emergence of an entirely new approach, a sort of intellectual fad, as it were, that attempts to master the sciences as autonomous techniques in which thinking is reduced to data gathering, testing, operating, experimenting, and transforming. Merleau-Ponty thus writes, “Thinking ‘operationally’ has become a sort of absolute artificialism, such as we see in the ideology of cybernetics, where human creations are derived from a natural information process, itself conceived on the model of human machines.”76 In operational thinking, in brief, the human himself or herself becomes simply another information machine. In Merleau-Ponty we hear a grim echo of Daedalus’s voice in James Joyce’s Ulysses concerning history as a nightmare. Merleau-Ponty continues, “If this kind of thinking were to extend its reign to man and history; if, pretending to ignore what we know of them through our own situations, it were to set out to construct man and history on the basis of a few abstract indices . . . then, since man really becomes the manipulandum he takes himself to be, we enter into a cultural regimen where there is neither truth nor falsity concerning man and history, into a sleep, or a nightmare, from which there is no awakening.”77 Heidegger, too, insists that the essence of technology (Technik) is no longer technological. Technology is, as it were, an ontological fix rather than instrumental. Whether embodying media (“new media”) is a fait accompli, a dream coming true, or a nightmare to be continued—that is the question yet to be answered.
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The French philosopher of social practices, Pierre Bourdieu, is no less concerned with the same question when he speaks of the habitus as an “incorporated disposition” in all kinds of social practices, which is “internalized as a second nature.” It is “what enables the institution to attain full realization: it is through the capacity for incorporation, which exploits the body’s readiness to take seriously the performative magic of the social.”78 Earlier, his compatriot Michel Foucault, too, was fearful of the specter of the Panopticon seen as “the diagram of a mechanism of power” or as “a figure of political technology.” This Panopticon of power “is polyvalent in its applications, it serves to reform prisoners, but also to treat patients, to instruct school children, to confine the insane, to supervise workers, to put beggars and idlers to work. It is a type of location of bodies in space . . . of definition of the instruments and modes of intervention of power, which can be implemented in hospitals, workshops, schools, prisons, [and academies].”79 In the final analysis, the “postphenomenologist” Don Ihde (1998) does a quick “reality check” on “virtual bodies” in light of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological sense of the “lived body” (corps vécu) and he comes to the conclusion that virtual reality bodies are “thin” or literally skin-deep and never gain the “thickness” or, I might add, softness of the body as flesh. Incorporating the technologized medium into our living body is just “a fantasy of desire.” “[W]hen we emerge from the shadows, effects, and hyper-realities of the theater into the sunlight in the street,” Ihde continues, “it is not Plato’s heaven we find, but the mundane world in which we can walk, and converse, and even find a place in which to eat” real but not prosthetic food.80 This distinction, just as the existential facticity that humans can laugh when they are sad and they can cry when they are extremely happy, does not necessarily, as posthumanists claim, make us antagonistic to technology, including new media, as our extensions. One wonders if the technoromanticism81 that folds humanity and technology into one fleshfold is a dream come true or a nightmare to be continued.
CHAPTER 10
the joy of textualizing japan a me tacomme nta ry on rol and barthe s’s empire of signs
Kogo tokitsukusazare. [Brevity is the essence of good wording.] —A Zen jakugo L’écriture est . . . un satori. [Writing is a Zen awakening.] —Roland Barthes Nowadays the way of educating as well as the way of learning is wrong. True knowledge is not in the written word. Books are always “translations.” The “original” is what is by its own nature. —Okada Torajiro (Zen Master)
i. introduction to barthes’s japan Along with Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes is a major architect of French structuralism. More specifically, he is one of the most inventive masters of contemporary literary theory who fashioned its directions, modes, and trends. He is indeed, as the Japanese would say, a meijin (famous person) of literary theory. He is called by Jonathan Culler “a cultural institution.”1 In this sense, interdisciplinarity is for Barthes not just a slogan or a theoretical speculation but is practiced in his own writings. Rather than confining himself to a particular discipline or
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subject matter—such as literature, anthropology, psychoanalysis, history of ideas—his intellectual taste is vast, versatile, and catholic. His versatile inventiveness as well as his Japonisme (love of things Japanese) are evidenced in the gem of an essay, L’Empire des signes (1970),2 which is thoroughly Gallic in taking delight in the dillydally of a myriad of things in Japan. Barthes speaks fondly of Japan or a system of signs called Japan. Versatility, however, does not mean the lack or absence of intellectual focus or unity. Empire of Signs is in itself the mosaic scanning by an itinerant eye of the tantalizing parade of signs each of which counts and falls in its proper place—its ordered randomness accentuates the carefree and spontaneous sense of natural balance and unity with no privileged center. It is called a “luxurious and eclectic album.”3 Empire of Signs is the cultural landscape or, better, the geography of itinerant cultural topics. There is indeed some truth in saying that a great thinker thinks only one single thought. Barthes is no exception. His decentered center is semiology, whose neutral center is language and particularly “literature” as writing (écriture). In his Inaugural Lecture at the Collège de France in 1977, he enunciated clearly and decisively, “I cannot function outside language, treating it as a target, and within language, treating it as a weapon.”4 And he called contemporary literature a permanent revolution of language and made it synonymous with writing or text. Writing makes knowledge festive or full of asobi (joyous play)—to use the expression of Japanese geisha culture. It is, in short, the gaiety of language in the manner of geisha asobi. The rhetoricity of Barthes’s Empire of Signs is, without question, of donjuanesque quality: it is a seductive exercise in semiological don juanism.5 Barthes is indeed a writer (écrivain) who is the homo ludens par excellence. Knowledge (savoir), too, is the flavoring (saveur) of language or words. No wonder there is a close diatactics between the knowledge of culture and that of cooking. Barthes’s Empire of Signs describes Japan as the vast network of signs or a galaxy of signifiers. It is, as Susan Sontag puts it, “the ultimate accolade” of semiology.6 As fashion is the language of fashion and the city is an ideogram, the country Japan is an “empire of signs” or an ideographic “city.” Ludwig Wittgenstein wittingly likens language to a city: “Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and these surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight and regular streets and uniform houses”7—and much more, more complex with, say, narrow zigzagging
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alleys and sometimes with unpassable subterranean tunnels, which are even intriguing and befuddling to the native dwellers. Moreover, Empire of Signs is inevitably an intellectual autobiography as well as Gedankenexperiment of his deconstructive semiology as a universal science in which Japan is one of its laboratories.8 Barthes is indeed a maiko (apprentice)—to use the geisha language—in performing the semiotics of Japanese culture. Every serious endeavor is in part autobiographical—the self becoming the material subject of writing for itself and for others. I am here reminded of Raymond Savignac’s Astral in which “de haut en bas” and “de bas en haut” are dialectically interchangeable. Autobiography or selfindulgence, it should be remembered, is not necessarily navel-gazing and thus acrimonious or opprobrious. For, on the contrary, radical observation is an interrogation for—to paraphrase Maurice Merleau-Ponty—a set of observations wherein he who observes is himself implicated by the observation. In other words, radical observation is a “metacommentary” in the sense that Fredric Jameson uses it: “every individual interpretation must include an interpretation of its own existence, must show its own credentials and justify itself: every commentary must be at the same time a metacommentary as well.”9 In this regard, Empire of Signs is an exotic subtext or supplement to Barthes’s structural semiology: at least it adds colors and flavors to the texture and fabric of his written corpus as a whole. Without it the main text itself would be incomplete. The exotic incites and excites his intellectual acumen. It elicits an inciting and exciting reading as well. It would be wrong to say, however, that Barthes intended to write a scholarly text on Japan and make a scholarly contribution to Oriental studies in the tradition of his countrymen Paul Masson-Oursel, Marcel Granet, Henri Maspero, and René Sieffert. Rather, he is an enthusiastic and observant amateur. Precisely because he is an amateur, he is able to pump in an air of fresh insight. Barthes’s Empire of Signs, as Culler characterizes it judiciously, is a combination of “touristic commentary on Japan with a reflection on signs in everyday life and their ethical implications.”10 It is indeed a discerning, abecedarian account of Japanese culture as a system of signs. In European history, Orientalism has been like a pendulum that cyclically swings back and forth from the likings and disliking of the Orient. In French history, it fluctuates from Voltaire to Montesquieu. It is certainly a pathological swing. In an imaginary dialogue with a Japanese scholar, Martin Heidegger once expressed his puzzlement and bemusement that the Japanese forget the beginnings of their own thinking and rush to and chase after
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anything latest and newest in European thought. In modern history, the Oriental or Japanese love for things Occidental needs no documentation. Particularly because of the Japanese success in industrial development, now the Occidental love for the Orient—Japan in particular—abounds. In 1974 the French Tel Quel group including Phillippe Sollers, Julia Kristeva, and Barthes visited China. As a result, Kristeva, for example, published in 1977 Des Chinoises, which is destined to become an important chapter in the annals of women’s liberation. Before his China trip, Barthes visited and toured Japan in 1966 to lecture on structural semiology. According to the account of the French scholar who was president of the Franco-Japanese Institute in Tokyo— Maurice Pinguet, to whom Empire of Signs was dedicated—Barthes’s love for Japan was genuine and deep. In this, I might add, he followed the footsteps of his compatriot Paul Claudel who, more than anyone else, opened up intercultural exchanges between France and Japan in the twentieth century. The Japanese, in turn, responded to Barthes by translating his L’Empire des signes four years after its original publication: Shirushi no Teikoku (1974).11 And they celebrated or, better, commemorated Barthes’s oeuvre in the June 1980 special issue of Gendai Shiso, which has the French subtitle—Revue de la pensée d’aujourd’hui. The present essay is a commentary on Barthes’s commentary on Japan. I think no apology, however, is necessary to the incomparable essayist Michel de Montaigne, with all due respect and seriousness, who complained about the profusion of commentaries instead of writing about the order of things (les choses), that is, “interpreting interpretations” instead of “interpreting things” themselves. Montaigne’s old but familiar complaint is no doubt a sober reflection on our age of commentaries, criticism, and scholarship. On the other hand, however, we should not forget that, in the first place, as human thought is coextensive with language, the verbum is not the surrogate or disguise of the res (or les choses). Rather, the verbum is also the res. So “interpreting interpretations” is willy-nilly “interpreting things” themselves. In the second place, since—following the lead of Nietzsche or Harold Bloom’s disputation—interpretation is and will always be misinterpretation, the interpreted things or words remain to be reinterpreted. Finally, as we will see more clearly later, phenomenological reading turns and returns to the experiential to honor its validity, that is to say, it not only does not bifurcate “interpreting interpretations” and “interpreting things” but actually makes the bifurcation unnecessary and superfluous because in it, as in Zen, “things” themselves are the homestead of all “interpretations.”
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Be that as it may, the present metacommentary will focus on Barthes’s semiological observation of significant Japanese cultural signs and symbols as manifested and surfaced particularly in Zen, haiku, and calligraphy in “Barthes’ Fascination with Things Uniquely Japanese,” and then it will critically evaluate the limits of his view of the Japanese empire of signs from the phenomenology of lived experience in “Critique of Barthes’ Semiological Sinography.” It should be noted from the outset that the question of how a given text is to be read is a controversial question in the contemporary hermeneutics of literature. No matter. I only intend to follow Barthes’s own deconstructionist injunction that as there is nothing outside it, the text has an autochthonous status whose fate depends on readership rather than authorship. As, according to Barthes, there is an ineluctable dialectic or even paradox between reading and writing, the only explicit reading is writing. The only proper response to writing is another writing that is a metacommentary. By all means, Barthes intended to record in Empire of Signs his fascination with Japan as “the country of writing”—Japan’s grammatology, which is heavily pictographic or ideographic. As the tidal waves of deconstructive grammatology have been sweeping the contemporary literary scene, the tendency is rushing toward Chinese ideography as pure, antiphonocentric writing.12 Barthes is by no means the first and will not be the last Occidental who has been mesmerized by things traditionally Japanese. Nevertheless, there is a uniqueness in his oeuvre: unlike the other Occidental students, he textualizes everything in Japanese culture through deconstructive grammatology whose grand goal is to dismantle logocentrism, which allegedly coincides with Western ethnocentrism. Like Igor Stravinsky who confessed that he enjoyed the activity of composing (writing) better than the music itself, deconstructive grammatologists have made writing intransitive: writing is writing is writing.
ii. barthes’ fascination with things uniquely japanese The title of Barthes’s work is, as it were, the wrapper of the content of Japanese culture as a system of signs. To decipher or zero in on the content, we must unwrap the wrapper. The content is packaged with a decorous plethora of cultural bonsai cultivated as miniaturized texts. If, however, the wrapper were the gift itself, the title would be the content: there would be no inner soul separate from the textual flesh. For Barthes, Japan displays an epicurean
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menu of exotic icons: Zen, satori, mu, haiku, sumotori, pachinko, ikebana, Kabuki, Bunraku, Zengakuren, hashi, miso, sashimi, sukiyaki, tempura, and so on. It would be wrong to conclude that Barthes attends only to the “wrapping” of Japanese culture while dispensing with its “contents.” What is to be recognized here is the need to deconstruct the all-too-commonplace dichotomy between the visible and the invisible, outside and inside, appearance and reality, wrapping and content, surface and depth, manifest and latent, concrete and abstract, ritual and choice, text and intention, style and form, deed and word, and so on. Where there is no dichotomizing doublet, there is indeed “sincerity.”13 Since the visible body initiates the rite of passage to the invisible soul of an alien culture by a foreign observer or tourist, let’s look closer at the outer appearance. It is doubly important in understanding Japanese culture and Barthes’s Japan because of the extraordinary attention paid to it by the Japanese themselves and consequently Barthes himself in Empire of Signs. From a semiological perspective, too, the outer is as important as, if not more than, the inner. What is a sign? It is, according to Barthes, the union of the signifier and the signified. The term is translated in Japanese as shirushi (or kigo), which means any visible marking—particularly nonlinguistic marking. It is interesting to see the unusual Japanese deference to the content is indicated immediately in the outer appearance of the translated copy of Barthes’s Empire of Signs—in addition to its addenda inside (more pictures, extra explanatory notes and the translator’s introduction). The translation is boxed and wrapped with wax paper. The cover of the book is clothed with the printing paper of excellent quality. Whether or not one can read Japanese, the external appearance gives one the impression that this is an important work, indeed. If Barthes’s work is to be judged by its cover, we should attend to it. The outer box has a separate wrapper with the photograph of a traditional, aristocratic, anonymous courtly woman, which could easily depict a scene from the Genji monogatari. The picture is explained in the French original simply as “Fragment d’une carte postale” reminding us of Derrida’s recent work on Freud. Without doubt the woman is the surfacial centerfold of Empire of Signs, which is consonant with Barthes’s own semiological approach. As a picture is worth a thousand words, the woman is the “stadium” where Barthes displays the multicolored galaxy of signifiers in Japanese culture. First, it is a picture. As such it de/sign/ates the presence of Japan in absence. In photography, according to Barthes, form and content coincide. The literal message of the woman (denotation) is not clear, but its symbolic message (connotation)
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is worth exploring. Clearly, Barthes is interested in signifying the traditional depth of Japanese culture. Second, the courtly woman is wearing a colorful, long garment that befits her long black hair. This garment is ingrained, as it were, in the fabric of Barthes’s text. Interestingly enough, Barthes in The Fashion System discusses clothing as protecting, covering, and masking. He quotes Hegel’s aesthetics approvingly: “as pure sentience, the body cannot signify; clothing guarantees the passage from sentience to meaning; it is, we might say, the signified par excellence.”14 What then does the garment of the courtly woman signify in relation to her pure sentience? The absolute privacy of sex? Speaking about the absence of sex in pachinko, Barthes observes that in Japan “sex is in sexuality, not elsewhere,” whereas in the United States, on the contrary, “sex is everywhere, except in sexuality.”15 Third and the most important is the activity engaged in by the courtly woman. In traditional Japan, there was a gender gap between man and woman in the activity of writing. What Barthes describes as the country of writing, kanji or ideographic calligraphy, whether or not he is aware of it, is typically a male activity, whereas for women it was an irreverent activity. Although there is no definite assurance that she is writing in kanji rather than (hira)kana—which is highly improbable—the importance of writing is accentuated by the woman in the act of letter writing. Man in the act of writing is normal and usual, whereas woman in the act of writing is rare. As sexuality and textuality coincide in the portrayal of the woman in the act of writing, the bridging of the gender gap signifies antiphallocentrism as well as antilogocentrism. If, however, Barthes was only interested in portraying sexuality alone, the more appropriate centerfold of his work would have been the “courtesan (yugo) with a dog” in the book, a geisha girl or a shunga (porno) to satisfy the lascivious eye.16 Now, so much for the outer cover. Zen is the inner soul of Japanese culture, and writing is for Barthes Zen’s satori—an inner awakening or enlightenment. He is fascinated with and celebrates the graphism of all things Japanese. As a nation of ideograms or pictograms, Japan is a graphic bliss or nirvana. Barthes has a tremendous proclivity to describe nonlinguistic signs in linguistic terms: every human face—including his own shown in the Kobe Shinbun during his tour in Japan and that of a corpulent sumotori—as a written text, an inscription, or a citation; miso as adding “a touch of clarity”; sukiyaki as becoming “decentered, like an uninterrupted text”; tempura as a “grammar” or visibly graphic; the city as an “ideogram”; Zengakuren as “a syntax of actions”; the stationary store as an “ideographic marquetry,” and so on. In the context of his deconstructive
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grammatology, in short, Barthes’s discovery of Japan as a nation of ideographic inscriptions may be likened to the famous wooden statue in Kyoto of the enlightened Zen monk Hoshi where the visage of divinity is emerging through a crevice of his face. Barthes declares that writing is a satori: Zen and satori are signified by the void or empty (le vide).17 There is the kanji (ideogram) “void” calligraphed for Barthes by a female student. Underneath the kanji is the Japanese pronunciation mu and le vide. In Japan, in the country of writing whose inner soul coincides with Zen, mu is the abysmal “ground” or Urgrund of everything or everything is a metaphor of mu. Barthes writes, “Writing is after all, in its way, a satori; satori (the Zen occurrence) is a more or less powerful (though in no way formal) seism which causes knowledge or the subject, to vacillate: it creates an emptiness of language. And it is also an emptiness of language which constitutes writing; it is from this emptiness that derive the features with which Zen, in the exemption from all meaning, writes gardens, gestures, houses, flower arrangements, faces, violence.”18 The key expression to understand Barthes’s Japan—and his deconstructive semiology—is “an emptiness of language.” In the first place, however, there is an ambiguity in Barthes’s own description of the kanji “mu” as le vide. Mu is sunyata (emptiness) in Sanskrit. When a Mahayana text was introduced to the Chinese in the second century, they were not able to grasp with ease the idea of sunyata (k’ung [Chinese] and ku [Japanese]) as they did many other abstract Buddhist concepts, although they found it akin to the Taoist idea of wu (nothingness) as in the famous wu-wei (no-action) in the Tao Te Ching.19 Ideogrammatically, mu and ku are two different characters. Mu (Japanese) or wu (Chinese) is le néant, whereas ku is le vide. The Japanese translation clearly indicates this difference. In the second place, the expression “an emptiness of language” is “un vide de parole” in Barthes’s original French text. Therefore, the English translation of “parole” as “language” is rather misleading inasmuch as it makes little sense to speak of writing as an emptiness of language itself. In the tradition of Saussurean linguistics, langage consists of parole and langue. If writing is “un vide de parole,” it is contrasted with speech as event within the (Japanese) language as a system. For it, too, is an integral part of language (langage). The passage cannot be understood otherwise. Writing as a satori is antiphonocentric resonating with the general aim of deconstructive grammatology. The dialectical opposite of writing is not language but speech. The Japanese translation of parole as kotoba (spoken word) is aware
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of this fundamental distinction between language as speech and language as writing. Moreover, deeply rooted in Chinese and Japanese thought is the tradition that the dialectical opposite of speech is not writing but rather silence or the “unsayable.” There is, however, no glaring contradiction here because writing is always a silent transgression of verbal acts. In the Zen tradition, there is a diatactics of speech and silence: speech is the yang of silence, and silence the yin of speech. Just as in John Cage’s compositional techniques sound and silence are posed as complementary, Sontag considers silence not as an “incineration of consciousness” but, on the contrary, as a pharmacon for the pollution of language.20 Silence may be invoked as a copula, hyphen, punctuation, or even rupture in the dialectical flow of human communication. As such its communicative value exceeds and surpasses that of “empty talk” (parole vide).21 To Zen, as the tradition goes, silence is more suitable than eloquence. According to D. T. Suzuki, whose name in the West is synonymous with Zen, Zen’s satori is realized in performance that may be (1) verbal (speaking) or (2) actional.22 In the first place, since Zen is an everyday occurrence in our social life, we need to communicate with one another through the medium of language. Unlike the rules of linguistics as the science of language (presumably including semiology), however, Suzuki insists that Zen verbalism is intuitive and experiential, that is, nonconceptual and lived. Cutting through the conceptual or intellectual sedimentations, Zen attempts to reach directly or immediately konomama (thisness) or sonomama (thatness)—that is, “isness” the attainment of which is called satori. Thus the attainment of satori avoids conceptual detours. According to Barthes, if this state of a-language is a liberation, it is because, for the Buddhist experiment, the proliferation of secondary thoughts (the thought of thought), or what might be called the infinite supplement of supernumerary signifieds—a circle of which language itself is the depository and the model—appears as a jamming: it is on the contrary the abolition of secondary thought which breaks the vicious infinity of language. In all these experiments, apparently, it is not a matter of crushing language beneath the mystic silence of the ineffable, but of measuring it, of halting that verbal top which sweeps into the gyration the obsessional play of symbolic substitutions. In short, it is the symbol as semantic operation which is attacked.23
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In the second place, satori is a moral emancipation, that is, moral fulfillment by doing that which is deeply Sinistic24 (i.e., both Confucian and Taoist). Consider the famous Confucian idea of the “rectification of names” (cheng ming) that is addressed to the performative power of speech in human conduct qua moral. The only way to bridge verbalism with moral fulfillment by doing is to regard speaking itself as the act of doing (i.e., the theory of language both as speech acts and as moral acts). The Japanese as well as the Chinese consider “sincerity”—literally meaning the completion of spoken words—the acme of moral virtue. Nishida Kitaro—the greatest Japanese philosopher of the twentieth century—regards intuition as the basis of artistic creativity and moral conduct. Intuition rather than the intellect is the élan vital of artistic and moral creativity. Mencius, too, considered “intuitive knowledge” (liang chih or, literally, “good knowledge”) as the basis of everyday moral conduct. Culler is right, as noted earlier, that Barthes’s commentary on Japan as empire of signs is also an ethical one. In the Japanese as well as the Chinese tradition, painting and writing are inseparable—the fact of which has not failed Barthes’s own attention. In calligraphy, writing reaches the status of an art. In it, to inscribe is to paint. As Guillaume Apollinaire “painted” his poetry as “calligrammes,” so does the contemporary Japanese painter Hiro Kamimura exemplify an attempt to synthesize painting with ideograms: his “Water and Ice” is a homonymous blending of painting and writing. The Obaku sect of Zen excels in kanji calligraphy, which approximates painting. Painting, moreover, is invariably accompanied by ideographic inscriptions. Sumiye painting is an example of how painting approaches writing.25 Japanese “photocracy”—the craze for pictograms—is too well known to elaborate. Barthes’s own 1970 painting after the Italian futurism (which is used on the front cover jacket of the recent American anthology A Barthes Reader edited by Susan Sontag) looks like vertiginous Chinese calligraphy. His own handwritten French transcription of a few Japanese expressions in Empire of Signs resembles calligraphy. Calligraphy may be characterized as a choreography of gestures. It is a ballet of ideograms in rite order—to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parkere.26 When sinograms, such as Picasso’s painted Swimmer (1929) and Acrobat (1930), are calligraphed as the human body in motion, they turned into a kinaesthetic art. In this sense, we are compelled to agree with the British philosopher R. G. Collingwood, who perceptively comments that insofar as language is a specialized form of human gesture, the dance is the mother of all languages.27
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Haiku is a polyglot La Vieille mare: Une grenouille sauté dedans: Oh! le bruit de l’eau. Furu ike ya! Kawazu tobikomu, Mizu no oto. [The old pond: A frog jumps in: Oh! the sound of the water.] Barthes’s unabated enthusiasm for haiku as the elixir of Japanese literature— indeed, all literature—cannot be doubted. S/Z, which was published in the same year as Empire of Signs, should perhaps be read as “Semiology/Zen” that celebrates the Japanese tradition.28 Each of the 561 lexias in S/Z, as noted earlier by Leitch, is a haiku of criticism whose packaged notation equals a cultivated bonsai. For Barthes, haiku is merely the literary branch of Zen.29 There is indeed a three-way interfusion of writing, Zen (satori), and haiku. Barthes, too, notices the ineluctable blending of painting and haiku writing in the following two examples. The first is the picture of one cucumber and two eggplants on a kakemono by an anonymous sixteenth-century author, which is unfortunately omitted from the English translation. It is found in the midst of Barthes’s discussion of haiku. The three vegetables symbolize or parallel three short lines of a haiku. The second is a more suggestive and seductive example than the first. It is the “mushroom picking” by the eighteenth-century Japanese artist Yokoi: three raw mushrooms are pierced through a wisp of straw above which is the following three-line haiku (poème bref en trois vers): Il se fait cupide aussi, le regard baissé sur les champignons
He becomes greedy his eyes lowered on the mushrooms
If “rawness” (crudité) is the kind of a “floating signifier,” the painting and the haiku are in the state of a sexual, chiasmic invagination. The kakemono
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signifies—to use a mycophilial expression—the “bemushroomed” state of ekstasis: the symbolic, spiritual flight of the haiku and the pictured mushrooms from the body of the kakemono. This may explain why the composer John Cage is interested in fusing Zen and mycology, that is, in ethnomycology. Be that as it may, Barthes goes on to ask (in handwriting) rhetorically about the “mushroom picking”: “Where does the writing begin? Where does the painting begin?” Set aside the rhetoricity of the questions, and one might point out that they can be raised only by those for whom Chinese ideography is an unknown art, although the pictured sketch of the three raw mushrooms pierced through a straw resembles, and may thus be mistaken easily for, a polygamous ideogram.
iii. critique of barthes’ semiological sinography Empire of Signs is the testimonial of an itinerant pilgrim—not unlike the Zen monk Hoshi who, too, travelled to China in the beginning of the T’ang period in search of Zen (satori)—in search of semiological markings (shirushi) in all things Japanese whose epicenter is writing (écriture). For Barthes, we may say, Japan was a semiological geisha house where the freeplay (asobi) of signs takes place.30 Although Barthes succeeds in “intellectual deprovincialization” and thus must be applauded for his intention and effort to overcome the conceptual sound barriers of Western narcissism, we cannot answer with certainty whether or not he succeeds in instituting an exogamous link between semiology and Japanese culture. To be universally valid, his semiology as the science of all signs must encompass different galaxies of markings of which Japan is only one. To discover Japan as the country of writing is not at all contrary to the affluent exhibition of the Japanese photocracy we have all come to know so very well in recent years—the photocracy that, in an extended sense of the term, could include photography, painting, dramaturgy, fashions, packaging, gastronomy, and above all calligraphy. Empire of Signs is a belletrism of Japan at its best: as Barthes himself admitted, he enjoyed writing it more than any other book. No doubt the most revealing and original formulation of Barthes’s work is writing is a satori. As Zen is the inner soul of Japanese culture, there is all the more reason the écrivain Barthes is interested in haiku, which he views as the privileged monument of Zen. The most significant question is not how many cultural trophies Barthes gathered but whether or not Empire of Signs—the “ultimate
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accolade” of Japanese culture in the eye of a semiologist—is the insemination and dissemination of his semiology. Although every intellectual endeavor for a savant is, to some extent, autobiographical and Barthes’s Empire of Signs is no exception to this rule, one hopes that it is ideally a reciprocation, as in the spirit of exchanging gifts, of the insemination (taking) of Zen and the dissemination (giving) of his semiology. The idea of writing as satori already involves a semiological strategy. By strategy I mean a chosen set of calculated moves in order to “win” a conceptual game. Part of this strategy is the very selection of what signs are to be taken as significant indicators of Japanese culture. There is, however, a serious problem in relating Zen and satori to semiology. It is in essence the problem of reconciling the French cult of writing (écriture) and the Japanese cult of inner tranquility, unless of course, writing like Zen calligraphy is the carnal “enjoyment” (jouissance or asobi) of a person as a nonutilitarian activity undertaken solely for serenity or what Martin Heidegger calls Gelassenheit, which has been identified as the common denominator of such Zen specialists as Suzuki, Eugen Herrigel, and Karl von Dürckheim. It is also the clash between semiology as a conceptual, linguistic system and Zen as an intuitive, actional experience, which is correlated with the question of the unity or duality of the inner and the outer, depth and surface, the content and the wrapping, gastronomic look and actual taste, and meaning and sign.31 The conception of writing as satori raises the unresolved paradox of Zen as an inner awakening and writing as an outer expression. This paradox is accentuated in Barthes’s Japan because structural semiology as a method of cultural interpretation has a built-in conceptual propensity to disregard the inner in favor of the outer or, in the case of Japan, to wrap Zen with semiology. Barthes is certainly not unaware of the problem when he defines the sign as the union of the signifier and the signified, and when he acknowledges that Zen wages a war against the prevarication of meaning (sens) and that the meaning of a sign is polygamous, not monogamous. John Sturrock thus observes that “In Japanese culture, or at any rate Barthes’ version of it, the exterior of a thing is the thing, there is no informing but invisible agency within. Japan is a country full of rich and intriguing signifiers whose charm is that they have no signifieds.”32 For Barthes, there is no inner soul or privileged center in Zen’s satori because it is mu or the void, which is contradictory to dominant Western metaphysics. The denial of the inner or depth in favor of the outer or surface may well be a conceptual trapping of structural semiology rather than
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the understanding of Zen from within. Thus Sturrock speculates that “the opposition deep-set/flush is itself a Western not a Japanese one, and the Japanese might very well employ a different code in order to locate the Oriental soul.”33 There is always the latent danger of catching Zen with a semiological net. It is for this reason that in his important article the Chinese philosopher Chang Tung-sun identifies Western reasoning with the logic of identity, while Eastern reasoning with the logic of correlation, which is neither monistic, nor dualistic, nor reductionistic.34 As clothing is to the body, so is the sign to culture. As pure sentience without clothing, the body too cannot signify or at least cannot signify sufficiently. By the same logic, culture cannot signify without signs as external “markings” (shirushi). However, a marking is only an external indication, not a meaning. There is a famous saying by the Chinese Taoist Chuang Tzu that words exist for meaning, and once the meaning has been gotten, the words can be forgotten. Culture or language is not like a white onion—a subject of Basho’s haiku of which Barthes seems fond—every layer of which is a surface without an inner core or center. Even in Zen there is mention of “the mind of no-mind” (mushin no shin). It may very well be true that surface is as telling as depth, but in language the signifier without the signified is babbling or doodling. Culture is like language: to understand it, we must understand the diatactics of the subjective and the objective without a facile reductionism. Cultural interpretation is the navigation of the stormy channel between the Scylla of subjectivity and the Charybdis of objectivity. What is lacking in Barthes’s structural semiology as a method of cultural interpretation, therefore, is, and is compensated by, a phenomenology of lived experience (l’expérience vécu) or the lifeworld (le monde vécu: Lebenswelt). In Barthes’s case of Japan as the country of writing as well as Zen, we need to hear Zen’s voice of invisibility as a prerequisite to see its visible surface. There is a lesson to be learned from Ralph Ellison’s “invisible man” who struggles for his visibility by lighting up his basement with 1,369 light bulbs. The message to be gotten here is not to disregard the outer but rather to encourage the dialectical coupling of the inner and the outer or the invisible and the visible, that is, to abandon the facile monism, dualism, or reductionism.35 Without the benefit of a phenomenology of lived experience as the founding and funding matrix of all conceptualization, there is in cultural interpretation the ever-present danger of conceptual entrapment or the prevarication of meaning—especially in the interpretation of a culture, including its own
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linguistic system, which is unfamiliar or dissimilar to the observer’s own.36 It is not to suggest “go native” or “think Japanese” here but only to intimate that a phenomenology of lived experience is the prerequisite for any cultural interpretation. Cultural interpretation is necessarily an echo of the original voice of culture as a network of intersubjective meanings—those meanings that are not just in the minds of the individual actors but rooted in their social and institutional practices including their language. More significantly, to ignore a network of intersubjective meanings is to open—often inadvertently—the safety valve, as it were, that prevents the spillage of ethnocentrism or, as Barthes himself calls it, “Western narcissism.”37 To attend to intersubjective meanings is to respect a local turn of mind and not to miss the cultural contextualization of indigenous signifiers. Barthes himself observes that in the Occident the mirror is a narcissistic object for man to look at himself, whereas in the Orient it is empty and symbolizes the emptiness (ku or le vide) of all symbols. To be enlightened or to attain a satori, Barthes’s writing on Japan must be emptied of the preemptive strategies of his semiology. To deconstruct (phenomenologically) Barthes’s Empire of Signs is simply to trace the presence of semiological reflection in the mirror of his Japan. There is no intimation here that Barthes is an ethnocentrist. Nor is it implied that his understanding of Japanese culture is shallow or superficial. What is pointed out is simply the potential danger of the categorial grid of structural semiology or, for that matter, any conceptual system that ignores consciously or unconsciously a system of intersubjective meanings. Barthes himself noted that in Japan sex is in sexuality, not anywhere else. This observation assumes, to be sure, the knowledge of the inner working of sexuality in Japan. Parallel to the problematic of the content of wrapping is Kabuki’s onnagata, which is in actuality the male actor playing the staged role of the female (i.e., the transvestite actor). Without knowing the inner working of Kabuki, here again, he might be easily mistaken for an actress. Let us make no mistake: a mask is never a real face, although the former tells on occasion a lot about the latter. Moreover, there is nothing wrong with the good looks of often decorous gastronomic Japanese dishes pleasing to our (hungry) eye, but they do not always or necessarily guarantee good taste. Taste, good or bad, is to be known only in the eating.38 In brief, when chained to the categorial grid of structural semiology, cultural interpretation courts conceptual reification, that is to say, falsification. As, in Zen, the written is only a copy or translation of something original or real, to textualize the real is to fabricate it or, at best, to reduce it to a confessional autobiography or a
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cultural narcissism. In the Japanese language, not in its written but only its spoken form, there is the triple, playful distinction between hashi-ga (chopsticks), haSHI-ga (bridge), haSHI-GA (edge). To wit, with the slightest slip (lapsus) of the tongue—not a pen or brush—one can stand at the “bridge” of understanding or at the “edge” of misunderstanding, or when one means to ask for a pair of “chopsticks” at the gastronomic table, he may end up with getting a “bridge!” After having said all this, it is not altogether impossible for anyone to have missed or been “off-side” (hors jeu) in the staging of the Bunraku or Kabuki of Barthes’s semiology in Empire of Signs, that is, the real semiological face or character behind the mask.39 In that case, he can confess that at least he enjoyed a brief geisha asobi (disciplined, not promiscuous, playfulness) of and in Barthes’s house of signs without perhaps knowing its inner workings. By so doing he supplements the Nietzschean freeplay for truth. Ultimately, perhaps we are all playing the labyrinthine game of “truthtelling” in the Rashomon. As the poem of the thirteenth-century Chinese Master Mumom reads, Gateless is the Great Tao, There are thousands of ways to it. If you pass through this barrier, You may walk freely in the universe.40
CHAPTER 11
revolutionary dialectics mao tse - tung and mauri ce m erl eau- p ont y
The “healthy” man is not so much the one who has eliminated his contradictions as the one who makes use of them and drags them into his vital labors. —Maurice Merleau-Ponty
i. introductory remarks We have previously argued that phenomenological hermeneutics is best suited for understanding Maoism as the Sinicization of Marxism and proposed that there is a nonreductionist way of treating phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and Marxism as complementary approaches to the interpretation of cultures. We have also alluded to the fact that Mao’s integral thought and the existential phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, when focused on their notion of the dialectic, not only are complementary, but also contain strikingly homologous arguments on crucial issues.1 Not only are Mao and MerleauPonty dovetailed, but the latter’s theoretical thrust also throws into relief the role of Maoism in the development of Marxism. The aim of our present study is to explore further why this is the case.
ii. merleau-ponty’s marxism and mao’s sinicization of western marxism What is the basis of our comparison of Mao and Merleau-Ponty? To be sure, our comparison is not prompted by one’s comment on the other. For, as far
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as we know, Merleau-Ponty never mentioned Mao. It is simply trite to begin our comparison by saying that Marxism is an integral texture of the thought of both men. Yet Maoism as the Sinicized form of Marxism and MerleauPonty’s interpretation of Marxism as a humanism—both with an emphasis on the dialectic—prompt us to compare them and point to their convergences, despite their differences, on the critical issues of man, history, and society. For Merleau-Ponty in particular, Marxism as a humanistic sociopolitical philosophy is not just an interlude in his philosophical reflections. On the contrary, it constitutes the very body of his work. That is why allusions to Marxism appear even at the most strictly philosophical moments of MerleauPonty’s thought—from Phenomenology of Perception to The Visible and the Invisible.2 Therefore, it would be as mistaken to separate Merleau-Ponty the phenomenologist from the Marxian interpreter as it would be wrong to separate Mao the Chinese from the Marxist. Nor is it sufficient to say that Merleau-Ponty is a man of thought whereas Mao is the man of action, because for Merleau-Ponty Marxism is a humanistic critique of history in a comprehensive sense; the two orders of thought and action intersect at every point. Moreover, if we regard philosophy as requiring only scholastic rigor and conceptual exactitude, then Mao and Merleau-Ponty are a world apart. However, if we regard philosophy as a contribution to the clarification of the human condition—as does Merleau-Ponty—then Maoism is profoundly philosophical. For Merleau-Ponty, as his close friend Claude Lefort remarks, Marxism was never simply “an object of study.” 3 Conversely, for Mao revolutionary praxis always requires revolutionary theory, and the latter precedes the former. Mao aims to Sinicize Marxism. Similarly, Merleau-Ponty aims to integrate it into his existential phenomenology. Although the latter’s enthusiasm for Marxism in Humanism and Terror (1947) became somewhat mellowed in Adventures of the Dialectic (1955),4 this applies not so much to the humanistic fundamentals of Marxism as to their disfigured application in Soviet politics. In Humanism and Terror, Merleau-Ponty contends that the decline of proletarian humanism does not invalidate the whole of Marxism. Marxism is still valid as a critique of the present world and as an alternative humanism: “In this respect, at least, it cannot be surpassed. . . . It is the simple statement of those conditions without which there would be neither any humanism, in the sense of the mutual relation between men, nor any rationality in history. In this sense Marxism is not philosophy of history; it is the philosophy of history and to renounce it is to dig the grave of Reason in history. After that
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there can be no more dreams or adventures.”5 For Merleau-Ponty, there is basically no real difference between the existential and the Marxian conception of history. Marxism is a humanism if by humanism we mean “a philosophy which confronts the relationship of man to man and the constitution of a common situation and a common history between men as a problem.”6 Humanism is nothing but a clarification of the intertwining network of the relationships of man with man, which Merleau-Ponty calls interexistence (intermonde)—we prefer “interexistence” to “coexistence” because, unlike the latter’s passive toleration of the plurality of subjects, the former affirms the active urgency of subjects existing together in the world. As MerleauPonty declares, “[A] political task is not incompatible with any cultural value or literary task, if literature and culture are defined as the progressive awareness of our multiple relationships with other people and the world rather than as extramundane techniques. If all truths are told, none will have to be hidden. In man’s co-existence with men, of which these years have made us aware, morals, doctrines, thoughts and customs, laws, works and words all express each other; everything signifies everything. And outside this unique fulguration of existence there is nothing.”7 So for Merleau-Ponty, interexistence is not the arrangement where the self exists with the other side or in mutual tolerance but is incarnate intersubjectivity—to the theme of which we shall later return. Now, the only reference to Chinese Marxism we find in Merleau-Ponty’s writings is his one-paragraph observation on André Malraux’s sympathetic account of the early stage of the Chinese Revolution in La Condition humaine where, according to Merleau-Ponty, a Marxist-like Kyo confronts the question of both will and fatality that lies at the heart of Marxism; that is, the question whether the individual, because of historical contingency and the ambiguity of the future, should become a victim of collective events or channel them into a desired direction in exercising his or her freedom. Merleau-Ponty says that if we are dealing only with the facts of the Chinese revolutionary situation, the Chinese Communists are probably doomed and the Kuomintang will become victorious. Since “one can be sure of facts only after giving up the attempt to change them,” Merleau-Ponty queries, “Is it not the moment to bring decisive aid to the Communists, thereby forcing history’s hand?”8 There are other indications of why Merleau-Ponty would be sympathetic to Maoism. In the first place, he would approve of Maoism as the Sinicized
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form of Marxism not only because for him Marxism allows historical vectors, situations, and creative variations but also because, as he says, To be a Marxist is not to renounce all differences, to give up one’s identity as a Frenchman, native of Tours or Paris, or to forego individually in order to blend into the world proletariat. It is indeed to become part of the universal, but without ceasing to be what we are. Even in a Marxist perspective the world proletariat is not a revolutionary factor so long as it only exists objectively, in economic analysis. It will become such a factor when it realizes that it is a world proletariat, and this will only happen through the concerted pressure or a meeting at the crossroads of actual proletarians, such as they exist in the different countries, and not through an ascetic internationalism wherein each of them loses his most compelling reasons for being a Marxist.9 Similarly, Mao speaks of “concrete Marxism” in contrast to “abstract Marxism.” For Marxism in China to be concrete means that it must be adapted to the peculiar, indigenous character and situation of China (i.e., the Sinicization of Marxism).10 In the second place, for Merleau-Ponty humanism is not an abstract moralism. He would justify Mao’s politics in the same way he does Machiavelli’s politics, which comprehend the extreme difficulties of collective life and, to be effective, refuse to reduce politics to abstract moralism or a heaven of principles. For, according to Merleau-Ponty, pure morality can be cruel and pure politics may work like a morality. There is a way of upholding Machiavelli that is not Machiavellian as there is a way of repudiating Machiavelli that is Machiavellian. To be a humanist or an effective humanist, one does not have to choose between the ethics of conscience and the ethics of consequences, that is, between the abstract moralism of one’s conscience, which cherishes the unconditional adherence to ends intended regardless of consequences they may bring about, and the ethics, which judges action purely according to its consequences, no matter what its intentions may be. For Merleau-Ponty, a policy cannot be justified in terms of its good or barbarous intentions alone. Nor is any policy that succeeds good: “The curse of politics is precisely that it must translate values into the order of facts. . . . A policy therefore cannot be grounded in principle, it must also comprehend the facts of the situation. It was said long ago that politics is the art of the possible.”11 Viewed in this
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way, the dominant idea of Marxism—Maoism notwithstanding—is not “the sacrifice of values to facts, of morality to realism”; rather, it is “the idea of replacing the verbal morality which preceded the revolution with an effective morality, creating a society in which morality is truly moral, and destroying the morality that exists, dreamlike, outside the world, by realizing it in effective human relationships.”12 So effective politics rejects only abstract moralism, which is ultimately detrimental to humanity. In enhancing humanity, effective politics is a judicious reconciliation of values and facts. By the same token, the moralistic politics, which renounces violence in any form fails to come to terms with the role of violence in all forms of politics—revolutionary or established. For Merleau-Ponty, our choice is not between the presence and absence of violence but is between justifiable (progressive) and unjustifiable (regressive) forms of violence.13 For inasmuch as we are incarnate beings, violence is inescapable: not only is violence the common origin of all regimes, but political choice also occurs only against a background of violence.14 It is instructive for our purpose to elaborate on the openness of MerleauPonty’s views regarding Oriental thought—both Chinese and Indian. What interests us in his discussion on Oriental thought is not to test his knowledge of it but to contrast it with Hegel’s and Husserl’s commentaries. For Merleau-Ponty, Oriental thought is “immensely interesting,” “suggestive,” and “instructive.” As he rightly recounts, Hegel viewed Oriental thought in a cavalier fashion—that, by the way, Marx himself inherited when he refers to an “Asiatic mode of production” that is not yet mature for a Marxist revolution. Oriental thought for Hegel is a state of immature childhood. It is neither philosophy nor religion, since on the one hand, it is not open to absolute and universal knowledge, its culture being bound by its own assumptions, and on the other hand it does not presuppose the principle of freedom and individuality. For Hegel, philosophical truth as absolute and universal knowledge is certified by the Occidental seal of approval alone. The Oriental represents the perpetuation of the eternal yesterday; Oriental thought is a philosophical infantilism or paleography in the progression of world history.15 Husserl too seems to set out on Hegel’s path in his judgment of Oriental thought by affirming the privileged position of Western philosophy—the entelechy of philosophy and humanity based on Greek theoria, which is absent in Oriental thought. Husserl traces the origin of (Western) philosophy in the theoretical attitude called theoria found in the thought of Plato and Aristotle. Devoid of any practical interest, theoria is the fully disinterested way of seeing the world. As he put it in his Vienna Lecture of 1935, “Within European
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civilization, philosophy has constantly to exercise its function as one which is archontic for the civilization as a whole.”16 “Man,” he continued, “becomes gripped by the passion of a world-view and world-knowledge that turns away from all practical interests and, within the closed sphere of its cognitive activity, in the times devoted to it, strives for and achieves nothing but pure theoria. In other words, man becomes a non-participating spectator, surveyor of the world; he becomes a philosopher; or rather, from this point on his life becomes receptive to motivations which are possible only in this attitude, motivations for new sorts of goals for thought and methods through which, finally, philosophy comes to be and he becomes a philosopher.”17 Later, Husserl spoke of the test of European humanity bearing within itself an absolute idea by means of “a universal philosophy which grows through consistent apodictic insight and supplies its own norms through an apodictic method” rather than merely being “an empirical anthropological type” like China or India.18 Although the common features between Oriental thought and Greek philosophy are evident, for Husserl the essential distinction lies in the fact that the purely theoretical attitude has its historical origin in the Greeks, and the perfecting of that attitude has become the infinite task of the successive generations of Western inquirers.19 For Merleau-Ponty, however, there is a fundamental difference between Hegel and Husserl in their respective views of Oriental thought. Even if Husserl, like Hegel, retains the privileged position of Western philosophy, “he does so not by virtue of its right to it—as if its possession of the principles of all possible cultures were absolutely evident—but in the name of a fact, and in order to assign a task to it.”20 That is to say, for Husserl the privileged position of Western philosophy is not simply proclaimed but must be proven and witnessed. For Merleau-Ponty, moreover, all thought is part of the lifeworld (Lebenswelt) as a sociocultural world; all philosophies are anthropological types and none has any special right to the monopoly of truth. Husserl admitted the value of primitive cultures for an understanding of our own type of the lifeworld and the meaning of the lifeworld as the invariant form of generality. “If Western thought is what it claims to be,” Merleau-Ponty says, “it must prove it by understanding all ‘life-worlds.’”21 For Merleau-Ponty, the arrogant path of Hegel that excludes Oriental thought from absolute and universal knowledge and draws “a geographical frontier between philosophy and non-philosophy” also excludes a good part of the Western past. Philosophy as a perpetual beginning is destined to examine its
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own idea of truth again and again because truth is “a treasure scattered about in human life prior to all philosophy and not divided among doctrines.”22 Thus the lifeworld—and its different versions both Occidental and Oriental—is the source from which truth emerges. If so, Western philosophy is destined to reexamine not only its own idea of truth but also related matters and institutions such as science and capitalism. Merleau-Ponty declares, From this angle, civilizations lacking our philosophical or economic equipment take on an instructive value. It is not a matter of going in search of truth or salvation in what falls short of science or philosophical awareness, or of dragging chunks of mythology as such into our philosophy, but of acquiring—in the presence of these variants of humanity that we are so far from—a sense of the theoretical and practical problems our institutions are faced with, and of rediscovering the existential field that they were born in and that their long success has led us to forget. The Orient’s “childishness” has something to teach us, if it were nothing more than the narrowness of our adult ideas. The relationship between Orient and Occident, like that between child and adult, is not that of ignorance to knowledge or non-philosophy to philosophy; it is much more subtle, making room on the part of the Orient for all anticipations and “prematurations.” Simply rallying and subordinating “non-philosophy” to true philosophy will not create the unity of the human spirit. It already exists in each culture’s lateral relationships to the others, in the echoes one awakes in the other.23 In search of truth nothing should be taken for granted or prejudged. It is just here that Merleau-Ponty makes a decisive break with Hegel. As childhood and adulthood are one inseparable ontological order of man, so are Oriental and Occidental cultures one integral order of humanity that together point to philosophical universality. For we learn as much from primitive cultures as from modern cultures regarding the human condition. Merleau-Ponty declares that “There is not a philosophy which contains all philosophies; philosophy as a whole is at certain moments in each philosophy. To take up the celebrated phrase again philosophy’s center is everywhere and its circumference nowhere.”24 In the final analysis, for Merleau-Ponty the Orient must also have a place in the museum of philosophies to celebrate its hitherto “secret, muted
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contribution to philosophy.” He writes, “Indian and Chinese philosophies have tried not so much to dominate existence as to be the echo or the sounding board of our relationship to being. Western philosophy can learn from them to rediscover the relationship to being and initial option which gave it birth, and to estimate the possibilities we have shut ourselves off from in becoming ‘Westerners’ and perhaps reopen them.”25 In this spirit, then, we shall judge the contribution of Maoism to the development of Marxism and compare it with Merleau-Ponty’s thought.
iii. mao’s sinicized marxism and merleauponty’s phenomenology compared Dialectical thought has its modern origin in Hegel. It is the most important connecting link between Marx, Merleau-Ponty, and Mao. As creative interpreters of history, however, they do not simply repeat what has preceded them but expand and change (i.e., revise) it in the light of historical circumstances and integrate it into their own mode of thinking—especially the revision of Marx’s “materialism” in Merleau-Ponty and Mao. In the following pages, we shall first discuss the Marxian dialectic, examine how Merleau-Ponty and Mao adapt it to their own patterns of thinking, and then analyze the dialectic of thought and action based on the primacy of perception in Merleau-Ponty and Mao. We must immediately note that Marx clearly indicates his opposition to the Hegelian dialectic in the Grundrisse. Although neither Mao nor MerleauPonty studied the Grundrisse, they come to a similar conclusion per accidens concerning the nature of the (Marxian) dialectic. Marx is, of course, critical of Hegel’s identification of the real with that which is thought or conceptualized, that is, Hegel was wrong when he conceived “the real as the product of thought concentrating itself, probing its own depths, and unfolding itself out of itself by itself.”26 In the second place, Marx speaks of his (materialistic) dialectic as a conditional mediation rather than the immediate, absolute, and inevitable identity of opposites.27 Speaking of the dialectic of production and consumption (and distribution and exchange), Marx says that they are dialectical not because they are identical but because “they all form the members of totality, distinctions within a unity.”28 Then he remarks that “nothing [is] simpler for a Hegelian than to posit production and consumption as identical.”29 However, production and consumption are two inseparable but distinguishable—that is, irreducible to each other—moments
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of the economic process as a whole. The dialectic is the way of determining their boundaries without suspending their real differences. Marx thus writes that “Without production, no consumption; but also, without consumption, no production; since production would then be purposeless. Consumption produces production in a double way, (1) because a product becomes a real product only by being consumed . . . [and] (2) because consumption creates the need for new production, that is, it creates the ideal, internally impelling cause for production, which is its presupposition.”30 The most astute student of Mao’s political thought, Stuart R. Schram, asserts that the originality of Maoism lies in its rejection of the HegelianMarxian dialectic.31 For us, however, it is the rejection of the Hegelian dialectic rather than the Marxian dialectic that is decisive and important in Mao’s conception of “contradiction.” For Mao, the dialectic is no longer a progressive series of resolutions of two mutually opposing elements of reality where the affirmation and the negation result in the negation of the negation, that is, in a higher affirmation. In one of his two most important philosophical writings, “On Contradiction” (August 1937) and the other being “On Practice,” July 1937, Mao defines the basis of the dialectic not as the resolved identity of two opposing elements but rather as their perpetual complementarity. “Contradiction,” he writes, “is universal and absolute, it is present in the process of development of all things and permeates every process from beginning to end.”32 The struggle of opposites is ceaseless and continues even when they coexist and transform each other. Thus Mao’s dialectic reflects the old Chinese cosmological principle of the complementarity of the yin (negative) and the yang (positive) in the working of the cosmos. “We Chinese often say,” he remarks, “things that oppose each other also complement each other.”33 The dialectic is identity as the asymmetric unity of differences. According to Mao who echoes the anti-Hegelian, Marxian dialectic of the Grundrisse, Without life, there would be no death; without death, there would be no life. Without “above,” there would be no “below”; without “below,” there would be no “above”; Without misfortune, there would be no good fortune; without good fortune, there would be no misfortune. Without facility, there would be no difficulty; without difficulty, there would be no facility. Without landlords, there would be no tenant-peasants; without tenant-peasants, there would be no landlords. Without the
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bourgeoisie, there would be no proletariat; without the proletariat, there would be no bourgeoisie. Without imperialist oppression of nations, there would be no colonies or semi-colonies; without colonies or semi-colonies, there would be no imperialist oppression of nations. It is so with all opposites; in given conditions, on the one hand they are opposed to each other, and on the other they are interconnected, interpenetrating, interpermeating and interdependent, and this character is described as identity.34 In this sense, for Mao all human relationships are characterized as contradictions; contradictions are ubiquitous, without them there would be no life, no history, and no world; they reveal the interconnectedness of two opposing elements in the natural rhythm of life, reality, and truth. This dialectic and the related notion of ambiguity go hand in hand throughout the writings of Merleau-Ponty. In linking the two, we may even say that the ultimate ambiguity—or perhaps “magic”—of the dialectic is that it contains within itself a dialectical dimension.35 Ambiguity for MerleauPonty is the way of characterizing the irreducibly open horizon of the human condition, that is, the “thickness,” “density,” and “transparency” of man’s existence, history, and world.36 We may say that for Merleau-Ponty ambiguity is an existential or ontological theme, whereas the dialectic is a conceptual theme. To say that human existence is ambiguous is to say that everything in history has a set of named multiple meanings. The (preconceptual) sense of life, history, and world has no single meaning but a multiplicity of meanings.37 A world is an organized ensemble; it is multidimensional. It follows that Merleau-Ponty is interested in replacing the notions of “concept,” “idea,” “mind,” and “representation” with the notions of “dimension,” “articulation,” “level,” “hinges,” “pivots,” and “configuration.” 38 In the second place, human existence is incomplete, unfinished, conditional, and always tentative: it is in sum a task to be accomplished. For the world itself is “not what I think, but what I live through. I am open to the world, I have no doubt that I am in communication with it, but I do not possess it; it is inexhaustible.”39 As a sociocultural world, it is already constituted for us contemporaries by our predecessors, and yet it is never constituted as it will be passed on to our successors. Ambiguity is the human condition that expresses neither a skepticism that constantly doubts the existence of the world nor an absolute dogmatism that merely accepts the ready-made existence of the world. Correlatively, philosophy whose function is to reflect on and clarify the meaning
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of prereflective lifeworld is also never complete—including its phenomenological dimension. Along with the notion of human existence as ambiguity, the dialectic has an important niche in Merleau-Ponty’s thought from The Structure of Behavior40 to Adventures of the Dialectic and The Visible and the Invisible. In The Structure of Behavior, he speaks of the dialectics of the physical (physiology), the vital (biology), and the mental (psychology) that together make up the whole structure of human behavior as a field of meaning (i.e., the human order). Dialectical thought here is opposed to reductionist, dichotomous, and causal thinking (i.e., physicalism, biologism, and mentalism). Scientific causality is necessarily reductionistic because in explaining the whole of the human order it reduces it to a single factor without recognizing the complex complementarity of the two or more factors that are necessary to make up a whole (Gestalt). In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty declares that “The dialectic is not a relationship between contradictory and inseparable thoughts; it is the tending of an existence towards another existence which denies it, and yet without which it is not sustained.”41 In reference to the dialectical conception of history in Adventures of the Dialectic, he also speaks of “a unity rich in final convergence and not a unity by reduction to a single order of reality or a single genetic schema.”42 Thus the dialectic is the complicity of two opposing principles. It is an interplay of points and counterpoints: the visible and the invisible, speech and silence, the subjective and the objective, the true and the false, the human and the natural, the self and the other, consciousness and history, the individual and society, thought and action, and so on. These paired principles are not divided into two separate areas. They are interdependent, though mutually distinguishable. “In rediscovering its birth certificate and its origins in history,” Merleau-Ponty writes, “consciousness perhaps thought it had found a guide to rely on, but now it is consciousness which must guide the guide. The two relationships—consciousness as a product of history, history as a product of consciousness—must be maintained together. Marx unites them in making consciousness, not the source of social being, not the reflection of an external social being, but a singular sphere where all is false and all is true, where the false is true as false and the true is false as true.”43 Ultimately, for MerleauPonty, phenomenology as a philosophical movement also works like the dialectic because it affirms the complicity (complementarity) of the conventional pairs of dichotomous or opposing principles such as subjectivism and objectivism, intellectualism and empiricism, individualism and sociologism
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(or structuralism), spiritualism and materialism (or behaviorism), skepticism and dogmatism, absolutism and relativism, determinism and indeterminism, and so on. Sociality or intersubjectivity, for example, may be described as the dialectic of the self and the other that make up a whole without reducing one to the other: it is an ongoing complicity of the self and the other. As can be shown in the works of Frantz Fanon and Paulo Freire, who speak the same radical language one finds in Mao, there is the dialectical complicity between the oppressor and the oppressed in which the liberation of the latter inevitably entails that of the former. This is possible because of the inherence of intersubjectivity as the complicity of the self and the other—in this case, the “oppressor” and the “oppressed.”44 We shall now turn to the affinity between Marx (as opposed to Hegel) and Merleau-Ponty on the question of the dialectic of man and history. In his “Letter on Humanism” (1947), Heidegger claimed that Marx, with the help of Hegel, was able to recognize both the alienation and homelessness of modern man and that in so doing he reached into an essential depth of history. As a result, “the Marxist view of history excels all other history.”45 Heidegger further maintains that neither the phenomenology of Husserl nor the existentialism of Sartre was capable of reaching the historical depth of Being and could not, therefore, engage in a fruitful dialogue with Marxism. Without lingering on Heidegger’s observation, which is deficient, it should be pointed out that he failed to notice the existential phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, which is capable of carrying out a dialogue with Marxism, without any dichotomous conflict between the existential (or phenomenological) and the Marxian conception of man and history. In the Inaugural Lecture he delivered at the Collège de France in 1953, Éloge de la philosophie, Merleau-Ponty summarizes concisely his views of history in relation to philosophy and decisively takes the side of Marx (and Kierkegaard) against Hegel.46 According to Merleau-Ponty, Hegel’s philosophy of the absolute, which reduces history to the conceptualization of universals, is incapable of grasping actual history: “The universal history of Hegel is the dream of history. As in our dreams, all that is thought is real, and all that is real is thought. There is nothing at all for men to do who are not already taken up in the system.”47 In the mode of Alexandre Kojève and Jean Hyppolite, Merleau-Ponty is of course fully aware of the existential dimensions of Hegel—the Hegel of The Phenomenology of Spirit who discusses the dialectic of the master and the slave and speaks of “unhappy consciousness,” a consciousness not in full possession of itself. Such a state
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of being in the midst of struggling to understand itself as immanent in history is precisely what Kierkegaard and Marx shared with each other as critics of Hegel.48 Nonetheless, it is Marx as a critic of Hegel who captures the heart of Merleau-Ponty’s thought.49 For the Marxian dialectic, real history is not reduced to philosophy as “identity.” The novelty of Marx as a critic of Hegel, according to Merleau-Ponty, is “not to identify the mover of history with human productivity, nor to interpret philosophy as a reflection of historical movement, but rather to denounce the trick by which the philosopher slips the system into history in order then to recover it and to reaffirm its omnipotence precisely at the moment when he seemed to give it up.”50 Marx decisively refuted the Hegelian speculative arrogance that presumed to certify the birthright of concrete history. For Marx, Merleau-Ponty writes, “history is not merely the order of fact or of reality on which philosophy, with its rationality, will confer the right to exist. History is rather the situation in which all meanings are deepened, and in particular the conceptual meanings of philosophy, insofar as they are legitimate. What Marx calls praxis is the meaning which works itself out spontaneously in the intercrossing of those activities by which man organizes his relations with nature and with other men.”51 It is this dialectical mode of Merleau-Ponty’s thought, recognizing the complicity of the self and the other, that is in collision with Sartre’s ontology; the latter dichotomizes and insulates the two in the name of the Hegelian categories. Merleau-Ponty’s opposition to Sartre is continuous from Phenomenology of Perception to Adventures of the Dialectic and The Visible and the Invisible.52 There is a dialectical interplay between the pour-soi and the en-soi; they are never sealed off from each other. For Merleau-Ponty, as long as man has a body, as long as he is a laboring and fabricating animal, he is not insulated from nature, although his existence cannot be reduced to his natural, economic, or productive activities. “In Sartre,” he writes, “there can be no dialectic between the being which is wholly positive and nothingness which ‘is not.’ What takes its place is a sort of sacrifice of nothingness which devotes itself entirely to the manifestation of being and negates absolutely the absolute negation that it is itself. Being at once mater and servant, negation and negated, the negative is equivocal in principle: its loyalty is a refusal, its refusal a loyalty.”53 Like the humanism of Marx, Merleau-Ponty’s humanism is the affirmation of man as (1) the responsible subject of history and (2) the social being, the ensemble of social relations, or “species-being” (Gattungswesen).54 The target of Merleau-Ponty’s dialectical critique is Sartre’s spiritualism and
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individualism of the pure consciousness affirming absolute freedom as the negation of nature. Nor is Merleau-Ponty’s critique an affirmation of materialism or sociologism—the alleged opposites of spiritualism and individualism. For him, such extreme pairs are undialectical because they are equally one-sided. He declares that “there is history only for a subject who lives through it, and a subject only insofar as he is historically situated. There is no one meaning of history; what we do has always several meanings, and this is where an existential conception of history is distinguishable from materialism and from spiritualism.”55 What he calls the existential conception of history coincides with his expanded interpretation of Marxism. For Merleau-Ponty, Marxism conceived merely as “materialism” is one-sided and therefore as false as the psychoanalytic reduction of the human order to its sexual component. This does not of course impugn the importance of the economic and the sexual in the human order. The economic and the sexual are human by significance because they are closed systems but are enmeshed in the network of relationships called the intermonde or interexistence. Sartre correctly opposes an inevitable “solipsism” resulting from Cartesian “substantialism,” which defines persons as thinking substances (res cogitans).56 To be sure, Sartre’s “phenomenological ontology” escapes the solipsism of substantialism. However, according to Merleau-Ponty, the recognition by Sartre of a plurality of (independent) subjects falls far short of establishing the world of intersubjectivity or interexistence, since interexistence is not a passive toleration of individual difference but an active recognition of Mitsein (Being-with). That is, neither self nor other is sovereign, but they are coextensive with each other. Interexistence is the active intersection of two or more subjectivities wherein a genuine reciprocity takes place, that is, the self and the other—or, for that matter, the world—is reversible. We are not islets but are together inscribed in the world. Thus Merleau-Ponty declares that “in Sartre there is a plurality of subjects but no intersubjectivity. . . . The world and history are no longer a system with several points of entry but a sheaf of irreconcilable perspectives which never coexist and which are held together only by the hopeless heroism of the I.”57 Nor is Merleau-Ponty’s intersubjective world just—as Hegel would have it—the world of conceived relationships. On the contrary, it is the world in which people in their concrete and intercorporeal relationships go about their daily activities prior to any conceptualization. Concrete, lived history as the embodiment of interconnected situations is not inscribed in the abstract books of philosophy;
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history when concretely viewed is an open notebook in which acts and events are yet to be written. As opposed to Hegel’s “inverted” form of concrete history, therefore, Merleau-Ponty states, “History has no meaning, if this meaning is understood as that of a river which, under the influence of all-powerful causes, flows towards an ocean in which it disappears. Every appeal to universal history cuts off the meaning of the specific event, renders effective history insignificant, and is a nihilism in disguise.”58 Historical meaning is neither an “idea” (spiritualism or absolute voluntarism) nor a “thing” (vulgar or mechanistic materialism). This is why Merleau-Ponty is Marxian, rather than Hegelian in affirming an effective humanism—embracing effective history, politics, morality, and effective freedom—which must oppose itself to abstract humanism. (For Mao, too, universality without particularity is am empty abstraction. The former depends on and is conditioned by the latter.) We see the working of Merleau-Ponty’s dialectical thought clearly in his discussion of effective freedom as opposed to Sartre’s thesis of absolute freedom as the pure project of the pour-soi, the negation of the en-soi. For MerleauPonty, the issue of effective freedom is not the dichotomy of freedom (spirit) and necessity (matter). Nor is the existential conception of history opposed to the Marxian version of it because (true) Marxism is not a philosophy of necessity based on the primacy of matter over spirit. On the contrary, Marxism dissociates the rationality of history from any idea of necessity. Rationality is necessary neither in the sense of physical causality, in which the antecedents determine the consequents, nor even in the sense of the necessity of a system, in which the whole precedes and brings to existence what happens.”59 Dialectical thought does not pose man and nature or freedom and necessity in opposition. Rather, dialectical thought demands a revision in the traditional controversy between indeterminism and determinism: “Man is a historical idea and not a natural species. In other words, there is in human existence no unconditioned possession, and yet no fortuitous attribute. Human existence will force us to revise our usual notion of necessity and contingency, because it is the transformation of contingency into necessity by the act of carrying forward. All that we are, we are on the basis of a de facto situation which we appropriate to ourselves and which we ceaselessly transform by a sort of escape which is never an unconditioned freedom.”60 On the one hand, however, to say that freedom is the recognition of necessity is to sacrifice freedom at the altar of necessity in which the possibility of a dialectical interplay between the two is lost. For while freedom is conditioned by necessity, necessity is not conditioned in any way by
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freedom. On the other hand, the absolute freedom of the pour-soi that negates nature (the en-soi) ends up with negating a part of man himself inasmuch as man is a corporeal being, that is, a part of organic nature. Moreover, MerleauPonty contends that Sartre’s absolute freedom of the pour-soi is vacuous. To be effective or meaningful, freedom is first a mediation of rationality and nature. Second, history is real history only if there is man who is its subject; and man is the subject of history insofar as he is historically situated. The world is in part constituted for us, but it is never completely constituted. Our freedom is limited by the fact that the world is already constituted by our “predecessors” and that it is also inhabited by other people: man lives in an atmosphere of humanity. We are not hermetically sealed selves but live in the midst of other people who are as indispensable for our existence as the natural elements. Effective freedom means to work within these limitations and possibilities. Unchecked or unsituated freedom is meaningless because meaning arises only from an encounter between the self and a situation involving both natural and cultural constraints; the ambiguity of the human condition makes it possible to accommodate the results of such an encounter.61 To be effective, freedom is neither completely constituted facticity nor unlimited transcendence but is the choice of one alternative among others on occasions of action. History may also be viewed as the dialectical interchange of thought and action. On the one hand, revolution as a form of praxis is never devoid of thought or reflection. As Paulo Freire observes, praxis is made of “action” and “reflection.” Thus praxis without reflection is blind activism or adventurism, whereas praxis without “action” is empty verbalism.62 On the other hand, philosophy is never a pure theoria; it is an integral part of history and a special way of involving or situating oneself in the world. For MerleauPonty, however, there is an ambiguity in philosophy that oscillates between attachment and detachment, between commitment and distanciation. Philosophy’s concern is to prevent detachment or distanciation from degenerating into indifference, which is the reason philosophy is distinguished from science. To be meaningful everything must acquire a name in history; and history is the “keyboard of acquired meanings” on which the “music” of specific acts and events is played and replayed. To speak or name is to perform; and to rectify speech or naming is to transform the world. When we speak, we are performing; when we intend to rectify names, we intend to transform the world. Freire declares that “There is no true word that is not at the same time a praxis. Thus, to speak a true word is to transform the world.”63
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Merleau-Ponty knows well the “unhappy consciousness” of the philosopher as a dialectician. The dialectical tension between thought and action in history is unfolded in that “history does not walk on its head, but . . . it does not think with its feet.”64 The dialectic of thought and action is manifested in the fact that “Truth and action will never communicate if there are not, along with those who act, those who observe them, who confront them with the truth of their action, and who can aspire to replace them in power” (italics added).65 As a modulation of interexistence, philosophy dwells or participates in life. But, more than that, it wishes to become the center of life as well, that is, at the heart of interhuman praxis. The philosopher knows, however, that he is not a professional in action. In order for him truly to engage in truth—not in action—he must gain distance from the world of action. To speak of action with rigor and authority is to say that he does not desire to act. This, according to Merleau-Ponty, is the limping of philosophy, which is a deficiency from the standpoint of action but a virtue from the standpoint of thought. For Merleau-Ponty, Marxism is never simply an object of study. It is concerned with the flesh fold of concrete history, just as for Mao revolutionary theory precedes revolutionary praxis. Complementary to the Marxist theory, there lurks in the depth of the Chinese tradition the problem of the unity of knowledge and action; the supreme virtue is viewed as making thought or saying words embodied in acts. From the most primitive Chinese formulations to Mao, the unity of thought and action is expressed in the idea that knowledge is the beginning of action, and action the completion of knowledge. For Mao, the materialist theory of knowledge claims that all knowledge depends on immediate experience (in practice). And he cites an old Chinese proverb saying, “How can you catch tiger cubs without entering the tiger’s lair?”66 In “On Practice,” Mao summarizes his view: “Discover the truth through practice, and again through practice verify and develop the truth. Start from perceptual knowledge and actively develop it into rational knowledge; then start from rational knowledge and actively guide revolutionary practice to change both the subjective and the objective world. Practice, knowledge, again practice, and again knowledge. This form repeats itself in endless cycles, and with each cycle the content of practice and knowledge rises to a higher level. Such is the whole of the dialectical-materialist theory of knowledge, and such is the dialectical-materialist theory of the unity of knowing and doing.”67 One of the most interesting aspects of our comparison of Mao with Merleau-Ponty is the place of perception in the dialectic of thought and action. The importance of perception in Merleau-Ponty’s thought is derived
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in large part from his interpretation of Husserl’s phenomenology of the lifeworld, whereas the importance of perception in Mao’s thought is imbedded deeply in the tradition of Chinese culture and mentality. Insofar as action or revolutionary praxis is in need of perception and insofar as politics constitutes the primary activity of man, there is a dynamic complicity between the primacy of perception and that of politics. For Merleau-Ponty, Marxism is basically a perception of history. Marx himself spoke of man as a natural, sentient, and embodied being and of perception as a form of labor or work. For Merleau-Ponty, however, perception is not yet a form of labor but the infrastructure that supports all human activities—the activities of both thought and action. Thus all consciousness— self-consciousness notwithstanding—is basically perceptual. Perception “summons us to the tasks of knowledge and action.”68 Merleau-Ponty’s thesis of the primacy of perception is a claim neither for perception’s monopoly of truth nor for denigrating reflective rationality but for laying the foundation for the certainty of thought and action: “The perceived world is the always presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value and all existence. This thesis does not destroy either rationality or the absolute. It only tries to bring them down to earth.”69 As the presupposed foundation of all rationality, perception is not yet a science of the world. It is rather “the background from which all acts stand out, and is presupposed by them.”70 The geography of all acts, all rationality, presupposes the landscape of perception. In this essay “On Practice,” Mao too speaks of perception in relation to revolutionary thought and action. His emphasis on perception is not simply Marxian but deeply Chinese. What is uniquely Chinese—including its language—is marked by practicality, concreteness, and experientiality. If philosophy’s conceptualization aims to harvest the fruits of human concrete experience rather than to build its own conceptual castle, then China—for that matter, the entire Orient—is rich with experiential data. The ideographic or pictorial nature of the Chinese language embodies the Chinese lifeworld. For language and the world are mutually implicated, and neither has an independent life of its own.71 The Chinese language relies heavily if not exclusively on sense perception. So the sixth-century Chinese thinker Yen Chin-tui went so far as to say that “what a man believes is only his ears and his eyes. Everything else is to be doubted.”72 Consistent with this deeply Chinese, perceptual tradition, Mao considers the perceptual and conceptual as two stages in the unified process of cognition or knowledge. According to him, conceptual knowledge is both quantitatively and qualitatively different from
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perceptual knowledge. The reason rational knowledge is different from perceptual knowledge is that the former is knowledge of a thing or an event in its entirety, its essence, and its internal relations, whereas the latter is knowledge of a thing or an event in its individual aspects, its appearance, and its external relations. Perception is the way of observing things, events, and other people in their separate aspects (i.e., their “external relations”), whereas rational knowledge is the way of knowing all aspects of them as a whole (i.e., their “internal relations”). However, perception is without question primary in that it is the very first step in cognition, and the true task of cognition is to arrive at thought or rational knowledge through perception.73 For cognition without perception is like “water without a source” or “a tree without roots.” Mao illustrates this by citing an old idea from the San Kuo Yen Yi (Tale of the Three Kingdoms): “knit your brows and a stratagem comes to mind.”74 Although cognition depends on perception in knowing the world, perceptual knowledge must be deepened, that is, elevated to the higher level of rational knowledge. One who denies the dependence of cognition on perception is called an “idealist” (or “rationalist”), whereas one who denies the existence of rational knowledge is called an “empiricist.” The dialectical-materialist theory of knowledge, according to Mao, refutes both idealism and empiricism. “Rational knowledge,” he writes, “depends upon perceptual knowledge and perceptual knowledge remains to be developed into rational knowledge— this is the dialectical-materialist theory of knowledge. In philosophy, neither ‘rationalism’ nor ‘empiricism’ understands the historical or the dialectical nature of knowledge, and although each of these schools contains one aspect of the truth (here I am referring to materialist, not to idealist, rationalism and empiricism), both are wrong on the theory of knowledge as a whole.”75 For Mao, both rationalism and empiricism are wrong because they are necessarily one-sided; that is, they are not capable of comprehending the dialectic of perception and cognition. It seems remarkable that Mao’s critique of “rationalism” and “empiricism” in the name of “dialectical materialism” is similar to Merleau-Ponty’s critique of “intellectualism” and “empiricism” in the name of phenomenology. “Where empiricism was deficient,” Merleau-Ponty contends, “was in any internal connection between the object and the act which it triggers off. What intellectualism lacks is contingency on the occasions of thought. In the first case consciousness is too poor, in the second too rich for any phenomenon to appeal compellingly to it. Empiricism cannot see that we need to know what we are looking for, otherwise, we would not be looking for it, and intellectualism fails to see that we need to be ignorant
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of what we are looking for, or equally again we should not be searching.”76 In short, for both Merleau-Ponty and Mao, it is true that the dialectic of thought and action walks on the feet of “perceptual faith”; however, it is also true that it does not think on its feet. For Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, perception and the body are inseparable since the body is not only the subject of perception but also an active vehicle of our insertion in the world that is inhabited by other people through the medium of their bodies in the midst of things both natural and cultural. Intersubjectivity is necessarily an intercorporeity. Because the body is the expressive medium of speech as social intercourse, Merleau-Ponty speaks of “singing the world,” which can be reduced to neither naïve onomatopoetic theory nor mechanistic theory of phonetics. He says that “in so far as, when I reflect on the essence of subjectivity, I find it bound up with that of the body and that of the world, this is because my existence as subjectivity is merely one with my existence as a body and with the existence of the world, and because the subject that I am, when taken concretely, is inseparable from this body and this world. The ontological world and body which we find at the core of the subject are not the world or body as idea, but on the one hand the world itself contracted into a comprehensive grasp, and on the other the body itself as a knowing-body.”77 Intercorporeity constitutes the fabric of the world; phenomenal bodies—mine, yours, and theirs together—intertwine the “flesh” of the social world.78 Mao, too, emphasizes perception as the primary stage of cognition that is further “completed” in practice. This emphasis, as has already been intimated, is deeply Chinese, as well as Marxian. The language of Mao’s revolutionary praxis is the language of perception and the body, which is often interspersed with the Chinese, indigenous anecdotes. His “scatological lyricism,” as is known to many Western observers of Maoism and Chinese politics with a psychoanalytical bent, has its root in the perceptual and bodily nature of Chinese mentality itself. Thus to understand fully the language of Mao’s revolutionary politics, we must first understand this perceptual, “wild” subtlety of the Chinese language and lifeworld. The Chinese express abstractions in concrete and graphic imageries, metaphors, and analogies, which Mao often equates with “perception.” This may be best shown from the Chinese way of translating the texts of Buddhism—the texts of Ch’an (Zen) Buddhism as the Sinicized form of Indian Buddhism. In Ch’an Buddhism, abstract ideas are often expressed in concrete images. Man’s “true nature” is “original face and eye,” the “human body,” “stinking bag of skin,”
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“essence,” “the pupil of the eye,” “an itinerant monk,” “clouds and water,” “perfection,” “round,” “the most perfect doctrine,” “the round doctrine,” and so on.9
iv. concluding remarks For Mao, Marxism as dialectical materialism is the philosophy that acknowledges the importance of (1) the universality of contradiction and (2) revolutionary praxis where “matter” is not the totality of material things but is the revolutionary will that triggers the radical transformation of society. Inasmuch as the dialectic is the process of continual transformation in the interplay of opposing elements, revolution as permanent is coextensive with the dialectic. For Merleau-Ponty, too, the existential conception of history is distinguished from both naïve spiritualism and vulgar materialism. At the heart of Marxism is an existential conception of man and history. To be sure, as history itself is the interplay of the order of men and the order of things rather than pure spirit or pure matter, the “economic” as a substructure of the human order has a human significance. The meaning of praxis emerges from the intersections of those activities by which men organize their relations with other men and with nature. If to “existentialize” Marxism is to “revise” it, then “revision” or continual renewal is not contrary to the Marxian dialectic of thought and action. On the contrary, it is indeed inscribed in it. In terms of the dialectic, Merleau-Ponty’s theory justifies Mao’s practice; that is, they complement each other. In practice, the dialectic as continual renewal is inscribed in the notion of revolution as permanent. As Merleau-Ponty himself stresses, the essential thrust or fulguration of existence lies in the following idea: “It is true neither that my existence is in full possessin of itself, nor that it is entirely estranged from itself, because it is action or doing and because action is, by definition, the violent transition from what I have to what I aim to have, from what I am to what I intend to be.”80 Therefore, the project of action as violent transition contains the possibility of radical transformation (by action)—from facticity to transcendence in individual consciousness that triggers transformation in institutions. Consequently, by focusing on the notion of revolution as permanent, we shall now examine an interplay between Merleau-Ponty’s theory and Mao’s practice in the context of Marxism. To acknowledge the core of Marxism as revolutionary praxis is to admit first of all the existential primacy of politics, and second, the priority of
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the revolutionary will over the culturally inherited structures of society. Thus, according to Merleau-Ponty, whether the history of our time has a preeminently economic significance and whether the ideological struggle is secondary to economic significance is a question of politics, but the aim of philosophy is to show only the possibility of how the economic or ideological scenario fits the facts of history.81 For Mao, central to Marxism is the question of (political) revolution. As such the primacy of politics means to make politics, that is, revolutionary praxis, the centripetal and centrifugal force of Chinese society and culture to which everything else is subordinate. The idea of the primacy of politics is deeply Chinese as well as Marxian. Even in the alleged political quietism of Taoism, in the Tao Te Ching, the political sovereign is exalted as one of the “four greats” of the cosmos. The paramount importance of political practice is suggested in the Chinese ideogram wang (the political sovereign) that symbolizes the authority of a ruler. It is composed of three parallel horizontal strokes joined together by one vertical stroke. These three horizontal strokes represent from top to bottom each of the three spheres of heaven, man, and earth, and the vertical stroke connects or unifies them. The primacy of politics symbolized in the ideogram wang is then the political paramountcy of Chinese culture where the sovereign is symbolized as the unifier of the most important elements of Chinese cosmology—heaven, man, and earth. The primacy of politics in Maoism can be considered a continuation of this perennial Chinese tradition that corresponds to the Marxian emphasis on revolutionary praxis. For Mao, it is the will of men rather than the administration of things that is decisive in revolutionary praxis. The subjective creates the objective. This “voluntarism” is the target of the Soviet attack on Maoism as “antiMarxist,” “anti-materialist,” or “revisionist.”82 One may even say that the ultimate proof of Mao’s voluntarism lies in his “defiance” of Marx’s own dim view of the “Asiatic mode of production” in bringing revolution to fruition in China.83 This voluntarism is opposed to the fetishism of technology (technologism)—along with economism, industrialism, and bureaucratism. Thus the best weapon for revolutionary politics is not technology—atomic bombs, airplanes, tanks, guns, and so on—but the will of the Chinese people. It is the political education of the masses—what Freire calls “pedagogy”— that is the foremost vehicle of social transformation;84 and it is the relations (human elements) rather than forces (material conditions) of production that are of paramount importance in Maoism. The economic has primarily a human significance. Mao’s singular emphasis on the notion of the
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“class struggle” as an “ideological” (subjective) rather than economic (objective) struggle, too, is an aspect of this voluntarism.85 This voluntarism of Mao must not, however, be mistaken for “a merciless voluntarism”—to use Merleau-Ponty’s phrase—which overburdens the subjective will by ignoring the objective conditions of a situation. For as a Marxist, Mao knows that human interexistence is always mediated by things and institutions. Speaking of class consciousness, Merleau-Ponty writes that “what makes me a proletarian is not the economic system or society considered as systems of impersonal forces, but these institutions as I carry them within me and experience them; nor is it an intellectual operation devoid of motive, but my way of being in the world within this institutional framework.”86 In the final analysis, the voluntarism of Mao—not being merciless—is closer to Merleau-Ponty’s theory of action based on interexistence and effective freedom rather than to Sartre’s theory of action based on the unchecked freedom of a pure consciousness (the pour-soi). For Merleau-Ponty, too, the philosophy of history amounts to nothing unless it accommodates the idea of men as the responsible subjects of history who at the same time are mediated by the objective conditions of things and institutions. For history is nothing but an inscription of concrete and specific acts and events in institutions. The dialectic, the primacy of politics, and revolution as permanent are perhaps the most critical features of Marxism. To show how this is so for our purpose, it will be revealing to examine Merleau-Ponty’s masterful Adventures of the Dialectic. This work consists of his commentaries on Weber’s vision of Vielseitigkeit (multifarious vectors and vicissitudes of historical facts), on the “Western Marxism” of Georg Lukács as putting subjectivity back into history,87 on Lenin’s Bolshevism as a “disfigured Marxism,” on Trotsky’s permanent revolution, and above all, on Sartre’s “ultrabolshevism” as “anti-dialectical.” For Merleau-Ponty, the idea of revisionism is permanently inscribed in the existential and dialectical nature of man and history. The Marxian dialectic is existential (critical) rather than structural (scientific) in character; humanity is defined as an infinite task to be accomplished rather than a fixed and finished product of history.88 As Merleau-Ponty puts it, it is through the program of continual criticism and revision in both theory and practice that revolution earns its good name.89 Adventures of the Dialectic speaks out against “disarming” or “derailing” the Marxian dialectic by disallowing the idea of men’s historical responsibility. “The Moscow Trials,” (which he at one time defended) he notes, “were the revolution which no longer wanted to be revolution, or inversely [he left
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the question open] an established regime which mimics the revolution. It has often been shown that the Russian Revolution, defined by Lenin as the Soviets plus electrification, concerned itself primarily with electrification and set up a series of powers, apparatuses, and social priorities which partition the revolutionary society and little by little make it something else.”90 The unforgettable lessons Merleau-Ponty learned particularly from the Korean War reconfirm the ambiguity and transparency of history—and Marxist history in particular. For him, the issue is no longer the absolute affirmation of communism or the absolute rejection of anticommunism. For there is more than one way of approving communism and of renouncing anticommunism. The Korean War raised a different question that could not be posed or foreseen in 1947. Indeed, there is a double meaning in the Marxian dialectic. The adherence to Marxism is no longer an unequivocal identification with the “cryptocommunism” of Soviet power politics both within and without. For Merleau-Ponty the ultimate validity of the Marxian dialectic, that is, revolution, now resides in a critique of existing power. The identity of theory and practice, too, is basically antidialectical, that is, anti-Marxian. Rather, the logic of the Marxian dialectic demands or requires more than ever before the distance of theory from practice. For the dialectic may be true in theory without being true in practice. The ultimate ambiguity or transparency of revolution lies also in the fact that “those who are the most revolutionary often go over to the opposition, and those who make the revolution are not always revolutionaries.”91 Merleau-Ponty’s renewed notion of the Marxian dialectic as permanent revolution is a result of the existential ambiguity of man’s participation in history. This is always a totalizing, rather than totalized process; the future neither is a finished text nor is determined by past action alone. Marxism is not the dogma that brings history to a conclusion—a millenarianism—but is a theory of participation at the threshold of truth. For, as Merleau-Ponty notes, “Marx did not speak of an end of history but of an end to prehistory.”92 The Marxian dialectic refers to the concrete situation in which revolution is “the sublime moment in which reality and values, subject and object, judgment and discipline, individual and totality, present and future, instead of colliding, would little by little enter into complicity.”93 This dialectical view of revolutionary praxis is certainly compatible with Merleau-Ponty’s vision of the philosopher as a perpetual beginner, a notion deeply rooted in the spirit of Husserl’s phenomenological perspective. As Merleau-Ponty affirms, the dialectician is a perpetual beginner with an uneasy
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equilibrium.94 This is why for him Marxism—as well as phenomenology—is not dogmatic. In both philosophies, the knowing subject is not exempted from the burden of history, from its vectors and vicissitudes. Moreover, the idea of “self-criticism” is applied to theory as well as to practice. The idea of philosophy as a perpetual beginning is found in “Socratic ignorance” that “knows only that there is no absolute knowledge, and that it is by this absence that we are open to the truth.”95 For Husserl too the “true thinker” (Selbstdenker) is the one who examines again and again his own presuppositions (i.e., “self-scrutiny”), that is, the one who sees what he thinks and writes not as a finished product but only as an “introduction.”96 Thus the true thinker is one who never ceases to regard his own activity of thinking as a riddle or an astonishment. In the final years of his philosophical career, Merleau-Ponty gravitated to the idea of philosophy as “interrogation” rather than a rigorous science. For interrogation is nothing but philosophy’s own constant vigilance about its own meaning. Thus, it must also be at the same time the search for the “primordial” (or “savage being”) as the underlying infrastructure of Logos or Being. If thought is dialectical only when it allows, in the internal structure of its own logic, self-examination, and self-criticism, then phenomenology is dialectical.97 Although the idea of permanent revolution was popularized by and primarily associated with Leon Trotsky in his opposition to Stalinism, we find its germination in Marx. Marx suggested the twofold reason for the necessity of revolution: (1) there are no other alternatives to dismantling the establishment and (2) “only in a revolution can the class which overthrows it (the power structure), rid itself of the accumulated rubbish of the past and become capable of reconstructing society.”98 Only in this sense can we understand Marx when he spoke of the “self-transcendence” (Selbstauhebung) of the proletariat. Trotsky, who opposed Stalin’s policy of courting Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang as a reliable ally in 1927, spelled out three aspects of the theory of permanent revolution in opposition to Stalin’s doctrine of socialism in one country (the latter being an extension of Lenin’s formula of “socialism” as Soviet power plus electrification). Trotsky’s central idea is that for “backward” countries the relative “democracy” of the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be established as a regime but only as a direct prelude or passage to the socialist revolution. Moreover, for an indefinite period as a result of constant internal struggle, all social relations in a given nation undergo political transformation. “Revolution in economy, technique, science, the family,
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morals and everyday life,” Trotsky writes, “develops in complex reciprocal action and does not allow society to achieve equilibrium.”99 And, of course, Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution has an international character that epitomizes his opposition to Stalin’s doctrine of “socialism in one country.” Trotsky contends that “a national revolution is not a self-contained whole; it is only a link in the internal chain. The international revolution constitutes a permanent process, despite temporary declines and ebbs.”100 He insists that he is opposed not to the idea of “socialism in one country” per se but only to the separation of the interconnected stages of the proletarian revolution. Stalin’s “socialism in one country” is useful only as the temporary “tactics” but not as the permanent “strategy” of Marxist revolution.101 The second point of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution is most relevant to our argument: the continual revolutionary self-criticism within the boundaries of a Marxist nation, preventing it from becoming an established regime, which in turn generates rigidly bureaucratized institutions whose entrenched leaders cut themselves off from communicating with the people at large. For Mao, the dialectic deals primarily with internal rather than external relations. The former are the bases of the dialectic, whereas the latter are its conditions. The periodic political upheavals and purges within the Chinese Revolution—time-bounded revolutions within the Revolution, as it were—including the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s, manifestly aim at ridding society of the “accumulated rubbish of the past,” treating the internal sclerosis of the revolutionary movement itself. When there is no opposition to sublate, perhaps it must be invented.102 By ceaselessly recycling the revolution, or immortalizing it, Mao hopes to prevent ideas and institutions from becoming sedimented and ultimately petrified. The institutionalized bureaucracy is, by its very nature, antirevolutionary and is characteristically charged with reverting to bourgeois mentality. Mao’s aversion to bureaucratism counteracts Lenin’s conception of the Party as the vanguard of the proletariat functioning by means of “democratic centralism”; at the same time Mao attacks the traditional Confucian “hierocracy” based on the literati who became the reflexes of the established regime. In the end, Leninism resembles the Hegelian state rather than the Marxian revolution as process. While Lenin assigned to the Party and its cadres the central role in the Russian Revolution, Mao regards the people at large as the medium for transforming Chinese society, not only with reference to political organization, but also with reference to the flow of ideas from bottom to top. The Cultural Revolution manifestly intended to dismantle bureaucratic
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sedimentations, and dissolve “bureaucratic arrogance,” thus minimizing the gap between the leadership and the people at large. Continual revolutionary praxis is, therefore, the pedagogy of the masses. Merleau-Ponty explores contemporary Marxism in Adventures of the Dialectic without, of course, emulating Trotsky’s and Mao’s vision of the Marxian dialectic as permanent revolution. For Merleau-Ponty, the thesis of permanent revolution—along with that of unequal development—not only extends and develops certain of Marx’s thoughts but also revolutionizes them, because it introduces a new idea of revolution and its relation to history. Revolution can take place in societies that did not “hatch” it; it can be delayed interminably and must always be repeated in mature societies. Moreover, revolution is no longer the fulfillment of history but is a continual rupture with history. Revolution viewed as a continual rupture with history can no longer be “proletarian” in the strict sense of the term. In China, the Marxist revolution had to be a peasant revolution. The universality of Marxism depends on and is conditioned by the particularity of Maoism. Mao says that “it is precisely in the particularity of contradiction that the universality of contradiction resides.”103 This does not destroy universality but insists that universality without particularity is an empty abstraction. When in Marxism history is perceived as having no ultimate end, the dialectic is neither naïve teleology nor dogmatic eschatology. History ceases to play the role of an external god who can dictate at will the course of revolution or offer absolution to revolution from one privileged position. The basis of Marxian thought, according to Merleau-Ponty, lies in its attempt to hold together “revolution as an incidental expense of historical development and history as permanent revolution”—and to do so simultaneously.104 In this light, Maoism as an extended version of Marxism can be more Marxian than Marx’s original thought; it goes beyond his initial vision of revolution and history. Merleau-Ponty’s words are pertinent: Revolution that becomes institution is already decadent if it believes itself to be accomplished. In other words, in a concrete conception of history, where ideas are nothing more than stages of the social dynamic, all progress is ambiguous because, acquired in a crisis situation, it creates a condition from which emerge problems that go beyond it. . . . It is no accident that all known revolutions have degenerated: it is because as established regimes they can never be what they were as movements; precisely because it succeeded and
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ended up as an institution, the historical movement is no longer itself: it “betrays” and “disfigures” itself in accomplishing itself. Revolutions are true as movements and false as regimes. Thus the question arises whether there is not more of a future in a regime that does not intend to remake history from the ground up but only to change it and whether this is not the regime that one must look for, instead of once again entering the circle of revolution.105 If we follow Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of the Marxian dialectic, Mao is more faithful than Trotsky to the idea of permanent revolution. In the first place, Trotsky “hesitated to situate truth outside the Party because Marxism had taught him that truth could not in principle reside anywhere but at the point where the proletariat and the organization which embodies it are joined.”106 It never occurred to Mao to consider the Party bureaucracy as a class, or the dictatorship of the proletariat turning into the fetishism of the dictatorship of the Party and its bureaucratic apparatus. In the second place, we can go a step further by saying that Mao is more faithful to the idea of the Marxian dialectic as permanent revolution than Lenin whose thought is depicted by Merleau-Ponty as epistemological “gnosticism” and political “aristocratism.” Merleau-Ponty calls Leninism a gnosticism because in Materialism and Empirico-Criticism, for example, he adds a heavy dose of “materialistic metaphysics” to the dialectic. The diagram of Lenin’s Bolshevism places the knowing subject outside the fabric of history, releases it from selfcriticism, inserts the subjective into the objective, and replaces the relations with the forces of production. In essence, it reduces the order of possibility to that of fact. On the epistemological plane, Lenin’s gnosticism shuts itself off from philosophical challenges concerning man and history. On the practical plane of translating epistemology into the order of action, Lenin’s Bolshevism “means replacing total praxis by a technician-made action, replacing the proletariat by the professional revolutionary. It means concentrating the movement of history, as well as that of knowledge, in an apparatus.”107 The Party elitism and bureaucratism of Lenin is a natural result of his epistemological gnosticism. In short, Lenin’s Bolshevism is an insertion of the movement of both historical knowledge and action into an institutionalized and regimented apparatus; that is, both theoria and praxis are functions or instruments reduced solely to the “matters” of the apparatchiks or “produced” and “administered” by the Party machines. Ultimately, his epistemological and practical bureaucratism is a result of treating the “iron law” of the
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dialectic as identities: the unequivocal identity of the Soviets with the people, the Party with the revolution, the professional revolutionaries with the Party, the Party with the dictatorship of the proletariat, and finally the Party with the State itself, which is a Hegelian rather than a Marxian concept. The complementary and convergent contributions of Mao and MerleauPonty to the historical development of Marxism is in clarifying the meaning of the dialectic in terms of the primacy of politics and in clarifying politics as permanent revolution. One could claim, further, that in an authentic dialectic of revolutionary theory and practice, Mao is in need of Merleau-Ponty and vice versa. There is indeed a creative imbalance between Merleau-Ponty and Mao, as there is between theory and practice; one limps when left alone, deprived of the aid of the other. Our aim is neither to miscegenate nor to homogenize Mao’s and Merleau-Ponty’s explorations of the dialectic; rather, we have attempted to show their complicity or, as Mao would say, how the dialectic “walks on two legs”—the primarily diagnostic endeavor of MerleauPonty on the one side and the primarily therapeutic (and provisionally prophetic) endeavor of Mao on the other. As the universal depends on and is conditioned by the particular—the particularity of Maoism as the Sinicized form of Marxism contributes to the universal development of Marxism. To this end, Merleau-Ponty’s adventures of the dialectic help to “scale” Maoism to the “height” of the Marxian dialectic.108 The comparison between Merleau-Ponty and Mao cannot simply be juxtaposed as philosophy and nonphilosophy. This would be so if we define philosophy as the discipline requiring conceptual exactitude and nonphilosophy as its opposite. If, however, we define philosophy as a contribution to the clarification of the human condition, that is, the clarification of men’s interexistence with other men in relation to things both natural and cultural, then Maoism is profoundly philosophical as well as humanistic. True philosophy is necessarily a humanism. For philosophy without humanism is empty, while humanism without philosophy is blind. In this sense, there is an urgent need for us to reaffirm and renew Marx’s unfaltering vision of humanizing man both radically and effectively. In the first place, to be radical is to get at the root of things, and the root of man is man himself. In the second place, to be effective means that, as universality itself resides in particularity, this radical humanization must be seen not in abstract generality but in the concreteness of specific acts, events, and institutions. For now more than ever before in history the ambiguity of the human condition of man as an incomplete being who is conscious of his own finitude
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and incompletion is a terrifying perspective. We can no longer treat truth in the cavalier and one-sided fashion of Hegel, the Western censor presiding over the procession of universal ideas. We cannot divide humanity into two different camps—one as the superior or privileged master and the other as the inferior or unprivileged slave. On the contrary, an integral and effective humanism as the flesh fold of the human spirit exists, only in the lateral relationships of all cultures in which the echoes of each awaken and are resonant with the others. For—to repeat Merleau-Ponty—truth’s center is everywhere and its circumference nowhere.109
PART V
The Fleshfold of the Earth: Green Thought, East and West
CHAPTER 12
merleau-ponty’s transversal geophilosophy and sinic aesthetics of nature
Only connect! —E. M. Forster
i. prelude At stake is the Earth in its totality, and humanity, collectively. Global history enters nature, global nature enters history: this is something utterly new in philosophy. —Michel Serres Ecology has rightly become our ultimate concern. It has a religious magnitude. It has turned into the question of “to be or not to be.” The ecological crisis persists: there is no warning sign to it. It is a permanent fixture of the human condition everywhere. Alarmingly this earth, our dwelling place, has progressively become an inhospitable, precarious, ruinous, and even deadly place for all earthlings both human and nonhuman. The ancient Hindu scriptural saying of Bhagavad Gita captures the dire predicament of the earthly condition today: “I am become death.” Indeed, we stand at the edge of history since the end of the earth or nature is also the end of history. Is there then a saving measure on earth to overcome our human-induced ecological crisis? The ecological crisis signals human disembodiment from the earth as a “household” (oikos) whose “deed” is being taken away by nature’s mutiny or silent revolt. In sinography, crisis is spelled with two ideograms: danger and opportunity. It means to seize an opportunity to save a situation from danger. To overcome the ecological crisis, we are in need of inaugurating
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a geophilosophy grounded in fundamentals that, according to Deleuze and Guattari, “brings together all the elements within a single embrace”1—only in fundamentals since, in following the advice of Einstein, not everything that counts can be counted. Merleau-Ponty’s ontology or “there-being” (“il y a”) of intercorporeality establishes and secures the firm foothold in such fundamentals for erecting the edifice of geophilosophy as if the earth really matters.2 Only by way of his intercorporeal ontology are humanity and the earth said to be bonded or intertwined. Without doubt the intercorporeal “generosity”3 of the whole earth will be a promising and defining moment of humanity in the new millennium.
ii. the way of transversality [T]hinking about One is not thinking about All. —Edouard Glissant Transversality is meant to be a term of connectivity, of lateral connectivity. It makes “connections in the face of difference” in the environment in which everything is connected to everything—the principle of which is called by the biologist Barry Commoner “the first law of ecology.”4 Difference marks the conditio sine qua non of connectivity. Difference and connectivity are correlative: but for difference, there would be no need for connectivity. Akira Kurozawa’s famed film Rashomon portrays the reality that truth or truthtelling is diverse and thus the search for it too is truly “an adventure of difference” (Gianni Vattimo’s phrase). Transversality is the term used in geometry (as well as in physics) that refers to the two diagonally connecting lines of any parallelogram. Félix Guattari, who was drawn to what he calls “ecosophy” in resonance with the Norwegian “ecosopher” Arne Naess, proposed transversality as a new way of thinking about the “politics” of psychiatric institutions.5 Transversality, for Guattari, interrupts the idea of “the institutional transference” and allows “undisciplined creativity” (chaosmosis in Joyce’s term), which means to prevent us from falling into seriality (Sartrean term) and bureaucratic sclerosis. It is a genre of social creationism in a multidimensional environment in which the individual subject too is conceived of polyphonically. For Calvin O. Schrag,6 transversality is the new way of overcoming the impasses of modernity and postmodernity. In other words, it is the way of
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defining or redefining the task of philosophy after postmodernity. His transversal shifter is meant to scale the continental divide between modernity and postmodernity and intends to dissolve, as it were, their differences. By way of transversality, Schrag means to subvert and transgress the dichotomy between “the Scylla of a hegemonic unification”/“a vacuous universalism” on the one hand and “the Charybdis of a chaotic pluralism”/“an anarchic historicism” on the other.7 The relevance of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s “lateral universal”8 to crosscultural geophilosophy cannot be underestimated. He uses “lateral” and “transversal” interchangeably. In opposition to the Eurocentrism of Hegel for whom universal knowledge is certified by the Occidental seal of approval alone, Merleau-Ponty insists that the Oriental past also has an honored place in the famed hall of philosophies to celebrate its hitherto “secret, muted contribution to philosophy.”9 He contends that Western philosophy can learn from Indian and Chinese philosophies to rediscover our relationships to Being. He challenges, “If Western thought is what it claims to be [universal], it must prove it by understanding all ‘life-worlds.’”10 It would indeed be presumptuous to claim that what is particular in the West is universalizable, whereas what is particular in the non-West remains particular or ethnophilosophical. For Merleau-Ponty, the “lateral universal” is acquired through ethnological experience by testing transversally one culture by way of the other and vice versa. It is a passport, as it were, that allows us to cross borders between diverse cultures, enter the zone of intersections, and discover crosscultural connections in pursuit of truth. It, in short, promotes the crossfertilization of ideas and deeds by negotiating differences and facilitates the confluence of differences. While Eurocentrism claims its validity as universal truth, Merleau-Ponty’s “lateral universal” takes into account “local knowledge” before global or planetary knowledge by espousing the Gadamerian “hermeneutical autonomy” of the other who may very well be right. Thus, it demands an open and unending dialogue as an end in itself. It opens up the uninterrupted flow of cultural dialogue based on difference or, in the terminology of Heidegger, Differenz as Unterschied, which may be neither reified nor erased, neither assimilated nor annihilated, but negotiated and compromised [com/promised].11 As “an adventure of difference,” the transversal dialogue, like a Zen garden, which allows no dialectical closure, is never finished or—as Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogism has it—it is “unfinalizable.” Transversality is, in a manner of speaking, a phoenix rising from the ashes of universality wedded to Eurocentrism. By decentering or deprovincializing
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Eurocentrism, it may be spelled “trans(uni)versality”; it intends to go beyond and transfigure the Eurocentric metanarratives of universality. As a paradigm shift in our thinking, it may be likened to a lateral movement of digging a new hole instead of digging the same hold deeper and deeper with no exit in sight. Michel Foucault’s lateral projection may have been right when he remarked in his dialogue with a Japanese priest in 1978, “The crisis of Western thought is identical to the end of imperialism. . . . [I]t is the end of the era of Western philosophy. Thus, if philosophy of the future exists, it must be born outside of Europe or equally born in consequence of meetings and impacts between Europe and non-Europe.”12 As a paradigm shifter in our thinking and doing, transversal geophilosophy, no less than transversality itself, is analogous to the famous wooden statue of Buddha at a Zen temple in Kyoto whose face marks the dawn of “enlightenment” (satori) or signals the beginning of a new regime of knowing and morals. From the crack in the middle of the old face in the Buddha’s statue, there emerges an interstitial, liminal face that signifies a new transformation. Since the new face emerges from the middle, it also symbolizes the arrival of Maitreya (i.e., the future “enlightened” One) or Maitreyan Middle Way.13 Thus the “new face” of transversal geophilosophy points to the emergence of the “middle” or “third” term that mediates and facilitates (1) cultural, (2) disciplinary, (3) speciesistic, and (4) sensorial border crossings. In other words, it is concerned with those matters that are intercultural, interdisciplinary, interspeciesistic, and intersensorial border-crossings.
iii. intercorporeality and geophilosophy Body am I entirely, and nothing else; and soul is only a word of something about the body. —Friedrich Nietzsche For twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for the beholding. It is for hearing. It is not legible, but audible. —Jacques Attali The Enlightenment contains the principle ethos of Western modernity. Its unbridled optimism, which awakened (Western) humanity from the slumber,
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as Kant put it with clarity, of self-incurred tutelage or immaturity, has promoted the idea of infinite progress based on the cultivation of pure (Cartesian) and instrumental (Baconian) reason, which spells out the lingua franca of Western modernity. While privileging and valorizing reason above all the other human faculties for allegedly human, material progress and emancipation, European modernity marginalizes and disempowers the (reason’s) other whether it be (1) nature, (2) body, (3) woman, or (4) non-West,14 all of whose categories are genderized interestingly as feminine. Descartes erected the canonical institution of the cogito, which is by necessity disembodied, monological and narcissistic, and ocularcentric. He built an epistemological panopticon15 whose influence at least in France has been so extensive that Deleuze and Guattari declare, “The French are like landowners whose source of income is the cogito.”16 As it is the act of the mind as “thinking substance” (res cogitans), the cogito (the “I think”) is the epitome of an incorporeal man in splendid isolation from others, both other minds and other bodies. As a thinking substance, the mind claims to be independent of the body (res extensa); it needs nothing other than itself to exist. Once the self and the other are viewed as disembodied substances, two self-contained substances, monologism—or even solipsism in extremis—is inevitable. Merleau-Ponty puts it succinctly: “Sociality . . . is a scandal for the ‘I think.’”17 In geophilosophy, sociality refers to both interhuman and interspeciesistic relationships. Francis Bacon18 is unquestionably the most eloquent and Enlightened voice of Western modernity as the age of science, technology, and quantitative economy. He advocated the convergence of theory and practice, of knowledge and utility, and of knowing and making. Experimentalism, the utility of knowledge, power over nature, and philanthropia when combined together become a paradigmatic attempt to replace the old “cult of books” by the new (experimental) “cult of nature” or the “inquisition of nature,” which promotes the “direct commerce of the mind with things” themselves. He formulated the principles of Herrschaftswissen in which knowledge and power converge for the sake of utility. The framework of modern technology was laid down by Bacon when he insisted on the meeting of human knowledge and power in one (i.e., scientia et potential in idem coincident) and discovered “in the womb of nature many secrets of excellent use.” Speaking against the “degenerate learning” of Scholastics, Bacon felt that they had “sharp and strong wits” and an “abundance of leisure” in “the cells of monasteries and colleges” but they knew little history of nature or “no great
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quantity of matter”; that is, their “cobwebs of learning” produced “no substance or profit.” Enough has so far been said about the grand narratives of European modernity in the language of the Cartesian bifurcation of mind and body and the Baconian domination and exploitation by humanity of nature. Merleau-Ponty, however, offers a radically different scenario in terms of the lived body or embodiment, which is not only the umbilical cord to the world both social and natural but also the stage director, as it were, of the body. He speaks of the lived body as “the zero point of orientation” that serves as the “canon” or “norm” of perception.19 The body founds and funds perception as a web of the human sensorium. There is indeed the primacy of perception in everything we do and think. To cite the often quoted passage of Merleau-Ponty in defense of his main philosophical thesis of Phenomenology of Perception, “The perceived world is the always presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value and all existence. This thesis does not destroy either rationality or the absolute. It only tries to bring them down to earth.”20 Not only are all forms of consciousness perceptual or earthly perception but also “the perceived world promises [transversal] relations.”21 Insofar as perception is a “nascent logos,” there can be neither “disembodied reason” nor alienation of humanity from nature. For Merleau-Ponty, to perceive natural things in the world is to sense them as they are through embodied consciousness, to sense the (sauvage, “wild”) nakedness of nature. The act of perception as embodied consciousness is then neither representation nor idea. Rather, perception participates in or inhabits each reality it senses. It intertwines or interlaces the flesh of the body and the flesh of the world: the body and the world form one inseparable flesh fold. Marjorie Grene is perceptive when she writes “it is always as lived bodies that we sing the world, maybe out of key, maybe forgetfully, maybe with ingenious novelty, but really, in the flesh.”22 Only in terms of the body as the participatory locus of perception do we come to grips with Merleau-Ponty’s deep notion that the world is made of the same stuff as the body or “my body is made of the same flesh as the world (it is a perceived [un perçu]).”23 In each act of perception, the body participates in the world. Each perception is an instance or moment of the sensuous unity, and it is enclosed in the synergic work of the body, that is, intersensorial. The body is the carnal field in which perception becomes localized as seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, and tasting this or that particular. Merleau-Ponty, therefore, contends, “la conscience perceptive n’est pas une alchimie mentale, elle est globale, totale” (perceptive consciousness is not a mental alchemy; it
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is global, total”), that is, synergic.24 The synergic organization of perceptual acts is unimaginable without one of the most important discoveries of phenomenology: the lived body or the body as subject. The body as subject is never an inert matter or mass but rather a sentient subject. As such, the body as flesh is capable of “authoring” the world first before “answering” it. Thus, Merleau-Ponty writes with a touch of eloquence: “Mon corps n’est pas un objet, mais un moyen, une organization. J’organise dans la perception avec mon corps une fréquentation avec le monde. Avec mon corps et par mon corps, j’habite le monde. Le corps est le champ dans lequel se localisent les perceptions.”25 (My body is not an object, but a means, an organization. In perception I organize with my body an association with the world. With my body and through my body, I inhabit the world. The body is the field in which perceptions localize themselves.) The body is an “earthword” as much as the earth is a “bodyword.” The body and the earth inscribe each other in and as one flesh fold. As such the body is quintessentially a place name, a name of location. The feminist Rosi Braidotti describes it concisely: “the primary site of location is the body.”26 One does not have to be a woman or feminist to be vindicated by Braidotti. The Anglo-Saxons knew the body as dwelling place, and they named it banhus (bonehouse) and lichama (bodyhome).27 In locating the identity and humanity of African Americans, Ralph Ellison begins his narratives in purely carnal terms in his classic work The Invisible Man: “I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible . . . simply because they refuse to see me.”28 Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the body as flesh is radically and preeminently geophilosophical across the measured template of time and space: to cite his celebrated passage, “[the body as] flesh is not matter, is not mind, is not substance. To designate it, we should need the old term ‘element,’ in the sense it was used to speak of water, air, earth, and fire, that is, in the sense of a general thing [chose], midway between the spatio-temporal individual and the idea, a sort of incarnate principle that brings a style of being wherever there is a fragment of being. The flesh is in this sense an element of Being. Not a fact or a sum of facts, and yet adherent to location and to the now.”29 Inasmuch as an element is matter (chose), the body is said to be the material condition of our being in the world or l’intermonde. There is no “thing” that does not occupy space. Only by way of the body are we said to be connected to the world that is both interhuman and interspeciesistic: as we are social through and through, intercorporeality is nothing other than that term that
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expresses our primordial and primary way of connecting or socializing ourselves to the world that is inhabited by other bodies, other minds, and other things. The body, in other words, is our primum relationis in which it and the world are correlational: one cannot exist without the other. The mind itself becomes a term of relation only because the body is always already populated in the world with and among other bodies. Intercorporeality inscribes what Pierre Bourdieu calls “the performative magic of the social,” which partakes of “le sens pratique,”30 not of “disembodied reason.” By the synergy of the body, Merleau-Ponty means to emphasize the transversal “circulation”31 of the senses, that is, the intersensorium or intersensoriality. As the “sensible sentient” (sentant sensible), the two-dimensional body is the chiasmic coupling of the sensible and the sentient. There is the synergic sociality of all the senses. As Merleau-Ponty describes it, “We must habituate ourselves to think that every visible is cut out in the tangible, every tactile being in some manner promised to visibility, and that there is encroachment, infringement, not only between the touched and the touching, but also between the tangible and the visible, which is encrusted in it, as, conversely, the tangible itself is not a nothingness of visibility, is not without visual existence. Since the same body sees and touches, visible and tangible belong to the same world.”32 Therefore, the transversal movement or circulation of the sensorium cannot be painted with one particular sense alone by disallowing the other senses to “inter-be” with each other and thus by ending in reductive abstraction against which Merleau-Ponty warns from The Structure of Behavior to The Visible and the Invisible. This reductive abstraction is a Cartesian trap in which everything is streamlined to edify the epistemological panopticon of the cogito that, by being mesmerized by the eye, is turned into a scopic regime and ocularcentric machine. Here we should take heed of Johann Gottfried Herder who, as a cultural pluralist, questions the presentation of reason as “the single summit” of all human cultures in a single sentence: “Is the whole body just one big eye?”33 Although vision may be an “exemplar sensible,” Merleau-Ponty warns that “there is a fundamental narcissism of all vision.”34 He also cautions the philosopher not to become a spectator or better yet, “kosmostheoros” at whose sovereign gaze the world turns into a panorama. Merleau-Ponty concludes that “a philosophy of reflection which identifies my being with what I think of it”35 scandalizes “sociality.”36 He claims that philosophy is in need of direct and immediate contact with the world prior to reflection. To be sure, the world is not something at which we merely gaze, but it is also something we can touch, taste, smell, and hear.
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In philosophy, sight is thought of as a “rational” and masculine sense, whereas touch is denigrated to a pariah status as an “irrational” and feminine sense.37 José Ortega y Gasset argues against visual primacy: it would be “a grave mistake” to think that sight is the most important sense of all and that “touch was the original sense from which the others were gradually differentiated” and that “the decisive form of our intercourse with things is in fact touch.”8 Therefore, Ortega claims that “touch and contact are necessarily the most conclusive factor in determining the structure of our world.”38 Not unlike Merleau-Ponty’s interlacing of the sentient body and sensed body as in a handshake, Ortega argues for the inseparability and the reversibility of “the body that we touch, and our body with which we touch it.”39 The synaesthesia of touch inseminates and disseminates the sociability of the senses and performs the “magic of the social.” The primary but not exclusive organ of touching is the hand: Rodin’s sculptural masterpiece Cathedral in which the caressing of two right hands (the “rite” of sociality) incarnates, certifies, and celebrates the “sacrament of coexistence”—to use the elegant expression of Henry G. Bugbee Jr.40 Here I wish to draw attention to the jouissance of tickling and being tickled that, again like the handshake, is a reversible phenomenon. It cannot transpire in the absence of the other for the reason that it is a contact (tactus) sport. This is the reason one cannot tickle oneself. In the footsteps of Irigaray and Levinas, Cynthia Willett speaks of “tactile sociality,”41 which begins and comes with the caress or contact between the mother and the infant. So she declares, “In the beginning is not the word; it is the touch.”42 Without doubt it is the “natal bond” (Merleau-Ponty’s phrase) between the two sentient beings. It is a skin-to-skin or epidermic sociality that is never just skin-deep. In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty has a cryptic instruction to himself: “Do a psychoanalysis of Nature: it is the flesh, the mother.”43 When accent is put on “Nature,” “flesh,” and “mother,” it turns into a “geopsychoanalysis,” that is, Mother Nature and Mother Earth (Terra Mater and Gaia), that personifies the caring and nurturing mother. The breast-feeding, which is the privileged rite of the mother, is the contact between the “skin-mouth” and “skin-breast,” which is deeper than any other contact we can imagine. Breast-feeding as the biological act of caring instantiates the ethic of care. We would be remiss if we forget to mention Irigaray’s feminist philosophy, which bucks the mainstream or better yet, “malestream” language of Western philosophy. She is determined to unpack or denigrate monistic
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“phallogocentrism,” which as vision has emasculated touch, is rooted in “scoptophilism” or the love of sight.44 By upholding the sense of touch or— to use Merleau-Ponty’s expression—“tactile palpation,” Irigaray embraces the caress of the two sexes—man and woman. For Irigaray, touch or caress enriches and cultivates the intercorporeal contact of proximity. Following the thread of Irigaray’s thought, it is worth lending our ears to the important and fascinating study of women in Tantric (Vajrayana) Buddhism in Nepal and Tibet, of yogini-tantra by Miranda Shaw in Passionate Enlightenment.45 Tantric Buddhism eulogizes the body or flesh as an “abode of bliss” or jouissance, as it were, by embracing the “jewel” of sexuality or sexual union in which asceticism and celibacy have no place.46 It “enlightens” the body’s passion. Shaw’s work presents a gynecological view of Tantrism where yoginis or female Tantrics, who are female practitioners of yoga, engage in the teachings and practices of blissful intimacy as a path to enlightenment. However, Shaw contends that the body of yoginis’ teachings and practices has been overlooked in the West because of the “androcentric bias” of Western (male) scholars and interpreters. Yoginis revolutionized Buddhism, just as Irigaray’s feminist philosophy overturned the “malestream” phallic-logocentric legacy of Western philosophy since Plato, in comprehending the nature of the three S words: sensuality, sexuality, and spirituality. No wonder Irigaray has turned to the East for her philosophical illumination in Between East and West (Entre Orient et Occident), in which she expands the horizon of her “logic” of “two” (or “betweenness”) to the East-West connection. Whatever her critics say about the work,47 it is the journey worth taking, which I suspect, is far from being finished or completed. She might very well benefit from tossing a peek at Shaw’s work as she expands her feminist horizon from corporeal “singularity” to intercorporeal “community” (ashram). The attainment of spiritual enlightenment, according to female Tantrics, is extremely difficult without a male partner. They seek their spiritual illumination in intimate partnership with men, which includes a mixing of sexual fluids. In a relationship with a man, touching and massaging a woman’s feet and ingesting a woman’s body are also allowed: a man sips, upon request, sexual fluid and menstrual blood from her vulva and licks any part of her body. In the final analysis, there is a direct geophilosophical or ecological message or lesson to be had in Irigaray’s feminist philosophy in conjunction with female Tantrics: The gynecological self is the ecological self par excellence. It is an “earthlink” to the flesh of the world where everything touches
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everything else.48 In rejecting the facile dichotomy between nature and culture, her “morphology” of jouissance and the sociability of the senses in touch connects what she calls “the calendar of the [feminine] flesh”49 or “the cyclical character of feminine sexuality”50 with the repeated cycle of seasonal changes in nature or the “myth of the eternal return.”51 There is indeed something “jouissanced,” if you will, as well as deeply healing and comforting in the repeated refrains of nature in the serene expression of the incomparable American ecofeminist Rachel Carson, who writes the following: Those who dwell, as scientists or laymen, among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life. Whatever the vexations or concerns of their personal lives, their thoughts can find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of the birds, the ebb and flow of the tides, the folded bud ready for the spring. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature—the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after the winter.52 So does Merleau-Ponty with Paul Valéry listen to and rejoice in “the very voice of the things, the waves, and the forests.”53
iv. the eastern body and geophilosophy He who knows himself and other, Will also recognize that East and West cannot be separated.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Silence is appreciated in the East as a priceless jewel. This may be the reason Asians are called “inscrutable.” Foucault was rightly curious about silence, which defines Japanese Zen culture. It may be said that the East is to silence as the West is to talk. There is the “diacritical” or “hyperdialectical” connection between the East and the West as the inexorable pairing of yin and yang as complementary, not as a binary opposition. Norman O. Brown’s Love’s Body has a mystical touch of Taoism and Zen. It is strikingly Eastern. It resonates with the Eastern conception of silence,
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which is quintessential to the magic of the body’s performance(s). For Brown, “silence is the mother tongue.”54 It “speaks” eloquently. As it “speaks,” its deed is performed in silence. As the (m)other tongue, silence has a double meaning: first, the genesis of language lies in silence and second, silence is the other of language or the other language. As a “virgin,” silence invaginates language.55 In the beginning was silence, not the word. Only when the word becomes flesh is there silence. “To recover the world of silence . . . ,” Brown sums up with brevity, “is to recover the human body.”56 In Sinism, which encompasses Confucianism, Taoism, and Ch’an (Sinicized) and Zen (first Sinicized and then Japanized) Buddhism and blankets the lands of China, Korea, and Japan, there are fortunately or unfortunately no hardheaded logocentrists—like Descartes and Bacon—who separate the mind (res cogitans) and the body (res extensa), on the one hand and humanity from nature, on the other. In Sinism it is said that there are four human “dignities,” which are all bodily postures and movements: standing, walking, lying, and sitting.57 Among these dignities, sitting as in zazen (seated meditation) in Zen is best known to the Western audience. Without zazen, that is, without meditative “training” (keiko) or “cultivation” (shugyo),58 there would be no possibility of enlightenment (satori) that, as a thoroughly embodied phenomenon, may be juxtaposed to the logocentric and disembodied European Enlightenment. In zazen, the body is the heart (kokoro) and vehicle of meditation and enlightenment. As hara (abdomen) is the heart of the body, there is the interesting Japanese expression kufu, which is identified with “thinking with the abdomen.”59 Kufu, not unlike Rodin’s The Thinker, depicts thinking itself as an embodied activity. It comes as no surprise that Dogen Kigen (the founder of Soto Zen),60 who is the most renowned Japanese carnal hermeneuticist, proclaims the primacy of the body, which is not far from Merleau-Ponty’s primacy of perception whose locus is none other than the body itself. The language of ideograms embodies the soul of Sinism. Therefore, it may be called sinography. Language and culture are inseparable twins. Language is a product of culture as much as culture expresses itself by the communicative medium of language: as Merleau-Ponty puts it, what the mind is to the body, thought is to language.61 They are all intertwined. The American philosopher Ernest Fenollosa62 is the inventor of “etymosinology” in which the study of things Sinic is correlated to the etymological anatomy of ideograms. Chinese ideography—calligraphy in particular—is a kinetic art: it is the human body in graceful motion. By the same token, calligraphy is kinaesthetic. The Chinese revere the art of calligraphy as much as, if not more than,
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painting: calligraphy is the ritualized painting of ideograms. In the genealogy of form, calligraphy precedes painting. In very significant measure, Chinese ideography is a choreography of human gestures (including ren, the human rendered in its upright posture) and, as a family of signifiers, “a conversation of gestures,” which, because of the presence of meaning, is not to be reduced to human physiology. Picasso’s Swimmer and Acrobat are two choreographs of the human body in fluent and rhythmic motion, which approach ideography or calligraphy.63 They are, in essence, balletic and frolicking anthropograms. Marshall McLuhan, who had the romantic vision of writing his antitypographic treatise64 in the ideogrammic medium (with the sensorium of touch as its synaesthetic epicenter), thought of—rightly, I think—the Chinese ideogram as “a vortex of corporate energy” (qi).65 Merleau-Ponty would have been delighted to know that the term “lived experience” (Erlebnis, expérience vécue) in Japanese phenomenology is translated as taiken (tai/ken) in two sinograms (kanji), “bodily” or “embodied” (tai) “experience” (ken).66 Moreover, the contemporary Chinese philosopher Li Zehou coined the neologism “subjectality” (zhu/ti/xing) in distinction to “subjectivity”; that is, the former is “embodied” while the latter is “idealized.”67 The Chinese ti and the Japanese tai are one and the same sinogram although they sound or are pronounced differently. To Sinicize “subjectivity” (or the body as subject) in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology is to rename it as “subjectality” to follow the hermeneutical injunction of Confucius for whom the “rectification of names” belongs to the first order of performing moral and speech acts and of performing deeds. Third, for Watsuji Tetsuro who still lives, justifiably or not, under the shadow of Nishida Kitaro and wrote an important geophilosophical treatise on the impact of “climate” (fudo)68 on human civilization, the temporal and spatial difference marks the difference between the East and the West: the East is spatial, whereas the West is temporal. As he is critical of Heidegger’s Daseinsanalyse in Being and Time that is alleged to focus on time rather than space, Watsuji propounds and defends the thesis that the spatiality of the body maps the social and environmental issues. In fact, the body is the connecting tissue of humanity to its environing world both interhuman and interspeciesistic. For Heidegger, the “ex-istential” condition of the human is temporally defined by the ecstatic “in” of Dasein as Being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-sein). Watsuji, in contrast, defines the human in terms of the spatial “betweenness” (aidagara) as the human itself is spelled ningen (nin/gen in two sinograms), that is, (the upright pictogram of) “man” (nin) and “betweenness” (gen).69 For Watsuji, accordingly, the true
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humanity of humans is located in “betweenness” as spatial relationality. The body is the specific location of human existence (sonzai). As the world is inhabited by other bodies or embodied beings, intercorporeality belongs to the frontier of Interbeing. Watsuji speaks of “a carnal interconnection”70 that constitutes the first order of spatial “betweenness.”71 Sinism, which is expressed in the communicative medium of the corporeal language of ideography, also incorporates a rich corpus of geophilosophy.72 It is rich in the corporeal poetics of topophilia. The Sinic slogan “the body and the land are not two” (but one) is the celebration of the body in defense of the land.73 The Sinic eco-art called fêng shui (geomancy or ideographically spelled “wind”/”water”), which is widely practiced as a conventional art of everyday living even in highly modernized, urbanized Asia, sanctifies and ritualizes the inseparability of humans from the land and the energy (qi) of the cosmic elements. The eco-art of fêng shui, whether it be used in building houses or in planning ancestral burials, means to harmonize human activities with the land, with the cosmic elements. In the land of Zen where for some even Heidegger appears to be anthropocentric, the Cartesian and Baconian possession and mastery of nature is unthinkable. The Japanese have perfected the horticultural art of bonsai, which began in China. It is no accident that haiku poetry was invented in the land of Zen. By economizing words, haiku, which is meant to “enshrine words,” expresses the feeling of reverence for small creatures and things in nature (“ten thousand things”) in accord with the circulation of the seasons. The way of Daoism as a geophilosophy is synonymous with the way of homo ecologicus. It deflates rather than inflates or magnifies the importance of both the self and the human in conceptualizing the earth or cosmos. It is, in brief, neither egocentric nor anthropocentric. According to the Daodejing, there is a “circulation” of “four greatnesses” in the universe: Man, Earth, Heaven, and Dao. Dao is the “mother” of Heaven and Earth or the world: In the universe we have four greatnesses, and man is but one. Man is in accordance with earth. Earth is in accordance with heaven. Heaven is in accordance with Dao. Tao is in accordance with that which is.74 At the heart of the circulating wheel of the four greatnesses lies “that which is” (ziran), “being natural,” or “thusness” in the sense of “thisness” or “thatness”
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in depicting the singularity of a particular thing. As it is spelled with two sinograms, it has a twofold meaning. One is physical in that it refers to myriads of beings and things in nature or “ten thousand things”—mountains, rivers, animals, trees, plants, and so on. The other, more importantly, is ontological. As “thusness,” it signifies the intrinsic and spontaneous (or uncontrolled) propensity of beings and things that may be called “Natursein.”75 In Confucianism, too, there is no absence or lack of geophilosophical ideas. In it, filial piety (interhuman), for example, is connected to geopiety as reverence for “ten thousand things” in nature. The fifteenth-century neoConfucian philosopher Wang Yang-ming, who yielded considerable influence inside and outside China (in Korea and Japan), declared that “The great man [or sage] regards Heaven, Earth, and the myriad things as one body.”76 The sage’s feeling of commiseration for a child falling into a well, his inability to bear the suffering of birds and animals, his feeling of pity for broken and destroyed plants all show his “humanity” or humaneness (ren), which is regarded as the highest Confucian virtue, with all the sentients as they together form one body as the “sensible sentient”—to use Merleau-Ponty’s expression. The feeling of humaneness (ren) embraces the sage’s feeling of regret even to shattered tiles and stones.77 Wang extends the Confucian notion of humaneness to nonhuman things both animate and inanimate and incorporates the body into the mapping of his geophilosophical idea. Seven centuries earlier, the Confucianist Zhang Zai envisioned in an encompassing way when he wrote the following reputed passage: “Heaven is my father, and earth is my mother, and even such a small creature as I finds an intimate place in their midst. Therefore that which fills the universe I regard as my body and that which directs the universe I consider as my nature. All people are my brothers and sisters, and all things are my companions.”78 Indeed, Wang and Zhang celebrate the human as quintessentially an earthly being who is interconnected by way of the body with other beings and things on earth.
v. coda We all stand only together, not only all men, but all things [in harmony]. —Henry G. Bugbee Jr. We have for sometime been disenchanted with the ecological condition of the whole earth. We are out of touch with and displaced from our dwelling
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place called the earth as oikos. Reenchanting the earth may be as difficult as repairing a torn spider’s web with our fingers—to use the evocative expression of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Nonetheless, disenchantment is a promising precondition for transcendence toward the reenchantment of all earthlings, that is, humans and “ten thousand things” alike. To sum up, the aim of this chapter is to explore Merleau-Ponty’s geophilosophy as if the whole earth really matters with an accent on intercorporeality by means of which we humans, as the first principle of ecology dictates, are said to be interconnected to all other earthlings. The heart of MerleauPonty’s contribution to geophilosophy, I submit, is his carnal ontology that provides us with the earthly comprehension that all relationships necessarily begin with the intercorporeality or interweaving of lived bodies both human and nonhuman. Indeed, intercorporeality is truly an “earthword” that means to “inter-be” with all earthly bodies or “earthbodies”—to borrow Glen Mazis’s befitting term.79 The body as flesh, according to Merleau-Ponty, is our social placement in the world with other species and other humans. As such it is, in essence, the primum relationis. Intercorporeality belongs to the first order of Interbeing: but for intercorporeality, there would be no Interbeing. The former is a species of the latter. If the human body is “a boundary symbol,”80 intercorporeality or intercorporeal “betweenness” marks boundary crossings for the self to “inter-be” with other bodies on earth. All relationships begin first with intercorporeal symbiosis. The body is the primordial “earthlink” of the self to the flesh of the world that humans and “ten thousand things” inhabit together. Moreover, transversality is to be taken as the radically new way of facilitating lateral border crossings by decentering all the centers from one culture to another (intercultural), from one species to another (interspeciesistic), from one discipline to another (interdisciplinary), and from one sense to another (intersensorial). First, transversality as a lateral movement deconstructs and replaces universality as a Eurocentric idea. Second, it unpacks anthropocentrism (as well as egocentrism), which regards humanity as the apex of all creation and the measure of all things and as such is the cause of wanton ecological destruction and the accelerated disappearance of biodiversity. The arrogance of humans as allegedly rational beings breaks off the ecological continuum of Being or ecological Interbeing and results inevitably in an incurable nihilism. In anthropocentrism all beings and things exist only for the sole benefit of humans as rational beings. By inflating the human self, anthropocentrism destroys the transversal “circulation” of all beings
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and things and is oblivious to the aesthetic principle that “small is beautiful.” Anthropocentrism queries, why do animals cross the roads we build? rather than why do we build the roads where animals cross? Third, as the body is the locus of perception or the human sensorium and the fundamentum of everything we do and think, the inflation or domination of one sense deflates the other senses and violates what Merleau-Ponty calls the body’s “synergy” or synaesthesia as the chiasmic intertwining of all the senses. Vision or sight has been the “Brahmic sense” in Western philosophy, and the others, particularly the sense of touch, have been reduced to “untouchable” senses. However, vision anaesthetizes the other senses and objectifies things, whereas touch synesthetizes them. The feminist Irigaray downplays ocularcentrism or “scoptophilism,” which is also identified with the “malestream” grid of Western philosophy. By replacing the masculine sense of sight with the feminine sense of touch, she also means to recover not only the place of femininity in philosophy but also the (feminine) earth (Terra Mater, Gaia). As Irigaray puts it elegantly, the calendar of the feminine flesh is consonant with nature’s rhythmic circulation of the seasons. In the final analysis, the synaesthesia of the human sensorium is synchronized with the harmony of music. The end of transversality is to measure and take into account the harmony of sentient beings and insentient things in the world. “All music is harmonious,” Mikel Dufrenne proclaims, “because harmony is the primary condition of musical being.”81 Inasmuch as the sound of music surrounds the environing world and thus promotes the (round) circulation of beings and things, harmony maintains and preserves the wholesomeness of the whole earth that requires, according to Merleau-Ponty, “no hierarchy of orders or layers or planes.”82 John Dewey evokes the Greek conception of harmony (kalon-agathon) and extends it to human moral conduct.83 By so doing, he is not far removed from Confucius, who, as an appassionato of music, champions the kinship between music and the Sinic cardinal virtue of jen (humaneness), which attends to all living creatures. Thus, the “earthword” harmony becomes most promising for the future cause of geophilosophy in advancing the lateral relationships of all beings— human and nonhumans—primarily as sentient beings who are in need of the ethics of compassion, civility, hospitality, care, responsibility, kindness, and generosity.84 In this respect, Erazim Kohák is forthright and unimpeachable when he declares that “To recover the moral sense of our humanity, we would need to recover first the moral sense of nature.”85 For the Amerindians, the first inhabitants of America, the entire embodied “Turtle Island” is the
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(sacred) kiva where all living creatures are called “peoples.” The Japanese, too, enshrine not only Fujiyama but also the island of their inhabitation as jinja (sacred temple, the dwelling place of gods). Merleau-Ponty’s transversality as lateral movement opens up a floodgate for gathering and fashioning the cross-cultural corpus and library of earthwords or geophilosophical ideas that give credence to the ecological motto of “thinking globally.”
CHAPTER 13
the greening of postmodern philosophy th e e thical que stion of rei nhab i t i ng t he eart h
The problem of Nature is the problem of human life. —Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki At stake is the Earth in its totality, and humanity, collectively. Global history enters nature; global nature enters history: this is something utterly new in philosophy. —Michel Serres If we keep on speaking the same language together, we’re going to reproduce the same history. —Luce Irigaray
i. prologue The earth has become an important element of postmodern thinking. Ecosophy or the philosophic wisdom of the earth (Gaia, Terra Mater), in turn, informs the postmodern condition: the latter is an effect or propensity of the former. Inspired particularly by Martin Heidegger’s later thought, many French thinkers of the postmodern persuasion have in recent years lent their attentive ears to ecosophy in an attempt to overturn and reverse the established institution of an anthropocentric metaphysics rooted in the scopic regime of Descartes’s cogito or his “epistemocracy,” which is necessarily logocentric and disembodied, egocentric, and ocularcentric. It is no mere accident that Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism,”1 which was originally
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written as a response to Jean Beaufret’s query in 1946 and marked the “turning point” (Kehr) of Heidegger’s own thought, is a critique in significant measure of the arrogance of modernist humanism, particularly of Cartesian epistemocracy, which infuses the human mastery and possession of nature and promotes a head-on collision with the earth. Michel Haar celebrates what I term Heidegger’s ecosophy, which questions the nature of Being as if the earth really matters (i.e., the idea of the “earth first”).2 Michel Serres discovers the notion of “natural contract,” which is meant to complement Rousseau’s earlier “social contract” as a critique in part of the possessive, utilitarian individualism of Hobbes and Locke that has dominated the Anglo-American world for over three long centuries.3 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari map out the contours of geophilosophy, in which the earth is not just one element among others (air, fire, and water) but that all-encompassing element that “brings all the elements into a single embrace.”4 It may be said that ecosophy in its holistic content and method is the “geophilosophy” par excellence, for the simple reason that it is concerned with the quintessentially Heideggerian question of how to dwell properly on earth.5 Furthermore, Guattari raises a weighty and timely question in his attempt to construct an “ethicoaesthetic paradigm” in opposition to a scientific one: The ecological crisis can be traced to a more general crisis of the social, political and existential. The problem requires a revolution of mentalities, whereby we cease investing in development based on productivism, which has lost all human finality. Thus the issue returns with insistence: how do we change mentalities? How do we reinvent social practices that would give back to humanity a sense of responsibility—if it ever existed—not only for animal and vegetable species but likewise for incorporeal species such as music, the arts, cinema, the relation with time, love and compassion for others—the feeling of fusion at the heart of the cosmos?6
ii. the direction of postmodern environmental philosophy The ecological crisis is by and large the result of the modernization process. Ecosophy is a postmodern adventure, insofar as it attempts to interrupt or deconstruct anthropocentric modernity and its principal conditions, all enframed in disembodied reason and translated into science and technology
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to fuel the engines of industrial civilization in the name of progress. The enlightened ethos called modernization and based on the Promethean ideology of progress now has a hegemonic and hypnotic grip on the entire globe. It signals the “end of nature” as well as the “end of history.” As a cultural politics of identity, modernization is that propensity or “mentality” of the West that willy-nilly legislates or legitimates itself as the anointed guardian and the privileged center of the historical telos of the world by colonizing, as it were, the very future itself.7 In the planetary projector of modernization, world history is ever more predictable than before and there are no longer surprises or “future shocks.” This postmodern adventure, which is thoroughly interdisciplinary in method and as yet marginally intercultural in scope and content, attempts to subvert and transgress the human mastery and possession of the earth as merely a human resource. For this reason, ecosophy is the critique par excellence of modernity and in itself constitutes a postmodern paradigm. It should be made clear, however, that this understanding differs from that of Heidegger, who identifies Being with being human and thus becomes oblivious to “ontological difference.” Contrary to a common misunderstanding by ecosophy’s critics, then, this argument against anthropocentrism celebrates no “abolition of humanity.” Rather, it is an argument against the arrogance and conceit of humans as the absolute lords of the earth. As everything is connected to everything else on earth or in the cosmos, ecosophy represents an effort to harmonize human life with nature or earth and thus overcome a facile and untenable dualism between nature and culture, self and other, and mind and body. Since the ecological crisis is a sign of human uprootedness from the earth (i.e., homelessness), we find it necessary to accent the body as our umbilical cord to the earth and our foothold and anchorage in the world, both human and nonhuman. Humans inhabit the world by way of the body, or our body inhabits the world. To reinhabit the earth, therefore, we need to conceptualize the body as interbeing since, to paraphrase Merleau-Ponty slightly, a philosophy of (the body as) flesh is the condition without which ecosophy remains anthropology.8 The body as flesh inscribes the morphological midway between uncultured (wild) nature and the cultured world. The gender of ecosophy, as that of postmodernity, is preeminently feminine, reflecting the didactic lesson we learn from the history of nature or earth as feminine. Moreover, the liberation of nature from human domination is inseparable from the liberation of women from the domination of men. To put it more concisely, the gynecological self is an exemplar of the ecological
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self. In other words, ecofeminism is an exemplar of ecosophy. Body politics, which happens to be in itself a postmodern subject, is integral to the struggle of feminism, of corporeal feminism. Ecosophy and body politics merge at a crossroads in the elegant words of Nancy Mairs: “Through writing her body, woman may reclaim the deed to her dwelling.”9 By affirming being human as being (and not as having) a body after the fashion of Merleau-Ponty’s carnal phenomenology, Mairs calls the dualism of body and mind/spirit “a classic Western patriarchal bifurcation.”10 As the body is a dwelling place, or—as the old Anglo-Saxons called it—banhus (bonehouse) and lichama (bodyhome), the word habit (habitus)11 refers to the “passionate liaison of our bodies.”12 Accordingly, the project of “reinhabiting the earth” turns to the body as the liaison between the self and the earth. Corporeal or ecosophic feminism engenders not only jouissance but also, more importantly, a heteronomic ethic of caring13 that will be exemplified in the following pages in the écriture feminine of Luce Irigaray and the “different voice” of Carol Gilligan.
iii. embodiment and environmental philosophy Guattari’s “ethico-aesthetic paradigm” calls for ecosophic wisdom as its integral element. Terry Eagleton informs us that the body’s opus is twofold. In the first place, the aesthetic (aisthesis) is born as a discourse of the body: it is intrinsically a carnal affair. In the second place, the aesthetic is the body’s rebellion against the “tyranny of the theoretical” (theoria).14 Nietzsche, who called himself a physician of culture, occupies a unique place in the history of the aesthetic as a discourse of the body. It is no accident that he, who proposes in Thus Spoke Zarathustra that “body am I entirely, and nothing else; and soul is only a word for something about the body,”15 challenges and transgresses the speculative conundrum of theoria and replaces it with aisthesis, also replacing specular theoria with “participatory aisthesis.” Nietzsche attempts to invert Platonism that seeks the eternal and heavenly (solar) ideas (eidos) radiated from the “mind’s eye” and abandons the fleeing moments of earthly reality.16 In his first major work The Birth of Tragedy, the young Tantric Nietzsche valorizes music as the consummate aesthetic: “it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified and that “only music, placed beside the world, can give us an idea of what is meant by the justification of the world as an aesthetic phenomenon.”17 Thinking in, through, and with the body, Nietzsche offers the social and
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political theory of the body. He describes the body as a “political structure” in The Will to Power18 and as a “social structure composed of many souls” in Beyond Good and Evil.19 The body houses many souls each of which marks a function or effect of sociality.20 For Nietzsche, a single body is made of many souls that are inscriptions of the social; the body is made of an ensemble of social effects (pragmata) and is not a product of theoretical speculation (theoria). Nietzsche’s ultimate and most trenchant criticism of the dominant Western tradition of philosophizing, from Plato’s theoria to Christian asceticism and Cartesian epistemocracy, is that it is a denial of sociality; it is elementally and deeply antisocial.21 The body is the carnal locus of the social. Since for Merleau-Ponty (the body as) flesh (la chair) “is not matter, is not mind, is not substance,” it may be called a “general thing” or an “element” like air, water, fire, and earth: it is an element of Being.22 As the body and the earth form one flesh fold, they inscribe each other. Humans live in the atmosphere of sociality. This flesh fold of sociality may be likened to the omnipresent air surrounding us, which is so elemental that we take it for granted and seldom notice it. The most serious consequence of the Cartesian division of mind and body as two separate “substances”—one as res cogitans and the other as res extensa—is that it denies and is incapable of justifying the concept of sociality—that is, the interconnection between ourselves on the one hand and between us and the earth on the other. The Cartesian disembodied cogito is totally blind to the body as a social phenomenon. Its interiority is sealed from corporeal and worldly exteriority. Gerald L. Bruns is poignant when he speaks of “Descartes’ jealousy of the subject,” that is, “the subject’s desire to seal itself off or to keep its thinking pure or uncontaminated by the horizon of the other,”23 human or nonhuman. Once the mind becomes a separate substance independent of the body, egocentrism or even solipsism is inevitable. The body (as flesh) is intrinsically a social phenomenon. Everything corporeal, every flesh, is social through and through: where there is no body, there is no sociality and no reality. To be social is first and foremost to be intercorporeal. Only because of the body (as flesh) are we said to be visible and capable of relating ourselves first to other bodies and then to other minds. The body is our social placement in the world. Only in this sense is the world said to be made of the same stuff as the body. In defining the social, the phenomenologist Erwin W. Straus favors the ontological primacy of the body over the mind when he says that “the body of an organism is related to other bodies; it is a part of the physical universe. The mind, however, is related to
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one body only; it is not directly related to the world, or to other bodies, or to other minds.”24 The mind becomes a relatum only through the body living in a world populated with other bodies. It is necessary that we exist as body, as flesh, in order to be social and thus ethical. It stands to reason to conclude that there is not only the “primacy of perception” in everything we do and think but also no “disembodied reason” insofar as perception is a “nascent logos.” Indeed the body is never an object among other (inert) objects but is a sentient subject or the subject of perception that is capable of “authoring” the world before “answering” it. Perception or the function of the body as flesh, in turn, is informed and “dilated” by the “ecological milieu” of culture.25
iv. critique of disembodied western modernity Ecosophy is a phoenix rising from the ashes of modernity. More than to any other thinkers including Descartes, the ethos of modern humanity owes directly to Francis Bacon, who also masterminded the human control and possession of nature on his way to erect an epistemocratic panopticon. In every significant respect Bacon was the intellectual harbinger and architect of the modern age as the age of science, technology, and quantitative economy, leading to the legitimization and glorification of modern humanity as the insatiable and frenzied consumer of the earth. He is indeed the philosopher who designed and engineered the technomorphic and industrial ethos of modernity. Bacon upheld the convergence of theory and practical operations, of knowledge and utility, and of knowing and making. Experimentalism, the utility of knowledge, power over nature by way of knowledge, and philanthropia are all the inseparable qualities of Bacon’s thought that, when put together, become an all-out attempt to replace the old “cult of books” by the new (experimental) “cult of nature.” To initiate the technological élan there must be both the knowledge of nature (or, as Bacon calls it, the “inquisition of nature”) and power over nature. Experiment is not only the essence of the natural sciences but also the way to discover or unveil the “feminine” secrets of nature. By increasing knowledge through experiment, humanity is capable also of extending its dominion over nature. Bacon sees utility to be the end of human knowledge; he thinks that “human utility and power” will “subdue and overcome the necessities and miseries of humanity” and that the “dignity” of knowledge
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will be maintained by “works of utility and power.” He formulates principles of domination in which knowledge and power coincide with each other for the sake of utility. The framework of modern technology or technomorphic civilization was laid down by Bacon when he insisted on the meeting of human knowledge and power in one and found “in the womb of nature many secrets of excellent use.” As he himself intimates, moreover, the fruits of science do not grow on the dead trees of books. He scorns the idea of idly studying “words” rather than “matter,” because the former are only “images” or “shadows” of the latter. To fall in love with words, for Bacon, is to fall in love with only a picture. Speaking against the “degenerate learning” of scholastics, Bacon states that they had “sharp and strong wits” and “abundance of leisure” in the “cells of monasteries and colleges,” but they knew little history of nature or “no great quantity of matter,” their “cobwebs of learning” spinning “no substance or profit.”26 The idea of philanthropia is unmistakably the pillar of Bacon’s imperial discourse of nature. Viewed from the subversive perspective of ecosophy as a postmodern adventure, his short posthumous work The Masculine Birth of Time (Temporis Partus Masculus), written in 1603 with the subtitle The Great Restoration of the Power of Man over the Universe (Instauratio Magna Imperii Humani in Universum),27 is both fascinating and revealing. Bacon’s conception of philanthropia is an anthropocentrism unsaturated and homogenized, for it is predicated upon humanity’s absolute knowledge and mastery of nature justified on the grounds of a Biblical mandate. As the holy inquisition of nature leads to philanthropia, the Bible mandates that nature with “all her children” be found and enslaved to serve humanity and achieve the “fructifying and begetting good” for humankind. It is quintessentially antiecosophic because it calls for the death of nature. In the first place, philanthropia proceeds with the worship of God and results from putting into action Christian duty and charity. Bacon faults intellectuals who are indifferent to the “plight of mankind” and calls them “unholy and unclean,” which is to say they are unphilanthropic or misanthropic. He wages a holy polemic in the name of Biblical religion in “Jerusalem” against allegedly wrong-headed philosophers in “Athens” as unholy and empty “talkers.” Second, we should recall the controversial disputation of Lynn White Jr. who faults Christianity as the most anthropocentric religion the world has ever known and thus the root cause of the ecological degradation in the West.28 Bacon’s philosophy of nature for the sake of philanthropia personifies Christian thought, which is criticized by White in his epochal essay. In significant measure White engages
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in a radical critique of Bacon’s divine inquisition of nature. Christianity is the most anthropocentric because, while it sacralizes humanity at the apex of God’s creation, it desacralizes nature: spirituality is the privileged, God-given possession only of humanity, and nature becomes a mass of inert materiality that may be wantonly exploited and used or abused for the ennobling ends of humanity, or what Bacon calls philanthropia. To borrow the incisive and elegant expression of Loren Eiseley, Christianity “took God out of nature and elevated man above nature.”29 Corporeal feminism engenders jouissance (carnal enjoyment). Jouissance scales feminine distinction and measures feminine sagacity in the etymological sense of the term. Corporeal feminism is an exemplar of the postmodern “ethico-aesthetic paradigm” that runs counter to Descartes’s epistemocratic panopticon, as well as to Bacon’s anthropocentric and utilitarian “inquisition of nature” viewed as feminine. The écriture feminine of Luce Irigaray, I would contend, embodies a (postmodern) subversion of the Cartesian phallocracy of the cogito, which is logocentric/disembodied/dualistic, egocentric, and ocularcentric. It is also intrinsically ecosophic because woman and nature have the same “calendar of the flesh” (la chair), to use Irigaray’s expression.30 Jouissance, which is the Nirvana principle of corporeal feminism, is what makes the feminine flesh resonant and consonant with the cyclical rhythm of nature.31 Irigaray’s écriture may be called a feminine “diatactics,”32 in which the notion of difference and the sense of tactility are intertwined and complement each other. Feminine difference also celebrates the radical difference between the identity of modernity and the difference of postmodernity. Irigaray’s philosophy of sexual difference is indeed a “subversion of identity”; for it, sexuality is the capital site of difference. Vive la différence! Sexual difference is for her a substrate of radical alterity, but this feminine substrate is not just a fig leaf hiding difference.33 As a matter of fact, Irigaray presents feminine difference as a paradigmatic “foundation for a new ontology, a new ethics, and a new politics”—to use her own programmatic language.34 She intends to subvert “phallic monism” or—as Thomas Laqueur calls it—a “one-sex model” that claims that “man is the measure of all things, and woman does not exist as an ontologically distinct category.”35 Irigaray’s celebration of feminine difference means to unveil or unmask the “phallacy” of (masculine and logocentric) identity. The liberation of women from men’s exploitation and domination must come only by way of sexual difference. “Equality between men and women,” she stresses, “cannot be achieved without a theory of gender as sexed and a rewriting of the rights and obligations
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of each sex, qua different in social rights and obligations.”36 It is a matter of social justice, she insists, to give cultural values to female sexuality and genealogy for the sake of balancing out the power of one sex over the other. Difference is the negation only of identity and not of the relational. Irigaray argues for feminine difference as “a taste for intersubjectivity.” Without difference, sexual or otherwise, there would be no genuine intersubjectivity or relationship. Heidegger’s play on Differenz as Unterschied clarifies the idea of difference as relational because (Differenz as) Unterschied couples difference with the between (Unter or inter) that at once connects, preserves, and promotes both difference and the relational. For Irigaray, however, without difference the very notion of subjectivity itself becomes undermined and, without radical alterity, intersubjectivity comes to be suspect.37 Here she would agree with Emmanuel Levinas in asserting that each subjectivity is different because it is unique, not the other way around. The model without sexual difference, in which man and woman become alike or the same, is a singular model of subjectivity that has been historically masculine and hierarchical: man on top and woman at bottom. Against privileging a universal egalitarian model valid for all men and all women, Irigaray proposes the paradigmatic model of two autonomous and different subjectivities in order to ensure and promote intersubjectivity—that is, to develop a palatable taste for their cohabitation and dialogue. She writes, “We must move on to the model of the two, a two which is not replication of the same, nor one large and the other small, but made up of two which are truly different. The paradigm of the two lies in sexual difference. Why there? Because it is there that two subjects exist who should not be placed in a hierarchical relationship, and because these two subjects share the common goal of preserving the human species and developing its culture, while granting respect to their difference.”38 Jouissance, of which the morphology is an intersection between mind and body, self and other, and culture and nature, is a feminine moment of carnal comprehension.39 As jeux de mots, it is also spelled j’ouïs sens (“I hear meaning,” or “I hear the sensible”): it means to subvert and transgress the scopic regime of knowledge or an an epistemocratic panopticon.40 It auscultates and resonates the voice of feminine difference; it is bliss or even the eroticism of hearing and voicing but not of seeing or voyeurism, which is a distinctively masculine trait. Irigaray writes, “Investment in the look is not privileged in women as in men. More than the other senses, the eye objectifies and masters. It sets at a distance, maintains the distance. In our culture, the predominance of the look over smell, taste, touch, hearing, has brought
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about an impoverishment of bodily relations. . . . The moment the look dominates, the body loses its materiality.”41 There is indeed a stark contrast or even opposition between the voyeurism of the “mind’s seeing” (eye or I) and the communal intimacy and contact of the “body’s touch.” Many feminists contend that the aristocracy of vision is a peculiarly phallocentric, patriarchal, and matrophobic institution and the objectifying logic of voyeurism is uniquely a male logic. The “participatory” sense of touch valorizes the feminine, whereas “spectatorial” vision glorifies the masculine. To feminize body politics, therefore, is to accent the sense of touch and to decenter or depanopticize the specter of vision in our thinking, which is to say to issue an injunction to arrest the Cartesian division of mind and body as two separate substances. As the sense of touch has traditionally been a pariah sense, to think through jouissance is indeed to subvert and scandalize philosophizing itself. In the end, jouissance as feminine distinction cannot be taken lightly. In its pursuit of “clear and distinct ideas,” which—it should not escape our attention—is in itself thoroughly a visual expression, the Cartesian cogito erects a epistemocratic panopticon. It interlocks egocentrism and ocularcentrism since there is an identity between the “eye” and the “I.” It is really video ergo sum or “the mind’s I is the mind’s eye.” Heidegger contends that the “I” (or the “eye”) of the cogito as “sub/stance” becomes the center of thought from which the “I-viewpoint” and the subjectivism of modern thought originate: “the subjectivity of the subject is determined by the ‘I-ness’ [Ichheit] of the ‘I think.’”42 For him, the “I-viewpoint” of the Cartesian cogito highlights the modern age as the “age of the world picture” (Weltbild). In this regard, the British utilitarian Jeremy Bentham’s grand and ingenious design of panvisualism serves as a parable of feminist critique of modern philosophy dominated by epistemocracy in a double sense: woman as a victim of visual incarceration and humanity’s panoptic isolation from the earth. It was a meticulous, architectural plan of observation and surveillance in the last quarter of the eighteenth century—during the Enlightenment—for the panopticon or Inspection House.43 As a Cartesian architectural plot, the panopticon is literally a prison house of visualism and a panvisualist technique. Its prisoners in perpetual solitude in the “islands” of cells protractedly partitioned by impregnable walls may be likened to those victims who become incarcerated under the panoptic surveillance of the cogito. The panopticon is, as the term itself implies, the all-encompassing or encircling prison house of visualism whose surveillance mechanism or “disciplinary principle” puts to use the Cartesian oracle of clarity and certitude: it is the interlocking of the
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life in perpetual solitude of the “hypnotized” prisoner and the mechanism of total control. Inspection is control.44 In the very words of Bentham himself, “solitude thus applied, especially if accompanied with darkness and low diet, is torture in effect, without being obnoxious to the name.”45 The Cartesian cogito, too, makes philosophy a peculiarly panoptic, phallocratic institution. Indeed, Cartesianism is panopticism par excellence, in which absolute knowledge or knowledge with absolute clarity and certainty is a private possession of and by sight. The keyword of the panopticon is inspection—the double idea of perpetual vision and vigilance in which the prisoner is never out of the inspector’s sight. The idea of inspection is regarded as control by the omnipotent and omnipresent vigilance of “seeing without being seen,” in which seeing and being seen are undialectically or, better, undiatactically identified. To put it slightly differently, the inspector who controls has “the unbounded faculty [and physical facility] of seeing without being seen” and the prisoner is “awed to silence by an invisible eye.” In the final analysis, the “opticized” or “objectivized” prisoner in the panopticon is a passive and powerless onlooker who is the de-subjectivized object of observation and surveillance. Irigaray speaks of “aporia of a tactility” that cannot caress itself but needs the other to touch itself.46 Of course there is no skinless touch. The skin is the sentient sentinel of human contact. As the skin, particularly in color, is a social inscription, contact is indeed a “skin trade.” In Thinking the Difference Irigaray speaks of taking on the male identity as “slip[ping] into men’s skin.”47 The question of why we cannot tickle ourselves is intriguing and tells us a great deal about the morphology of the skin as the site of social contact. The answer for why we cannot tickle ourselves may be that tickling is a contact sport. Tickling requires the “enacted recognition of the other,”48 and we cannot engender the jouissance of being tickled in the absence of the other; we can engender it only in the presence of and contact with the other. Touch(ing), which is a uniquely feminine sense, is the carnal, Tantric moment of enjoyment and intimacy involving a union of flesh folds.49 It engenders contact (“touching together”) that, being consociational and requiring the “consent” of the body as flesh, is necessarily a sharing of spatial continuity and the durée of lived time. The sense of touch that engenders contact is meant to refute the distancing of narcissistic vision. Unlike vision, contact through a handshake, for example, requires the “diatactical” intertwinement of touching on the one hand and being touched on the other. “Touch,” Walter J. Ong declares, “requires contact, which the eyeball cannot tolerate.”50 The metaphor of “eye contact” (e.g., Marshall McLuhan’s
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electronic medium, particularly television as tactile) exalts the sense of touch, not the sense of sight; it means to scale and measure sight in terms of the intimacy and tenderness of touch. The eye or vision, nevertheless, has only an appearance of contact, not contact itself. In tracing feminine genealogy or the history of feminine difference, Irigaray embraces the virtue of Aphrodite, who symbolizes the embodiment of philotes or “tenderness,” which combines carnal Eros and spiritual agape.51 Giving birth and mothering are morphologically integral to the feminine “calendar of the flesh” and exemplify feminine tenderness. In Jesus as Mother,52 Caroline Walker Bynum also relates to us the “affective spirituality” of a feminine theology in the Middle Ages that has rarely been described until now. Affective spirituality modeled in the maternal image of Jesus is loving, tender, and nurturing. As opposed to the masculine theology, for example, of St. Augustine and Origen, enfleshment or carnality in feminine theology is an engendering principle, while milk and blood are viewed interchangeably as nurturing (feminine) or as a Eucharist enactment. The idea of the soul (anima), too, is feminine. Above all, there is the homey image of the divine, or God, as a woman nursing the soul at her breast. The hand is an agent of touch, of contact. It is not just an extension of the body but the body incorporated. It is the lived body; it is an organized “corporation”; that is, it is pansensory. It activates the works of the other senses such as hearing, seeing, saying, and singing. Indeed it incarnates the sociability of the senses: as Merleau-Ponty would explain, it is “synergic.” The sense of touch is, in short, the regal sense. It is this sociability of the hand and the regal sense of touch that Toni Morrison urges on to celebrate the African American flesh in her novel Beloved: “And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face ‘cause they don’t love that either. You got to love it, you!”53 Auguste Rodin’s sculptural masterpiece, The Thinker, which is the artistic rendition of two hands and the intimate sense of touch, enshrines the enfleshment of thinking and the body as a temple of organized corporation. By depicting two right (rite) hands tenderly coming together, his Cathedral, too, inspirits the piety and certifies the sacrament of human coexistence. The moving story of piety (pietas) is original with and told in the Greek and Roman religions.54 As it unfolds, there is a temple standing in Rome that was built to honor the goddess Pietas. On its site a mother had once been
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imprisoned and kept alive by the milk of her own daughter’s breast. The story tells the meaning of the natural, reciprocal circle of giving and receiving, which is bodily and mental and spiritual at the same time. It signifies the absolute reciprocity between one who gives nourishment and the other who returns it in uninterrupted thankfulness. In an eloquent, deep, and unsurpassable passage from his What Is Called Thinking? Heidegger defines thinking as chirosophia (or the feminine “wisdom of the hand”) or “manual concept,” which goes against the inherited tradition of denigrating and castigating the allegedly least intellectual of all the senses (touch) and regarding the philosopher as an “eye-man” who supposedly celebrates the aristocracy of vision and insight. The hand, according to Heidegger, is a peculiarly human institution. There is an abyss of difference between the hand and grasping organs such as paws, claws, and fangs. The hand signifies the humanity of humans, that is, the human difference in its sensuousness, its sociability, its speaking, its thinking. “Every motion of the hand in every one of its works,” Heidegger writes, “carries itself through the element of thinking, every bearing of the hand bears itself in that element. All the work of the hand is rooted in thinking.”55 In addition to chirosophia, there is “chiromancy” that was coined by the sixteenth-century Swiss author Paracelsus (Theophrastus Paracelsus von Hohenheim) as the “divination” or, better, the “enchantment” (manteia) of the “hand” (chiro), intended to evoke the sense of a microcosm (human) enfleshing the macrocosm (the cosmos or earth). Like the eco-art of geomancy— fêng shui or “wind-water,” as it is called in East Asia—chiromancy is the intimate art of interpreting nature by anthropomorphizing it in terms of the human body and its parts: Paracelsus compared the growth of a plant with that of a human being, in that “it has the bark as its skin, the root as its head and hair; it has its body and senses; sensibility in the stem: that it dies, if you hurt it; it is adorned by flowers and fruits as man by the ability of hearing, seeing and speaking.” Conversely, he “naturalizes” the human body itself: it is “a wood, and life a fire which consumes it.”56
v. cure for western modernity Ecosophy, corporeal feminism, and postmodern ethics together culminate in a heteronomic ethic of caring as responsibility. Caring, which is always tender and involves corporeal and spiritual intimacy, is the ethical site of feminine
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distinction. It is also a feminine response to and resolution for egocentrism (Cartesian or otherwise) and liberalism (possessive or otherwise). Since care is a participial act, the term caring is preferred. What “being” is to “becoming,” “care” is to “caring.” Unfortunately however, “being,” like “becoming” is a participial gerund whereas “care” is not. “Caring” refers to that social or, more specially, consociational process that is active, ongoing, and unfinished. It is, therefore, the consociational prototype of responsibility as heteronomic. In the academic discourse of the American feminist movement, Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice birthed the ethic of caring as the privileged marker of feminine distinction and thus held forth a radical departure from traditional ethics. With the intent of “making connection in the face of difference,” including the difference between the feminine and the masculine, she contends that Lawrence Kohlberg’s influential psychology of human moral development, which has been well received and endorsed by philosophers such as John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas, is prejudiced and flawed in method and substance and as such fell far short of the universal moral point of view he purports to advance and promote. Gilligan sums up women’s moral orientation, which is a radical departure from its male counterpart as formulated by Kohlberg: “The moral problem arises from conflicting responsibilities rather than from competing rights and requires for its resolution a mode of thinking that is contextual and narrative rather than formal and abstract. This conception of morality as concerned with the activity of care centers moral development around the understanding of responsibility and relationships, just as the conception of morality as fairness ties moral development to the understanding of rights and rule.”57 In opposition to Kohlberg’s focus on abstract rights and formal rules for the development of moral conduct, Gilligan centers her ethical concern on concrete relationships and responsibility. While rights are self-centered, caring is heteronomic—a relational ethic for the sake of the Other, which is self-transcending but not self-effacing; that is, it is receptive to the needs of the Other. Neither Heidegger in Being and Time58 nor Michel Foucault in his suggestive title The Care of the Self59 is fully aware of caring as self-transcendence— that is, as an ethical notion. For Foucault, on the one hand, care is a matter of self-indulgence although it intensifies social relations and binds a system of reciprocal obligations. On the other hand, Heidegger in his seminal work Being and Time60 defines human existence itself (Dasein) as care (Sorge, cura), which is a feminine category. Invoking the old Latin fable of Hyginus, he intimates that human existence is inspirited with care, which shapes homo with
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its body (corpus) as the gift of humus (earth). However, his conception of care is marred by being self-centered (eigentlich), and thus care authenticates only existential autonomy but not responsibility. Moreover, Mitsein (beingwith-others, other humans), which is a mode of Being-in-the-world (in-derWelt-sein), is concerned exclusively with interhuman relationships and fails to negotiate with human and nonhuman relationships. By Heidegger’s own admission, the turning point (Kehr) of his thought aims to overturn and cure this exclusively humanist concern. It is Hans Jonas who in The Imperative of Responsibility61 attends to the heteronomic ethic of responsibility, for which he considers the primordial form or prototype to be caring. He holds that parental responsibility for children, which is nonconsenting and nonreciprocal, is the archetype of all responsible action. It is implanted especially in the natural propensity of maternal humanity. Maternal responsibility is deemed to be selfless care. We must turn for help to Emmanuel Levinas to comprehend the heteronomic structure of responsibility. For him, ethics is the “first philosophy” (philosophie première), and he is “radically opposed to Heidegger who subordinates the relation with the Other to ontology.”62 Moreover, the ontological framework of existential “authenticity” (Eigentlichkeit) cannot prescribe an ethical concern, since ethics worthy of its name is constructed on the basis not of self-centered (eigentlich) absorption but of heteronomic concern. The ethic of caring commands, most basically, the primacy of the Other (alterity) over the self. It is heteronomic rather than egocentric. In other words, the primacy of the Other, of alterity, is the ethical site of responsibility if not the site of the ethical itself, which is nontransferable because each person who is responsible is unique and thus different (i.e., singular). Only by way of selftranscendence is an ethic possible in which the Other is not only not an alter ego but also primary to the self. The discovery of heteronomy, of a “Thou” as alterity, comes from the Copernican revolution of social and ethical philosophy first introduced by Ludwig Feuerbach in the mid-nineteenth century. It is called “Copernican” simply because what egocentrism is to geocentrism, heteronomy is to heliocentrism. Levinas continues and preserves Feuerbach’s Copernican revolution of heteronomy. The ethical principle of alterity might very well be upheld by spelling it “altarity,” to use Mark C. Taylor’s newly coined word after a fashion of Jacques Derrida.63 What différence is to différance in Derrida, alterity is to altarity in Taylor. The term “altar” is derived from the Latin altare, which signifies “a high place.” By conforming the primacy of the Other as
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a singular subjectivity, the idea of altarity elevates the Other to the altar of interhuman relationships. Now the heteronomic ethic of caring as responsibility confronts and runs counter to the sanctified Anglo-American institution of “rights talk” or the talk of “the I’s have it,” which places the self at the dead center of the moral and political universe and lends a deaf ear to the voice of responsibility. Mary Ann Glendon sides with Gilligan’s ethic of caring and responsibility and speaks most critically of the scotoma of the Anglo-American “rights talk.”64 Following Hobbes, Locke, Austin, and Blackstone, Ronald Dworkin has now become the chief spokesperson for this “rights” tradition after writing Taking Rights Seriously in which he declared, “If someone has a right to something, then it is wrong for the government to deny it to him even though it would be in the general interest to do so.”65 Even C. B. Macpherson, who is most reputed for his single-minded critique of possessive individualism, appears to be swept into the language of Anglo-American “rights talk” when he suggests controvertibly if not incomprehensibly that we get further by treating “human rights” (i.e., rights to a quality of life) as “individual property rights” to preserve and reclaim, for example, the ecological balance of nature.66 “The American rights dialect,” Glendon retorts, “is distinguished not only by what we say and how we say it, but also by what we leave unsaid.”67 We are indeed possessed by “rights talk.” As every “want” is being translated carelessly into a “right” whose language is extended now to trees and animals, we tend to trivialize the magnitude of the dire plight of the weakened and fragile earth, whose well-being is indispensable for the sustainability of all earthbound creatures including humans. For the preservation of the earth and humanity, we should become “caretakers” (more properly “caregivers”), not “rights talkers.” The ideology of liberalism as possessive individualism (i.e., “rights talk”) highlights the antisocial principle of relationships between humans, which has its modern origin in Hobbes and Locke. In Lockeanism, however, there is a most conscious integration of individualism and possessiveness (i.e., private property rights, the protection of which is the sole function of government); Locke is the possessive individualist par excellence since for him the concept of the human as laborer or exploiter of nature is necessary for the acquisition of private property as an absolute right. The ideology of Locke’s liberalism with its philosophical foundation laid out by Hobbes promotes the ethos of technological civilization, which aims to subjugate nature for the exclusive benefit of humans. The utilitarianism of labor and industry
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in exploiting and dominating nature or the land, which when uncultivated by human labor is called by Locke “waste,” builds the society of acquisitive individuals (or homo oeconomicus). For Locke, things of nature are useless unless they acquire values on account of labor and industry. In the end, Lockean possessive individualism incorporates the antisocial principles between humans on the one hand and between the human and nature on the other. The possessive individualist in the Lockean tradition, who is also the functionary of technology, is quintessentially self-centered in his or her dealings with other humans and other things. There is indeed a paradox and incongruity when “rights talk” is anthropomorphically extended, albeit well-intended in all quarters of ecosophy, to stones, trees and animals—that is, “rights” of stones and trees and “animal rights.” For example, in a recent work, The Natural Contract, Michel Serres expresses an innovative and admirable sentiment in proposing a holistic and global approach to ecosophy with the intent of making peace with the ruinous world of nature, in the same way that Rousseau intended with the social or interhuman world by way of social contract. It was also Rousseau who warned that “you are lost, if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and that the earth belongs to no one.”68 So far, so good. Nonetheless, there is a conceptual flaw, something unnatural and incongruous about Serres’s language of “contract,” Rousseau notwithstanding, which is invented— ingeniously I might add—when it contradicts historical and anthropological facts in order to overcome, as Hobbes alleged, the wretched and unbearable condition of inhumanity to humanity in the “state of nature,” but not to overcome inhumanity to the nonhuman world (i.e., nature). The ecofeminist Carolyn Merchant in her recent challenging work Earthcare69 attempts to construct a “postpatriarchal” and “ecotopian” theory for the third millennium that would recover the natural world from spoilage and declension. It is “a partnership ethic of earthcare” that adopts a two-pronged approach in “a homocentric social-interest ethic of partnership.” This ethic governs interhuman relationships and also promotes “an ecocentric ethic of partnership” in dealing with human and nonhuman relationships. Merchant alleges that in some ecosophic quarters there is the confusion of lumping together “egocentric” and “homocentric” ethics both as anthropocentrism. While accepting a “homocentric ethic,” she rejects the “egocentric ethic” associated with “capitalist exploitation of people and nature.” Here she refutes private property rights (i.e., “rights talk”) and by implication replaces Serres’s language of “contract” with the language of “partnership.” However, there is
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a hitch in Merchant’s formulation of a partnership ethic in relating humans with nonhuman nature, simply because the idea of partnership is plausible only between two “equals” or, to use her own expression, “two autonomous actors.” “Partnership” is no better than Serres’s “contract.” Both terms are categorial mistakes. Moreover, Merchant fails to make the distinction, if any, between homocentrism and anthropocentrism. In the literature of ecosophy, the two terms are one and the same. It is also not enough to fault alone the egocentric ethics associated with capitalism for the exploitation and domination of nature. Rather it is, I would contend, economism (the theory of homo oeconomicus) or what Guattari calls “productivism”—both capitalistic and socialistic—that must be faulted and abandoned. The difference between capitalism and socialism lies in governing interhuman relationships but not in dealing with human and nonhuman relationships.70 To be ecocentric, to be in favor of the “earth first,” we must reject both egocentrism and homocentrism (anthropocentrism).71 In the final analysis, we are in need of a heteronomic ethic of caring as responsibility to sustain the earth that includes both human and nonhuman things. Indeed, this may truly be called an ethic of earthcare in which all humans are caretakers and caregivers.
vi. epilogue: what to be done The ecological crisis points to human estrangement and uprootedness from the earth as household (oikos)—a dwelling place whose deed was taken away from us by nature’s mutiny. We are becoming homeless because of our selfcentered pursuit of arrogance, exploitation, and carelessness. It awakens us to the unavoidable recognition that the earth defines and dictates the terms and limits of history. To sum up, the aim of this essay is to rehabilitate and reinhabit this earth—the only earth—and to restore our deed to it. It is principally threefold. In the first place, it conceptualizes ecological ethics as if the earth really matters. It proposes the ethics of the “earth first,” which rejects the arrogance of a man-centered worldview as found particularly in Descartes and Bacon, the two masterminds of modernity and modernization for whom the “sovereign gaze” of a philosopher as “kosmotheoros” rules the entire globe.72 No wonder, therefore, that feminine jouissance is a threat to, and a scandal of, philosophizing. Second, this essay defines the self always in relation to its social and natural environment, that is, the self immersed in and surrounded by the atmosphere
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of sociality. Sociality is as elemental as the air we breathe. What is really central to human existence, as the etymology itself affirms, is the eccentricity (ex/centricity) of the self toward the world of other humans and other beings and things. The human as eccentric is a being who is exposed and reaches out by means of the body toward the exterior world. Thus the true motto of human existence must be as follows: do not go inside, go outside. The embodied self is never sealed off from the world: it is rather a synaesthetic or diatactical process of turning inside out and outside in. As the “first law” of ecology is the synchronistic dictum that everything is connected to everything else in the universe, this chapter attempts to construct and develop the “ecological self.” Listen carefully to the sound voice of Zhang Zai, the eleventhcentury Neo-Confucian patron saint of the “ecological self” and “ecopiety” (an enshrined “earthword” of my own): “Heaven is my father, and earth is my mother, and even such a small create as I find[s] an intimate place in their midst. Therefore that which fills the universe I regard as my body and that which directs the universe I consider as my nature. All people are my brothers and sisters, and all things are my companions.”73 To be interhuman and interspecific requires bodies-in-relation; it is first and foremost intercorporeal. It is in corporeal feminism justified by the phenomenology of embodiment or enfleshment that we discover the body as the epicenter of all relationships. In other words, the gynecological self is an exemplar of the ecological self whose eccentricity, it must be emphasized, confirms the ineliminable “promiscuity” between us and the world, between mind and body, and between nature and culture.74 In the third place, jouissance as feminine sagacity is an “ethico-aesthetic” revolt against and subversion of masculine logocentrism, which is disembodied, egocentric, and ocularcentric. Irigaray’s “diatactics,” which interlaces the (postmodern) idea of difference and tactility as the tangible sense of intimacy and proximity, is set forth in opposition to the tangible sense of intimacy and proximity and in opposition to the intangible and distancing sense of vision. The hegemony of vision as the sense of and reason for phenomena such as the panopticism or hypervisualism of the Cartesian cogito falters and is faulted because it denies the possibility of synaesthesia or “consensus”: the world viewed rationally is totally blind to the dense texture of the world as the copresence of bodies in the flesh, not just the copresence of humans (homopiety) but that of nonhumans (geopiety) as well. The hegemony of vision inhibits and anaesthetizes the sense of touch (and the other senses) that, as Walter J. Ong judiciously asserts, “gives us an intimate sense of
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ourselves and of otherness simultaneously.”75 Thus it stands to reason to confirm that feminine distinction is the mirror and jewel of ecosophy in the Sinic sense of both terms, holding together the ideas of unmasking actuality and discovering piety with tenderness. Most important, the ethos of feminine distinction engenders a heteronomic ethic of caring as primordial responsibility that is an ethic of the “earth first,” of “earthcare”: the healing of and cure for the ailing and fragile earth is (an ethic of) caring that demotes and refutes both egocentrism and homocentrism (anthropocentrism). Nature’s mutiny against humankind finds its parallel in a heteronomic ethic of caring against “rights talk.” For caring is not a right but a responsibility. It may be claimed for good reason that heteronomy alone is the site for caring as responsibility if not as the ethical itself. Earthcare is one of the principal effects of the feminization of the ethical itself. As the touchstone of ecological ethics it restores the connaturality between humanity and nature, involving a rediscovery of the primeval and enfleshed earthwords that would once again enable humans and animals to talk to one another, to paraphrase Toni Morrison slightly.76 In conclusion, we have overlooked for too long the “ethico-aesthetic paradigm” as a postmodern configuration that incorporates ecosophy and corporeal feminism. As we are living in a time of crisis, or as the Chinese would say “interesting times,” the ecological crisis offers us an opportunity to plant a new tree of earthcare. The power of the aesthetic that cultivates the flesh’s sense and sensibility lies in its potential to defy and break loose the conformist grip of given or established reality.77 The body as our firm and secure anchor in the world summons the hope of a future redemption that can muster a renewal of our enfleshed solidarity with the earth. The aim of this redemptive beginning is twofold: first, to destroy a real world and then to construct a possible world. The body as flesh inscribed in feminine jouissance can empower us with and legislate for us an “ethico-aesthetic paradigm,” the fact of which is yet to be acknowledged. In the land where the eutrophication of “rights talk” has suffocated, if not been annihilated, all the other species of talk, the edifying talk of “taking responsibility seriously,” must interrupt and will redeem the commonplace and one-sided chatter of “taking rights seriously.” In the end, the ethico-aesthetic injunction to begin again, to reinhabit the entropic earth for the next millennium and beyond, is “small is beautiful”—to borrow the elegant and frugal expression of E. F. Schumacher. If we continue to speak the same language together without a radical, continental shift to “earthcare,” as a household word, we are surely doomed and heading toward the end of the earth as well as humanity.
N O T E S
introduction 1. Yijing follows the Pinyin transliteration, whereas the Wade-Giles system spells it I Ching. My earlier essays (chapters 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 11) used Wade-Giles and later ones (chapters 9, 12, and 13) Pinyin (e.g., jen and ren). 2. Giambattista Vico, The New Science, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 78 (par. 237).
chapter 1 1. For the general question of the Other as prima philosophia, see Michael Theunissen, The Other, trans. Christopher Macann (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984). Unfortunately, however, Levinas is missing from this work. For the classical examination of the Other from a standpoint of cultural anthropology, see Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). Edward W. Said’s influential and controversial work Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978) is preoccupied with the non-Western Other. Craig Owens contends that Western thought including postmodernism has been “scandalously in-different” to the issue of the other sex. See “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism,” in The Anti-Aesthetic, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), 57–82. Hwa Yol Jung examines the body as the question of the mind’s other. See “Phenomenology and Body Politics,” Body and Society 2 (1996): 1–22. Paul Shepard’s The Others (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1996) discusses the importance of the nonhuman other in the growth of humanity. 2. Edward O. Wilson comments, “Postmodernism is the ultimate polar antithesis of the Enlightenment.” See Consilience (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 40. His desire for the “unity of knowledge” is of Kantian inspiration. John R. Searle recently advances the idea of doing “philosophy in the real world” by building a triangular tower of mind, language, and society. He considers it “a modest contribution to the Enlightenment vision.” See Mind, Language, and Society (New York: Basic Books, 1998). By so doing, he also attempts to answer the postmodern challenges to the Enlightenment projects. It is noteworthy that he typifies the Enlightenment visions by leaving out the vital issues of the body, woman, nature, and the non-West.
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3. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H. M. Parshley (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952). 4. Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, trans. John T. Goldthwait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960). 5. Michael Jackson, At Home in the World (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 14. 6. Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
chapter 2 In memory of my wife, Petee. This essay was prepared for delivery in the Fourth Plenary Session, “Rethinking History of Philosophy and Comparative Philosophy: Traditions, Critique and Dialogue,” at the twenty-second World Congress of Philosophy in Seoul, South Korea, July 30–August 5, 2008. The author is grateful for Research in Phenomenology and its editor, John Sallis, for giving me permission to reprint with some modification this article, which was published in volume 39 (2009): 416–37. The three epigraphs and Sections I and II are added to the originally published essay in Research in Phenomenology. 1. Compare Cornel West, “The New Cultural Politics of Difference,” in Out There, ed. Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Cornell West (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1990), 19–36; Nishida Kitaro, Fundamental Problems of Philosophy, trans. David A. Dilworth (Tokyo: Sophia University, 1970), 254; and Paul Ricoeur, History and Truth, trans. Charles A. Kelbley (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1965), 271–84. 2. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), xv. 3. See Hwa Yol Jung, “Enlightenment and the Question of the Other: A Postmodern Audition,” Human Studies, 25 (2002): 297–306. (Reproduced in this book as chapter 1.) 4. Jonathan Culler, “Comparative Literature, at Last!” in Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, ed. Charles Bernheimer (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 117–21. 5. See Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004) and “Literature as a World,” New Left Review 31 (2005): 71–90. 6. See Hwa Yol Jung, “Phenomenology, the Question of Rationality and the Basic Grammar of Intercultural Texts,” Analecta Husserliana, vol. 46 (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer, 1995), 169–240. 7. John M. Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 283. 8. Legislators and Interpreters (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), 110. 9. David Hume, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. T. H. Green and T. H. Grose, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, 1875), 1:252. 10. Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, trans. John T. Goldthwait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), 110–11.
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11. See Edward de Bono, New Think (New York: Basic Books, 1968). 12. Toward a Marxist Humanism, trans. Jane Zielonko Peel (New York: Grove Press, 1968), 9–37. 13. See Calvin O. Schrag, Philosophical Papers: Betwixt and Between (Albany: State University Press of New York, 1994) and Convergence amidst Difference (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004). Compare also Hwa Yol Jung, “The Tao of Transversality as a Global Approach to Truth: A Metacommentary on Calvin O. Schrag,” Man and World 28 (1995): 11–31; “Transversality and Geophilosophy in the Age of Globalization,” in Calvin O. Schrag and the Task of Philosophy after Postmodernity, ed. Martin Beck Matuštík and William L. McBride (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2002), 74–90; “Transversality and Comparative Political Theory: A Tribute to Fred Dallmayr’s Work,” in Letting Be: Fred Dallmayr’s Cosmopolitical Vision, ed. Stephen F. Schneck (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), 230–50; and “Transversality and Comparative Culture,” Ex/ Change: Newsletter of Centre for Cross-Cultural Studies 16 (2006): 11–17. 14. Schrag, Convergence amidst Difference, 76. 15. “The Effacement of Difference: Colonialism and the Origins of Nationalism in Diderot and Herder,” in After Colonialism, ed. Gyan Prakash (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 414. 16. J. G. Herder on Social and Political Culture, trans. and ed. F. M. Barnard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 199 (emphasis added). 17. In phenomenology, meaning is derived from intentionality, which is the meeting of consciousness (ego-cogito) and its object (cogitatum). Thus meaning is in the middle between consciousness and its object. The American pragmatic semiotician Charles Morris extensively discussed “Maitreyism” in Paths of Life (New York: George Braziller, 1956), 151–79. See particularly the works of Lou Marinoff, The Middle Way (New York: Sterling, 2007), and Mary Douglas, Thinking in Circles (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). It is interesting to note that David Farrell Krell sketches das Geviert envisioned by Heidegger in the diagram of a rectangle that connects sky, earth, gods, and mortals with two diagonal lines having “Being” at its epicenter: the cross (X or chi) of Being is not a crossing out (Durchstreichung) but a crossing through (Durchkreuzen). See “Analysis,” in Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 4: Nihilism, trans. Frank A. Capuzzi (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), 289. Recently I stumbled on the very important and interesting “garden theory” or Gartenkunst in Germany in the mid-eighteenth century and the mid-nineteenth century. Instead of detailing it, I wish to note here only its importance for the concept of transversality. The core concept of garden theory is “Mittelweg” (middle way). The Mittelweg or Mitte was intended to be the way of resolving binary oppositions such as art and nature, freedom and determinism, rationality and sensibility, and the city and the country. It includes the “‘between’ condition as a form of unification that incorporates elements of both [extremes whatever they may be]” (see Michael G. Lee, The German “Mittelweg”: Garden Theory and Philosophy in the Time of Kant [New York: Routledge, 2006], 61). There is an important difference between garden theory’s Mittelweg and transversality. That is to say, the former focuses on the idea of “mediation,” whereas the latter is intended to create a new paradigm. 18. See “Did Philosophers Have to Become Fixated on Truth?” trans. Janet Lloyd, Critical Inquiry 28 (2002): 803–24 and “China as Philosophical Tool,” Diogenes 50 (November 2003): 15–21.
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19. See “Michel Foucault and Zen: A Stay in a Zen Temple (1978),” trans. Richard Townsend, in Religion and Culture, ed. Jeremy R. Carrette (New York: Routledge, 1999), 110–14. Before he became interested in Japanese aesthetic culture and the Iranian revolution, Foucault wrote with an inerasable sense of a great divide between the East and the West: “In the universality of the Western ratio, there is this divide that is the East; the East thought of as the origin, dreamt of as the dizzy point that is the place of birth, of nostalgia and promises of return, the East which offers itself to the colonizing reason of the West but is indefinitely inaccessible, for it remains always as a boundary, the night of beginning in which the West was formed but where it drew a dividing line, the East is for the West everything which the West is not, yet it is here that it has to seek whatever might be its originating truth. It is necessary to do a history of this great divide.” Also see Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 18. The physicist Werner Heisenberg, who is also acquainted with Daoism, noted that “[i]t is probably true quite generally that in the history of human thinking the most fruitful developments frequently take place at those points where two different lines of thought meet” (quoted in Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics, 25th anniversary ed. [Boston: Shambhala, 2000], 4). Capra was apparently inspired by Heisenberg to “network” or interface modern physics and Eastern mysticism. Capra also encouraged others to discover “networkings.” 20. Alisdair MacIntyre is impeccable when he observed that “a genuine dialogue [between East and West] is for the most part lacking. It is we in the West who are impoverished by our failure to sustain our part in this dialogue” (quoted in Anindita Niyogi Balslev, Cultural Otherness: Correspondence with Richard Rorty, 2nd ed. [Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991], 80). Although the late Richard Rorty felt uncomfortable with “a tendency in contemporary political discussion to treat ‘the West’ as a name for the source of every imaginable oppression” (quoted in Anindita Niyogi Balslev, Cultural Otherness, 101), he agreed with MacIntyre that “Eastern writers and thinkers have done much more work than Western ones to find out what goes on the other side of the world” and that “it is we in the West who are impoverished by our failure to sustain our part in this dialogue” (quoted in Anindita Niyogi Balslev, Cultural Otherness, 89). In his recent book Europe, or the Infinite Task: A Study of a Philosophical Concept (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), Rodolphe Gasché provides a detailed discussion of the idea of Europe or Europa in Husserl, Heidegger, Patočka, and Derrida. However, he overlooks Merleau-Ponty completely, while mentioning Levinas several times in discussing Derrida. The importance of Levinas, I think, is his ethical philosophy of dialogue and responsibility based on the primacy of the other. Dialogism, Levinasian, or Bakhtinian, celebrates the primacy of alterity that radically transforms our way of philosophizing ontology, ethics, culture, politics, and economics. Nonetheless, Gasché entertains the idea of multiple universalities. A multiplicity of singular universalities, European or non-European, may be called “multiversity” or what Merleau-Ponty calls “lateral universals.” What comes after multiversity is the question Gasché does not raise. On the other hand, transversality goes beyond the idea of universality, both singular and multiple, in the direction of hybridity or creoleness in the globalization of the multicultural world. To use the formula of the incomparable Goethe, what the self is to the other, Europe is to non-Europe. Europe is implicated in non-Europe and vice versa. The transversal way of thinking based on
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Heidegger’s (Differenz as) Unterschied, which fuses “difference” and the “relational” at once, is a radical way of conceptualizing and transforming the very nature of philosophizing itself. 21. Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. E. S. Haldane, vol. 1 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trüber, 1892), 121. In reading Amartya Sen’s recent work, I find an interesting and striking parallel between Hegel’s comments on Chinese philosophy and James Mill’s views of India, both of which have influenced the generations of specialists on the subjects: both Hegel and Mill pontificated their views without ever visiting the countries of their subjects and without reading and understanding their languages (Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny [New York: W. W. Norton, 2006], 86–87). Bertrand Russell was the first Western philosopher in the twentieth century, I think, who was self-conscious of writing a book on “history of Western philosophy.” See History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945). He also stressed the fact that philosophy cannot be separated from its social and political context. Robert Bernasconi puts Hegel on trial at the court of the Ashanti in Ghana (see “Hegel at the Court of the Ashanti,” in Hegel After Derrida, ed. Stuart Barnett [New York: Routledge, 1998], 41–63). To be post-Hegelian is also to be postcolonial as well as postmodern (see Stuart Barnett, “Introduction: Hegel Before Derrida,” in Hegel After Derrida, 1–37). In her recent book Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), Susan Buck-Morss critically discusses Hegel’s Eurocentric cultural racism, while she holds onto his idea of universality or “universal history,” which is meant, she argues, to be non-Eurocentric. However, her future projection of “universal history,” whether it be Eurocentric or non-Eurocentric, does not justify the globalizing world of multiculturalism or what Glissant calls “diversality.” His anti-Hegelian and transversal argument rejects the overarching linear vision of a single history. To reiterate Glissant: thinking about “One” is not thinking about “All.” 22. Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 4. 23. Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 353. See also Pascale Casanova, “Literature as a World,” New Left Review 31 (Jan.–Feb. 2005): 71–90. 24. M. Merleau-Ponty, “Everywhere and Nowhere,” in Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 133–40. Cited as Signs. 25. Natalie Melas points out that “the unquestioned universality of ‘us’ (whites) versus the irreparable particularism of ‘them’ (those ‘marked’ by color or ethnicity or more ambiguously, gender) is an extraordinarily stubborn structure of thought and feeling” (“Re-Imagining the Universal,” in Unpacking Europe, ed. Salah Hassan and Iftikhar Dadi [Rotterdam, Netherlands: NAi Publishers and Museum Boijamans van Beuningen, 2001], 134–51). For her detailed argument, see her work All the Difference in the World: Postcoloniality and the Ends of Comparison (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007). 26. John Wild envisions four different kinds of phenomena in the lifeworld (Lebenswelt), “each of which requires a distinct model of scientific investigation: man himself, the realm of nature, other men and the realm of human culture, and, finally, the transcendent” (“Interrogations of John Wild” conducted by Henry B. Veatch, in Philosophical Interrogations, ed. Sydney and Beatrice Rome [New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964], 119–78). Since phenomenology of the lifeworld is a global
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exploration, it is worth noting that Wild once remarked at an East-West philosophical conference that all the major forms of Western philosophical thought are to be found in a vast variety of Eastern schools. See “Certain Basic Concepts of Western Realism and Their Relation to Oriental Thought,” in Essays in East-West Philosophy, ed. Charles A. Moore (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1951), 258; quoted in Hwa Yol Jung, “Wang Yang-ming and Existential Phenomenology,” International Philosophical Quarterly, 5 (1965): 612, which is reprinted here as chapter 3. 27. Speaking of Hegel’s rationalism, which is “inveterately wedded to the conceptual decomposition of life,” the pluralist William James contends that “Hegel was dominated by the notion of a truth that should prove incontrovertible, binding on every one, and certain which should be the truth, one, indivisible, eternal, objective, and necessary, to which all our particular thinking must lead as to its consummation. This is the dogmatic ideal, the postulate, uncriticised, undoubted, and unchallenged, of all rationalizers in philosophy. ‘I have never doubted,’ a recent Oxford writer says, that truth is universal and single and timeless, a single content or significance, one and whole and complete. Advance in thinking, in the Hegelian universe, has, in short, to proceed by the apodictic words must be rather than by those inferior hypothetic words may be, which are all that empiricists can use” (A Pluralistic Universe [New York: Longmans, Green, 1909], 100–101). 28. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Everywhere and Nowhere,” in Signs, 139. 29. Ibid., 133. 30. Ibid., 139. 31. Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 110. 32. See John Rajchman, The Deleuze Connections (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 50. 33. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort and trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 89–95 (emphasis added). Hereafter VI. 34. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 363 (emphasis added). Compare Hans-Georg Gadamer concludes his magnum opus: “It would be a poor hermeneuticist who thought he could have, or had to have, the last word” (Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd rev. ed. [New York: Crossroad, 1991], 579). 35. See Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1969). 36. See Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989) and Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). See also Hwa Yol Jung, “Edouard Glissant’s Aesthetics of Relation as Diversality and Creolization,” in Postcolonialism and Political Theory, ed. Nalini Terese Persram (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), 193–225. 37. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 33. In her critique of the French politics of the veil or headscarf (hijab in Arabic and foulard in French) in school, Joan Willach Scott judiciously writes that “oneness” or “unanimity” produces “exclusions that are contrary to democratic ideals of inclusiveness,” whereas the concept of “wholeness” recognizes “the existence of disagreement and differences within a ‘multitude of citizens’ and thus opens the way for the kind of political engagement that negotiates rather
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than excludes” (Scott, The Politics of the Veil [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007], 192). 38. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 49. 39. Here Glissant echoes Merleau-Ponty on Hegel in his Inaugural Lecture at the Collège de France in 1953. Merleau-Ponty emphasized that “the universal history of Hegel is the dream of history. As in our dreams, all that is thought is real, and all that is real is thought. There is nothing at all for men to do who are not already taken up in the system” (see In Praise of Philosophy, trans. John Wild and James M. Edie [Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1963], 49). To use this identity logic of the real and the rational (thought), the non-West is excluded from Hegel’s system of history. Furthermore, the contingency of human events is the precondition of history. Otherwise, according to Merleau-Ponty, “history has no meaning, if this meaning is understood as that of a river which, under the influence of all-powerful causes, flows towards an ocean in which it disappears. Every appeal to universal history cuts off the meaning of the specific event, renders effective history insignificant, and is a nihilism in disguise” (emphasis added). Merleau-Ponty, too, is a radical empiricist who pays attention to particulars before abstract universals. Nothing is prefixed or predetermined in history under the guise of “Universal History” (In Praise of Philosophy, 52–53). 40. See Ivan Ivask, “Edouard Glissant: The New Discourse of the Caribbean,” World Literature Today 63 (1989): 557–58. 41. Robert Young, Postcolonialism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 68. Paul Gilroy’s reputed thesis of “the black Atlantic” also favors “double consciousness” or hybridity that sums up the transcultural intermix of African and European things. Hybridity here is a converging middle path of “multiple, interconnecting axes of affiliation and differentiation.” Gilroy’s “black Atlantic” is also constructed as “a counterculture of modernity” (The Black Atlantic [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993]). 42. Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant (Paris: Gallimard and Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). This is the manifesto that is preceded by the francophone Swiss Charles Ferdinand Ramuz’s 1914 manifesto of creoleness called Raison d’être, which is appropriately called by Casanova “Swiss creoleness” (The World Republic of Letters, 296). 43. Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant, In Praise of Creoleness/Éloge de la Créolité, 13. 44. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 98. 45. Speaking of “global dialogue,” Enrique Dussel asks the following interesting and important question: “Should not the constitution of this first global dialogue (West/East, North/South) between continental philosophical communities be one of the initial and central tasks of the twenty-first century?” (“Philosophy in Latin America in the Twentieth Century: Problems and Currents,” in Latin American Philosophy, ed. Eduardo Mendieta [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003], 34). Emmanuel Levinas goes one step further: dialogue and ethics are inseparable. “When I speak of first philosophy, I am referring to a philosophy of dialogue that cannot not be an ethics” (Alterity and Transcendence, trans. Michael B. Smith [New York: Columbia University Press, 1999], 97). Indirectly, therefore, Levinas’s view of ethics, unprecedented in the history of Western philosophy, restores the dignity of Sinism as a philosophy, which was regarded by Hegel, for example, as lack of abstract “speculation.” It would be interesting to explore the transversal connection between Confucius and Levinas. 46. In reference to Merleau-Ponty’s seminal work Phenomenology of Perception,
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trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch offer an exemplary observation: they speak of the openness of a space between the self and the world as “a middle way, an entre-deux” (The Embodied Mind [Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993], 3). Jean-Luc Nancy’s neologism “exonomy” is proposed to move out of “the binary familiarity of the self and the other” (Philosophical Chronicles, trans. Franson Manjali [New York: Fordham University Press, 2008], 10). It signifies “neither the same nor the other” (ibid.). Exonomy may and can be tied to Nancy’s idea of human existence as “Being-in-Common” or of the commonality of common beings (i.e., “communalism”). See “Of Being-inCommon,” trans. James Creech, in Community as Loose Ends, ed. Miami Theory Collective (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 1–12. Moreover, it would be worthwhile to relate Nancy’s exonomy or the space of in-betweenness to the East-Asian conception of the human (ingan in Korean and ningen in Japanese). See particularly Watsuji Tetsuro, Rinrigaku, trans. Yamamoto Seisaku and Robert E. Carter (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996) and Hwa Yol Jung, “Interbeing and Geophilosophy in the Cultural Topography of Watsuji Tetsuro’s Thought,” in Why Japan Matters! ed. Joseph F. Kess and Helen Lansdowne, vol. 2 (Victoria: Centre for Asia-Pacific Initiatives, University of Victoria, 2005), 691–702. Nancy’s exonomy moves into the Eastern “in-betweenness” or Interbeing out of the Western bipolarity of the self and the other. 47. Martin Jay, Songs of Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 405. 48. While reading Desmond Morris, I came across the fascinating traveling gesture of fig (fica)—a slang term in Italian for the female genitalia—which when we were youngsters we learned to use as a gesture of sexual insult during the Japanese occupation of Korea. In fact, the fig gesture originally traveled from Europe to Japan with the Portuguese or the first Europeans in the mid-sixteenth century. Morris comments that the Portuguese must have traded gestures as well as goods on their expeditious visits to Japan. To his amazement he discovered the fig gesture signified protection while visiting a geisha house in Kyoto for the purpose of academic research, not of asobi (play). What is most interesting here is the fact that not only do ideas, oral and written, travel or transverse, but gestures also migrate (The Human Animal [New York: Crown, 1994], 26–27). 49. In his concluding remarks of a comprehensive study of the teaching and research of philosophy in Korea, Yersu Kim writes in the kindred spirit of transversality when he invokes a “philosophical synthesis” that “will not be Eastern or Western, Korean or American, Korean or Chinese, but one ‘whose centre is everywhere and its circumference nowhere’” (“Republic of Korea,” in Teaching and Research in Philosophy: Asia and the Pacific [Paris: UNESCO, 1986], 126–67). Here Kim is quoting Richard Rorty. See Rorty, “Genteel Syntheses, Professional Analyses, Transcendentalist Culture,” in Two Centuries of Philosophy: American Philosophy Since the Revolution, ed. Peter Caws (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1980), 239. 50. Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). 51. Over four decades ago, Chang Tung-sun ably showed and argued that Chinese logic, which is dictated by the social nature of the Chinese language itself, is a logic not of identity but of correlation that both assumes and allows pluralism (“A Chinese Philosopher’s Theory of Knowledge,” in Our Language and Our World, ed. S. I. Hayakawa [New York: Harper and Brothers, 1959], 299–324). In this connection,
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it is most important to note the cultural psychologist Richard E. Nisbett’s empirical and collaborative study of the correlational thinking of East Asian peoples. See The Geography of Thought (New York: Free Press, 2003). Since the mid-1980s, I have been using the expression “relational ontology” for the correlational thinking and doing in East Asia. 52. See Homi K. Bhabba, “Afterword: A Personal Response,” in Rethinking Literary History, ed. Linda Hutcheon and Mario J. Valdés (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 194–204. See also his classic and influential work The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1996). The American journalist T. R. Reid comments that “East is East and West is West, but anybody who still thinks the twain shall never meet has never been to Baskin-Robbins or Burger King on the far side of the Pacific.” Then he mentions the “nouvelle cuisine” of Asian hybrid or “fusion” delicacies: “the squid pizza, the curry doughnut, the bean-paste Danish, the rice burger, the kimchee burger, the tempura hot dog, the green tea milkshake, the sashimi submarine, and ever-popular BST (that’s bacon, seaweed, and tomato) sandwich” (Confucius Lives Next Door [New York: Random House, 1999], 30). If you like burgers but not kimchee, Danishes but not bean paste, milkshakes but not green tea, or bacon and tomatoes but not seaweed, then you may be a purist or essentialist but not a transversalist. 53. Can Asians Think? (Singapore: Times Books International, 1998). 54. Anthony Pagden, Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle Between East and West (New York: Random House, 2008), 521. 55. Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 311. 56. Edward W. Said, preface to Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978); quoted in Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization, 322. 57. Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 5. 58. See Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991) and Nations without Nationalism, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). 59. In Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 98–106, Bonnie Honig argues for “a democratic cosmopolitanism” by balancing the local with the international that puts a stop to the hostility between “us” and “them.” 60. Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), 1. 61. Jacques Derrida mentions in passing transversality as an interdisciplinary (“interscientific”) approach (Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2, trans. Jan Plug et al. [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004], 241). Martha C. Nussbaum discusses the importance for her program of a new liberal education of cosmopolitanism, non-Western or intercultural studies, and women’s studies. See Cultivating Humanity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). It is instructive for us to read what Barthes says with regard to the nature of interdisciplinarity: “Interdisciplinary studies, of which we hear so much, do not merely confront already constituted disciplines (none of which, as a matter of fact, consents to leave off). In order to do interdisciplinary work, it is not enough to take a ‘subject’ (a theme) and to arrange two or three sciences around it. Interdisciplinary study consists in creating a new object, which belongs to no one. The Text is, I believe, one such object” (The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard [New York: Hill and Wang, 1986], 72; emphasis added). So is the hybrid product (“Intertext”) of what might be called transversal or intercontinental philosophy, which is the crossing of two or more continental philosophies.
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chapter 3 1. John Wild, “Certain Basic Concepts of Western Realism and their Relation to Oriental Thought,” in Essays in East-West Philosophy, ed. Charles A. Moore (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1951), 258. 2. In recent years there has been a revived interest in vitalizing the philosophy of Wang Yang-ming. Chan Wing-tsit’s recent translation of Wang’s philosophical work entitled Instructions for Practical Living and Other Neo-Confucian Writings (IPL) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963) is a signpost for future study. Wang’s work was previously translated by Frederick Goodrich Henke as The Philosophy of Wang Yang-ming (Chicago: Open Court, 1961), which has been criticized by Chan and Chang Carsun as being too defective. For recent writings on Wang Yang-ming, see Chang Carsun, Wang Yang-ming: Idealist Philosopher of Sixteenth-Century China (New York: St. John’s University Press, 1962); “Wang Yang-ming’s Philosophy,” Philosophy East and West 5 (April 1955): 3–18; and Iki Hiroyuki, “Wang Yang-ming’s Doctrine of Innate Knowledge of the Good,” Philosophy East and West 11 (1961): 27–44. 3. A recent translator of Heidegger’s work lists various English equivalents of Dasein and, having pointed out their inadequacies, finally decides to use the term in the original German. Kant and the Problem of Metaphhysics, trans. James S. Churchill (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962), xvi–xvii, n. 3. Similarly, Wang Tch’ang-tche gives up translating liang-chih in French and uses the original Chinese: “Une traduction est incapable de render tous les sens que Wang yang-ming lui a attribué, nous préférons dire tout simplement le liang-tche [i.e., liang-chih], sans le traduire.” La Philosophie morale de Wang Yang-ming (Shanghai: Librarie de T’ouSé-Wé, 1936), 208. 4. See Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), 472–76. 5. The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction, vol. 2 (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), 653. 6. Wang Tch’ang-tche, Phil. morale, 120. 7. IPL, 92. 8. John Wild, “Existentialism as a Philosophy,” Journal of Philosophy 57 (1960): 61; William A. Luijpen, Existential Phenomenology (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1962), 35. As Luijpen points out, a difference between existential philosophy and phenomenology exists in that “Kierkegaard is the founder of existentialism and Husserl that of phenomenology, but one could hardly call Kierkegaard a phenomenologist or Husserl an existentialist” (35). James M. Edie recently notes that “In this country the term ‘existential philosophy’ is coming to have practically the same meaning as ‘phenomenology’ and they are used synonymously more and more frequently. So long as the historical evolution which lies behind this identification is properly understood, I see nothing against such a usage. . . .” “Recent Work in Phenomenology,” American Philosophical Quarterly 1 (1964): 155, no. 4. 9. See Sein und Zeit, 9th ed. (Tübingen, Germany: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1960). In the development of Heidegger’s thought, we are especially interested in the early Heidegger or what William J. Richardson calls “Heidegger I” in contrast to “Heidegger II,” after the “Kehre” (reversal) has occurred. See Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963).
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10. See L’Être et le néant: Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique (Paris: Librairie Gallimard, 1942). 11. See Phénoménologie de la perception (PP) (Paris: Librairie Gallimard, 1945). 12. See Existence and the World of Freedom (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963). 13. The Lebenswelt is translated most commonly as the “lifeworld” and often as the “world of everyday life,” the “world of lived experience,” and the “pre-reflective world.” 14. PP, 520. The translation of Colin Smith, Phenomenology of Perception (New York: Humanities Press, 1962) is used throughout this essay. 15. Luijpen, Exist. Phen., 97. 16. The idea of the Lebenswelt was expounded by Husserl and found in his posthumously published work: Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, Husserliana VI, 2nd ed. (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), especially 123–51. 17. Merleau-Ponty, PP, i. 18. Literature, Philosophy and the Social Sciences (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), 203. 19. PP, xii. 20. Among his works, see The Self as Agent (New York: Harper, 1957), Persons in Relation (New York: Harper, 1961), and Interpreting the Universe (London: Faber and Faber, 1933). John Wild comments that the second is “a lucid expression of radical empiricism, worked out independently by a British philosopher, which has much in common with continental phenomenology.” Existence and the World of Freedom, 231. 21. For example, see Robert O. Johann: “The Return to Experience,” Review of Metaphysics, 17 (1964), 319–39, and “Experience and Philosophy,” in Experience, Existence, and the Good: Essays in Honor of Paul Weiss, ed. Irwin C. Lieb (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1961), 25–38. 22. James M. Edie, “Introduction” to Pierre Thévenaz, What is Phenomenology? And Other Essays (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1962), 36. Edie does not include Macmurray and Johann. 23. Sein und Zeit, 28–34. 24. The Field of Consciousness (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1964), 167. 25. Dorion Cairns, “An Approach to Phenomenology,” in Philosophical Essays in Memory of Edmund Husserl, ed. Marvin Farber (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1940), 4. 26. Field, 183. 27. PP, xiv. 28. Field, 181. 29. Dorion Cairns stresses the notion that the methodological principle of phenomenology is “an ‘official’ philosophical attitude of neutrality.” Art. cit. (n. 25), 4. 30. “Phénoménologie existentielle,” in Encyclopédie française, XIX (Paris: Sociéte nouvelle de l’encyclopédie française, 1957), 19.10–8. Compare 19.10–21: “Ainsi la phenomenology existentielle fait la transition entre la phenomenology transcendentale, née de la réduction de toute chose à son apparition pour moi, et l’ontologie, qui restaure la question du sens de l’être pour tour ce qui est dit ‘exister.’” See also Stephan Strasser, Phenomenology and the Human Sciences (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1963), 275. 31. “Ontologie ist nur als Phänomenologie möglich.” Sein und Zeit, 35.
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32. Ibid., 42. 33. Merleau-Ponty, PP, 1. 34. Thévenaz, What Is Phen.? 91. 35. Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, 1:195. 36. See Alphonse De Waelhens, “L’Idée phénoménologique d’intentionalité,” in Husserl et la pensée moderne, ed. H. L. Van Breda and J. Taminiaux (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1959), 155. 37. There are two wings in the movement of Neo-Confucianism that arose as a reaction against Buddhism and Taoism during the Sung dynasty (960–1279) and in the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). One is the “rationalist” wing of the School of Principle (li-hsüeh) and the other, the “Idealist” wing or the School of Mind (hsin-hsüeh). The former is sometimes called the Ch’eng-Chu school because Ch’eng Yi (1033– 1108) and Chu Hsi (1130–1200) were its prominent leaders and the latter the Lu-Wang school because Lu Hsiang-shan (1139–1193) and Wang Yang-ming were its leaders. For discussion on Neo-Confucianism, see Chang Carsun, The Development of NeoConfucian Thought (New York: Bookman Associates, 1957); Chan Wing-tsit, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), 450ff.; and Fung Yu-lan, A History of Chinese Philosophy, vol. 2, trans. Derk Bodde (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953), 407ff. 38. IPL, 164. 39. See Chang, Wang Yang-ming, 55. 40. IPL, 162. 41. See Chan Wing-tsit, “How Buddhistic Is Wang Yang-ming?” Philosophy East and West 12 (1962), 203–14, in which he points out that Wang Yang-ming criticized Buddhism more effectively than Chu Hsi. 42. PP, ix. 43. Merleau-Ponty writes that “La plus importante acquisition de la phénoménology est sans doute d’avoir joint l’extrême subjectisme et l’extrême objectivisme dans sa notion du monde ou de la rationalité.” PP, xv. 44. IPL, 77 and passim. 45. La phil. morale, throughout which the term coeur is used, 198 in particular. 46. IPL, 278. 47. Ibid., 80. 48. Ibid. Wang Tch’ang-tche refers to yi as “‘intentionalité’ au sens phénoménologique” (Phil. morale, 198). 49. Cartesianische Meditalionen, Husserliana I, 2nd ed. (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963), section 14, 70–72 and Ideen zu einer reinen und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Husserliana III (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950), especially sections 34–39, 79–89. 50. Gurwitsch, “Field of Consciousness,” 74n25. 51. IPL, 189. 52. Ibid., 128. 53. Ibid., 14 and passim. 54. Ibid., 14. 55. Also, we may say that these principles of filial piety, brotherly respect, loyalty, and benevolence are “things” in the sense that they can be the objects of thought or reflective knowledge. 56. IPL, 161.
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57. Labeling a philosophy by “isms” is a risky business. It is interesting to note what J. N. Mohanty says about Husserl’s philosophy: “There is at least one reason that makes a study of Husserl particularly interesting. He is one of the very few amongst the pre-analytical philosophers who refuse to be classified by any ‘isms.’ In fact, his peculiar method enabled him to combine in his philosophy elements as diverse as ‘realism’ and ‘idealism,’ ‘rationalism’ and ‘empiricism,’ ‘positivism’ and ‘pragmatism,’ ‘intuitionism’ and ‘intellectualism.’” Edmund Husserl’s Theory of Meaning (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), 2. 58. IPL, 189. 59. Ibid., 252. 60. Ibid., 189. Compare Merleau-Ponty, PP, 11: “ce pur sentir reviendrait à ne rien sentir et donc à ne pas sentir du tout. La prétendue évidence du sentir n’est pas fondée sur un témoignage de la conscience, mais sur le préjugé du monde. Nous croyons très bien savoir ce que c’est que ‘voir,’ ‘entre,’ ‘sentir,’ parce que depuis long-temps la perception nous a donné des objets colorés ou sonores. Quand nous voulons l’analyser, nous transportons ces objets dans la conscience. . . . comme le perçu lui même n’est évidemment accessible qu’à travers la perception, nous ne comprenons finalement ni l’un ni l’autre.” 61. IPL, 223. Compare Merleau-Ponty, PP, 10: “Je renoncerai . . . à definer la sensation par l’impression pure. Mais voir, c’est avoir des couleurs ou des lumières, entendre c’est avoir des sons, sentir, c’est avoir des qualités, et, pour savoir ce que c’est que sentir, ne suffit-il pas d’avoir vu du rouge ou entendu un la?—Le rouge et le vert ne sont pas des sensations, ce sont des sensibles, et la qualité n’est pas un élément de la conscience, c’est une propriété de l’objet.” 62. IPL, 225 and 259. 63. Ibid., 150. 64. See Fung, Hist. Chin. Phil., II, 492–93, 522, 601; Wang Tch’ang-tche, Phil. morale, 208: “Ce que l’homme connaît sans avoir appris, c’est la connaissance naturelle (le liang-tche, l’intuition morale); ce que l’homme peut sans avoir reflechi, c’est le pouvoir naturel (la capacité instinctive).” Liang-chih has an ethical implication based on what Mencius believed about human nature as being naturally good. However, to interpret liang-chih in narrowly moral terms does injustice to its full meaning. Liangchih transcends what is merely ethically good and bad. As Wang Yang-ming himself says, it knows both the good and the bad. Liang-chih is really “practical knowledge” in the sense of prereflective knowledge that pertains to lived experience. Although Wang Tch’ang-tche’s interpretation of Wang Yang-ming is predominantly ethical, he writes that one quality of the philosophy of liang-chih is its essentially practical character in terms of its origin, its expression, and its effects. Phil. morale, 187. 65. Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers I: The Problem of Social Reality, ed. Maurice Natanson (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), 229. 66. Self as Agent, 90ff. 67. Phil. morale, 11. 68. Natanson, Literature, Philosophy and the Social Sciences, 201. 69. Existence, 41. 70. Schutz (n. 64), 137. 71. Ibid., 247. 72. “Christian Rationalism,” in Christianity and Existentialism by William Earle, James M. Edie, and John Wild (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1963), 58.
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73. Maurice Natanson, ed., Philosophy of the Social Sciences: A Reader (New York: Random House, 1963), 188. 74. Edie, “Introduction” to Thévenaz, What Is Phen.? 33. 75. Strasser Phenomenology, 253. Compare Emmanuel Levinas, Théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl (Paris: Vrin, 1963), 134–35. 76. 157. 77. Levinas Théorie de l’intuition, 217. Compare Strasser, Phenomenology, 252: “Intuition is the cognitive act corresponding to the being-evident of real being.” 78. IPL, 104. 79. Levinas, 216. 80. Ibid., 185n58. 81. Ibid., 219. 82. Wang Tch’ang-tche, Phil. morale, 68. 83. Strasser, Phenomenology, 156. 84. See ibid., 157: “It is in the successful praxis that consists the verification, the ‘making-true,’ of prescientific intuition. This verification, therefore, is likewise of an intuitive nature.” 85. IPL, 161. 86. Ibid., 277. 87. Existence, 19. 88. IPL, 15. 89. Ibid., 104. 90. See Schutz, Collected Papers I, 67. 91. “The relationship between knowledge and action,” writes Chan, “had been a perennial topic for discussion in the Confucian tradition.” IPL, xxxiv. See his “Chinese Theory and Practice,” in Philosophy and Culture East and West, ed. Charles A. Moore (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1962), 81–95 and David S. Nivison, “The Problem of ‘Knowledge’ and ‘Action’ in Chinese Thought Since Wang Yangming,” in Studies in Chinese Thought, ed. Arthur F. Wright (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 112–45. 92. IPL, 93. 93. Ibid., 30. 94. Ibid., 11–12. 95. See Schutz, 137 and 208. 96. It would be interesting to compare the phenomenological notion of intersubjectivity or the intersubjective world with the idea of jen. Etymologically, the Chinese word jen is a combination of the word “man” and “two,” signifying “man in society” or “humanity.” Jen is “one of the most persistent subjects in the history of Chinese philosophy” (Chan, Source Book, 591), and became an important development in the Neo-Confucian movement (ibid., 676). Ch’eng Hao, for example, says that “As jen is preserved, the self and the other are then identified” (ibid., 524). Jen is essentially activity and sociality. For further discussion on jen, see: Chan Wing-tsit, “The Evolution of the Confucian Concept Jen,” Philosophy East and West 4 (1955): 295–319. 97. Thévenaz points out that existential phenomenology is a “pragmatism.” What Is Phen.? 34. 98. IPL, 109. 99. Ibid., 107. 100. Ibid., 128.
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101. Merleau-Ponty, Les Sciences de l’homme et la phénoménologie (Paris: Centre de Documentation Universitaire, 1963), 2: “Le philosophe est, dit-il [Husserl], le ‘fonctionnaire de l’humanité,’ voulant dire par la que le philosophe est professionnellement destiné à définer et à rendre conscientes les conditions d’une humanité, c’està-dire d’une participation de tous à une vérité commune.” 102. The Spirit of American Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), 186. 103. The “Four Books” are the Great Learning (Ta Hsüeh), the Analects (Lun Yü), the Doctrine of the Mean (Chung Yung), and the Book of Mencius, and the “Five Classics” consist of the books of History (Shu Ching), Odes (Shih Ching), Changes (I Ching), Rites (Li Chi), and the Spring and Autumn Annals (Ch’un Ch’iu). 104. “Syntheses in Chinese Metaphysics,” Essays in East-West Phil. (n. 1), 164.
chapter 4 This is a revised version of the paper I read for the International Society for Chinese Philosophy at the Annual Meeting of the American Philosophical Association (Eastern Division), December 27–30, 1984, Hilton Hotel, New York City. I am grateful to my longtime friend Kuang-ming Wu for having invited me to write and read this paper. My interest in comparative philosophy began in earnest when I met Kuangming at Yale University some eighteen years ago. As we were students of existentialism and phenomenology together, we spent many late hours discussing the infamous and intriguing question as to whether China or the Orient has indeed a philosophy. I am also grateful to Professor Tong Lik Kuen for commenting on my paper on very short notice and both Kuang-ming and Professor A. S. Cua for raising probing questions from the floor during the panel discussion. 1. See Hwa Yol Jung, “Wang Yang-ming and Existential Phenomenology,” International Philosophical Quarterly 5 (December 1965): 612–36. In the context of the present discussion, I should mention two other essays that are sequels to the Wang paper: “Jen: An Existential and Phenomenological Problem of Intersubjectivity,” Philosophy East and West 16 (July–October 1966): 169–88 and “Confucianism and Existentialism: Intersubjectivity as the Way of Man,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 30 (December 1969): 186–202. 2. See Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). 3. Herrlee Glessner, Sinism: A Study of the Evolution of the Chinese World-View (Chicago: Open Court, 1929). 4. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. Richrd C. McCleary (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 120. 5. Ibid., 138. 6. Ibid., 139. Paul A. Cohen’s recent work Discovering History in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984) challenges ethnocentrism in American historiography on China. He makes an interesting observation: “the Chinese themselves, both Marxist and non-Marxist, in reconstructing their own history, have depended heavily on vocabulary, concepts, and analytical frameworks borrowed from the West, thus depriving Western historians of compelling insider-produced alternatives to our own outsider perspective” (ibid., 1).
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7. For a sustained discussion of this theme from ancient Greek thinkers to Marx, see Nicholas Lobkowicz, Theory and Practice (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967). 8. See “Wang Yang-ming and Existential Phenomenology,” 633. All these passages of Wang are taken originally from Instructions for Practical Living and Other NeoConfucian Writings, trans. Chan Wing-tsit (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963). 9. “Wang Yang-ming and Existential Phenomenology,” 621. Julia Ching often uses the expression “mind-and-heart” in translating hsin. See To Acquire Wisdom: The Way of Wang Yang-ming (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976). It is interesting to note that the ideogram hsin is used in other ideograms as their component that signifies conscious or intentional acts. According to Jitendra Nath Mohanty, some Indian schools of thought make the distinction between “mind” and “consciousness”—that is, the latter alone is intentional, whereas the former is nonintentional. See The Concept of Intentionality (St. Louis: Warren H. Green, 1972), 160. 10. See S. I. Hayakawa, ed., “A Chinese Philosopher’s Theory of Knowledge,” in Our Language and Our World (New York: Harper, 1959), 299–324. 11. Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 4. 12. This original meaning of dialogue is discussed in Hans-Georg Gadamer, Dialogue and Dialectic, trans. Christopher Smith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980). 13. There are some close affinities between Wang Yang-ming and Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology that need to be examined. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological discussion on corporeality (i.e., the “primacy of perception”) is an urge to return to perception as the radical root of conception. Importantly enough, the verb “to conceive” is associated with the “fertility” (or fecundity) of the body in the process of thinking with language. Elizabeth Sewell bemoans the fact that conception has become an intellectual (i.e., disembodied) term. She writes that “The human organism thinks as a whole, and our division of it into mind and body is the result of overemphasis on logic and intellect in near isolation which has led us into so onesided a view of the activity and thought, so gross an underestimation of the body’s forms of thought and knowledge.” The Orphic Voice (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), 35–36. Heidegger has a marvelous passage concerning many ways of the hand that culminate in thinking as a “handicraft”: “the hand’s gestures run everywhere through language, in their most perfect purity precisely when man speaks by being silent. And only when man speaks, does he think—not the other way around, as metaphysics still believes. Every motion of the hand in every one of its works carries itself through the element of thinking, every bearing of the hand bears itself in that element. All the work of the hand is rooted in thinking. Therefore, thinking itself is man’s simplest, and for that reason hardest, handiwork, if it would be accomplished at its proper time.” What Is Called Thinking? trans. Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 16–17. 14. For a discussion of the essence of human action as intentional in contemporary Anglo-Saxon philosophy, see Stuart Hampshire, Thought and Action (New York: Viking Press, 1960). His thesis for action as intentional is also an argument against the “behaviorist” conception of human conduct. Hampshire states that “The notion of the will, of action, the relation of thought and action, the relation of a person’s mind and
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body, the difference between observing a convention or rule and merely having a habit— all these problems find their meeting-place in the notion of intention” (ibid., 96). 15. The detailed exposition of John Macmurray’s philosophy is found in his 1953– 54 Gifford Lectures entitled “The Form of the Personal” at the University of Glasgow, which unfortunately have not attracted the scholarly attention they deserve. They were published in two volumes: The Self as Agent (London: Faber and Faber, 1957) and Persons in Relation (London: Faber and Faber, 1961). See also the author’s paper “The Logic of the Personal: John Macmurray and the Ancient Hebrew View of Life,” The Personalist 47 (Autumn 1966): 532–46. 16. John Macmurray, Religion, Art, and Science (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1961), 47. 17. Maurice Mandelbaum, The Phenomenology of Moral Experience (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1955), 31. 18. J. Donald Moon, Moral Knowledge and Its Methodology in Aristotle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 90. 19. Compare Martin Heidegger, What Is a Thing? trans. W. B. Barton Jr. and Vera Deutsch (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1967). 20. “Wang Yang-ming and Existential Phenomenology,” 624. 21. A. S. Cua, The Unity of Knowledge and Action: A Study in Wang Yang-ming’s Moral Psychology (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1982), 70. The pagination in the text is from this work. 22. In his History and Will: Philosophical Perspectives of Mao Tse-tung’s Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), Frederick Wakeman Jr. treats Wang Yang-ming as a precursor of Mao and speaks of Wang’s “existential commitment.” He regards my “Wang Yang-ming and Existential Phenomenology” as a case for “the existentialist cast of the Wang Yang-ming school” (ibid., 363–364, n. 26). Wakeman makes the following interesting point: “Despite the Maoist bridge between them, the distance separating Marx and Wang Yang-ming’s theories of practice—at least insofar as they responded to differing philosophic inquiries—was apparently quite vast. Wang’s form of praxis was not devised as a logical solution to the problem of truth. It was designed to prevent the seeker of good from becoming so infatuated with abstract principles of being that he overlooked the need for worldly action. Men had lost the Way precisely because philosophers had been content to know in vacuo. . . . Marx, on the other hand, put cognition before action and tried to mediate the familiar Western philosophical dualism between abstract theory and concrete praxis with his dialectic” (ibid., 273). However, Wakeman is right on Wang Yang-ming, but he is wrong on Marx. See the author’s paper “Being, Praxis, and Truth: Toward a Dialogue between Phenomenology and Marxism,” Dialectical Anthropology 12 (1988): 307–28 and Hwa Yol Jung and Petee Jung, “Revolutionary Dialectics: Mao Tse-tung and Maurice Merleau-Ponty,” Dialectical Anthropology 2 (1977): 33–56. 23. The Concept of Intentionality, 174. 24. Ibid., 193. 25. To Acquire Wisdom, 61. 26. Ibid., 289, no. 29. 27. Ibid., 66. 28. Julia Ching, “Authentic Selfhood’: Wang Yang-ming and Heidegger,” The Monist 61 (January 1978): 3–27. 29. Ibid., 7.
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30. Neo-Confucian Thought in Action: Wang Yang-ming’s Youth (1472–1509) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976) and Humanity and Self-Cultivation: Essays in Confucian Thought (Berkeley, CA: Asian Humanities Press, 1979). 31. Neo-Confucian Thought in Action, 198, no. 74. 32. Ibid., 171. 33. Humanity and Self-Cultivation, 151. Tu draws the following diagram to show this set of four correlations. shen ↑ hsin ↓ i
(body) (mind)
↓
↓
(intention)
chih (knowledge)
wu (thing)
34. Neo-Confucian Thought in Action, 172. 35. Ivan Morris, The Nobility of Failure: Tragic Heroes in the History of Japan (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962). 36. For a brief discussion of Wang Yang-ming’s influence on Japan, see Ching, To Acquire Wisdom, 249–56. 37. In this connection, I should mention the forgotten work by the American philosopher Josiah Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty (New York: Macmillan, 1908, 16–17), in which he defines the concept as “the willing and practical thoroughgoing devotion of a person to a cause.” For him, loyalty is a central principle of our moral life and the other moral concepts such as justice, charity, industry, wisdom, and spirituality are all definable in terms of it. It triggers one’s action that, by being social, transcends the narrow confines of the individual, that is, ego-satisfaction. Of course, we should be careful not to confuse sincerity with the nationalistic fervor of kokutai (national polity) in recent Japanese history. 38. In La scandale du corps parlant (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1980), Shoshana Felman evokes the sense of corporeality when she speaks of speech (parole) as “corporeal promise” (promesse corporelle) that beckons a conjugal relationship between Austin’s philosophy of language and (Jacques Lacan’s) psychoanalysis as the “talking cure.” 39. It is extremely important, I believe, to understand the diatactics of speech and silence in human communication. Tong Lik Kuen astutely observes that “in the context of Chinese philosophy, . . . speech and silence are correlative concepts. There is no speech without silence, and there is no silence without at least the possibility of speech. . . . We may say, in the metaphysical terminology of the I Ching, that speech is the yang of silence, and silence the yin of speech. But ‘one-yin-one—oneyang is called Tao.’ The alternation of speech and silence is thus an instantiation of the cosmic law of I, the primordial process of Creativity which is the ultimate reality of the universe.” “The Meaning of Philosophical Silence: Some Reflections on the Use of Language in Chinese Thought.” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 3 (1976): 170. Max Picard goes so far as to say that “One cannot imagine a world in which there is nothing but language and speech, but one can imagine a world where there is nothing but silence.” The World of Silence, trans. Stanley Godman (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1952), 1. The opposite of language is not silence, but it is noise. In human
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communication, silence as the horizon of sound resides in the beginning, interlude, and ending of speech as verbal utterances. It is lack of utterance or enunciation but not lack of thought, lack of words, or lack of the intention to speak. As a beginning and ending of speech, it works like the “primordial” Tao that is “silent” (unspoken) and “empty” (unwritten). In a dialogue or conversation, there is no basic opposition or incompatibility between silence and utterance. Genuine dialogue demands the diatactics of speaking and listening as an exchange. For it is a doubling or coupling of saying utterance and silent listening: one who utters and the other who listens (silently) are reversible or exchangeable. If there is no listening or silence, conversation would be a series of monologues rather than a dialogue. In brief, there is no basic opposition among silence, utterance, and action. 40. The nineteenth-century American Ernest Fenollosa, who went to Japan to teach philosophy, became fascinated with Chinese ideograms and discovered “etymosinology.” See The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. Haun Saussy, Jonathan Stalling, and Lucas Klein (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). For an exposition of the implications of etymosinology, see the author’s paper “Misreading the Ideogram: From Fenollosa to Derrida and McLuhan,” Paideuma 13 (1984): 211–27. 41. Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker, Through the Vanishing Point (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 39. For an extensive discussion on the subject, see Chang Cheng-ming, L’Écriture chinoise et le geste humain (Paris: P. Geuthner, 1937). The most comprehensive anthropological study of human gesture and language is found in André Leroi-Gourhan, Le Geste et la parole, 2 parts in 2 vols. (Paris: Éditions Albin Michel, 1964–65): Part I, Technique et language and Part II, La Mémoire et les rythmes. 42. See The New Science, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1970). 43. The Principles of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), 243–44. Compare Curt Sachs, World History of the Dance, trans. Bessie Schonberg (New York: W. W. Norton, 1937), 3: “The dance is the mother of the arts. Music and poetry exist in time; painting and architecture in space. But the dance lives at once in time and space.” 44. “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . . Joyce,” in Samuel Beckett et al., Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (London: Shakespeare, 1929), 11. 45. Confucius—The Secular as Sacred (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 53.
chapter 5 1. See my paper, “Wang Yang-ming and Existential Phenomenology,” International Philosophical Quarterly V, no. 4 (December, 1965), 612–35. 2. Y. P. Mei reports that existentialism has no representation at all among contemporary Chinese philosophers. He does not even mention phenomenology. See “Chinese Philosophy,” in Philosophy in the Mid-Century, ed. Raymond Klibansky, vol. 4 (Firenze, Italy: La Nuova Italia Editrice, 1962), 270. However, it is reported: “At one time even Scheler had quite a following in China.” See Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, vol. 2 (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), 622.
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Recently the first comprehensive work in Chinese on Edmund Husserl was published: Li Kuei-liang, Husai-erh Hsien-Hsiang Hsüeh (Husserl’s Phenomenology) (Taipei: The Research Institute of Education, Taiwan Provincial Normal College, 1963). 3. See John Wild, “Existentialism as a Philosophy,” The Journal of Philosophy 57 (January 21, 1960), 61. 4. Calvin O. Schrag writes, “It [the existential self] is given to itself as a going concern—thinking, planning, hoping, rejoicing, regretting, and despairing in an immediately encountered life-world. This pre-cognitive relatedness to a world of existential concerns we shall call existential intentionality.” Existence and Freedom (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1961), 20. 5. Husserl’s analysis of the Lebenswelt is found in Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, ed. Walter Biemel, 2nd ed. (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962); and see, further, Gerd Brand, Welt, Ich und Zeit (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1955), 1–53. 6. See Paul Ricoeur, “La Phénoménologie existentielle,” Encyclopédie française, vol. 19 (Paris: Société nouvelle de l’encyclopédie française, 1957), 19:10. 7. See Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), 151; Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: The Humanities Press, 1962), ix; and Gabriel Marcel, Metaphysical Journal, trans. Bernard Wall (London: Salisbury Square, 1952), 334. 8. Ricoeur, “La phénomélogie existentielle,” 19.10–8 and 19.10–10. 9. See Sydney and Beatrice Rome, eds., Philosophical Interrogations (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964), 177. 10. Wing-tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), 40. (Hereafter Source Book.) 11. Wing-tsit Chan, “The Concept of Man in Chinese Thought,” in The Concept of Man, S. Radhakrishnan and P. T. Raju, eds., 2nd ed. (Lincoln, NE: Jensen, 1966), 158. See Chan, Source Book, 3. 12. Chan, “The Concept of Man in Chinese Thought,” 158–60. T. Raju also writes that “if western philosophy started with reason first affirming itself as ‘I am,’ then Chinese philosophy would start with man affirming himself as ‘I am.’” Introduction to Comparative Philosophy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962), 11. 13. Paul Ricoeur, Finitude et culpabilité, I: L’Homme faillible (Paris: Aubier Éditions Montaigne, 1960), 87; compare Fallible Man, trans. Charles Kelbley (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1965), 107. 14. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 223. 15. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 9th ed. (Tübingen, Germany: Max Niemeyer, 1960), 42: “Das ‘Wesen’ des Daseins liegt in seiner Existenz.” John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson translate this passage as “The essence of Dasein lies in its existence.” Being and Time (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1962), 67. 16. Henry G. Bugbee, The Inward Morning (State College, PA: Bald Eagle Press, 1958), 215. He explains, “If you reject the notion that ‘I am the doer’ in every sense, you reject the possibility of a philosophy of human action, and you lose all experiential purchase for reflection on reality as sustaining responsibility in an inexpugnable sense.” 17. Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, 1:157. John Wild lists four different kinds of phenomena in the Lebenswelt: “man himself, the realm of nature,
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other men and the realm of human culture, and, finally, the transcendent” (Philosophical Interrogations, 177). 18. Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers I: The Problem of Social Reality, ed. Maurice Natanson (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), 53. Compare John Wild, Existence and the World of Freedom (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963), 41. 19. Wing-tsit Chang, “The Evolution of the Confucian Concept of Jen,” Philosophy East and West 4 (January 1955): 309, 319. 20. Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1941), 176–77. 21. Chan, Source Book, 286. 22. Ibid., 669–70. 23. Ibid., 730, and Fung Yu-lan, A History of Chinese Philosophy, trans. Derk Bodde, vol. 2 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953), 685. (Hereafter History.) 24. John Wild, The Challenge of Existentialism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1959), 256. 25. Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Philosophical Library, 1947), 42. See José Ortega y Gasset, Man and People, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: W. W. Norton, 1957), 23: “Man’s destiny . . . is primarily action. We do not live to think, but the other way round: we think in order that we may succeed in surviving.” 26. Bugbee, The Inward Morning, 143. 27. Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having, trans. Katharine Farrer (Westminster, UK: Dacre Press, 1949), 27. 28. Compare Alphonse de Waelhens, La Philosophie et les experiences naturelles (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961), 38: “La philosophie . . . deviant un élément de l’expérience totale et tend dès lors en quelque sorte à sortir de soi pour orienter directement l’oeuvre effective de la rationalization en cours dans tous les domains de l’expérience.” 29. Chan, “Evolution,” 309, 319. 30. Ibid., 304. It is important to note how Indian Buddhism, according to D. T. Suzuki, transformed itself in the Chinese soil. Zen (Ch’an) acquired the “Chinese mentality” of practicalness from Confucianism, which is “eminently practical and ethical.” Moreover, Suzuki points out that Mencius Tao meant the “everyday life” or man’s “everyday-life experience” when he said, “The Tao is near and people seek it far away.” Zen and Japanese Culture (New York: Pantheon Books, 1960), 11, 43. Compare Chan, Source Book, 425. 31. Chan, Source Book, 96. 32. Fung, History, 1:371. 33. Chan, Source Book, 499. 34. Ibid., 16. 35. Fung, History, 1:72; Chan, “Evolution,” 295; and Source Book, 591. 36. Fung, History, 2:693. 37. Chan, Source Book, 81. 38. Chan, “Evolution,” 303, and Source Book, 450–51. 39. Fung, History, 1:343. 40. Chan, Source Book, 521.
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41. Fung, History, 1:69, and Chan, Source Book, 789. Each of the “Four Books” of the Chinese classics contains the term “jen”: Jen occurs 8 times in Ta hsüeh (The Great Learning), 4 times in Chung yung (The Doctrine of the Mean), 108 in Lun yü (the Confucian Analects) and 151 times in Mencius (The Book of Mencius) that is the longest of the four. 42. Chan, Source Book, 735. 43. Bugbee, The Inward Morning, 224. 44. F. M. M. Saint-Ina, “Confucius: Witness to Being,” International Philosophical Quarterly 3, no. 4 (December 1963): 547. 45. Martin Buber, Between Man and Man (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 17. Bugbee also uses the term “sacrament of coexistence” (Bugbee, The Inward Morning, 159). “The sacrament,” Buber says, “has rightly been called ‘the most dynamic of all ritual forms.’ But what is of greatest importance in its dynamic is that it is stripped of its essential character when it no longer includes an elementary, life-claiming and life-determining experience of the other, the otherness, as of something coming to meet one and acting toward one.” “Symbolic and Sacramental Existence,” in The Origin and Meaning of Hasidim, ed. and trans. Maurice Friedman (New York: Horizon Press, 1960), 166. 46. “Subjectivity of Objectivity,” in Edmund Husserl, 1859–1959, H. L. Van Breda and J. Taminiaux, eds. (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1959), 174. 47. Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith, 2nd ed. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), 28. See Remy C. Kwant, Phenomenology of Social Existence (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1965), 104. 48. Chan, Source Book, 523. 49. I and Thou, 63. 50. Chan, Source Book, 761. 51. See The Perennial Scope of Philosophy, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Philosophical Library, 1949), 45–46; Way to Wisdom, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1951), 27; and Reason and Existenz, trans. William Earle (New York: Noonday Press, 1955), 77–106. 52. Fung, History, 2:693. 53. Heidegger writes, “Die Sprache ist das Haus des Seins. In ihrer Behausung wohnt der Mensch.” “Über den ‘Humanismus,’” in Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit (Bern, Switzerland: Francke Verlag, 1954), 53. 54. Mikel Dufrenne, Language and Philosophy, trans. Henry B. Veatch (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963), 80. 55. Speaking (La Parole), trans. Paul T. Brockelman (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1965), 58. 56. Gabriel Marcel, The Existential Background of Human Dignity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 41. 57. John Macmurray, Persons in Relation (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1961), 128. 58. Max Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, trans. Peter Heath (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1954), 246–47. 59. Chan, Source Book, 69–70. Fung also writes, “As jen is a name for virtue in its entirety, Confucius often used it to include all kinds of different individual virtues” (History, 1:72). 60. Chan, Source Book, 76, and Fung, History, 1:125.
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61. Chan, Source Book, 20. 62. It would be interesting to investigate the place of feeling or emotion and jen as the feeling (ch’ing) of commiseration in Chinese philosophy in the light of the growing literature of a phenomenology of emotion today; for a comprehensive phenomenological analysis of emotion in the lifeworld, see Stephan Strasser, Das Gemüt: Grundgedanken zu einer phänomenologischen Philosophie und Theorie des menschlichen Gefühlslebens (Utrecht, Netherlands: Spectrum, 1956). 63. Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being, vol. 1, trans. G. S. Fraser (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1951) 64. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 176, 178. 65. Chan, “Evolution,” 319. 66. Ibid., 306, and Source Book, 452. 67. Dufrenne, Language and Philosophy, 82. 68. Robert O. Johann, The Meaning of Love: An Essay towards a Metaphysics of Intersubjectivity (Westminster, UK: Newman Press, 1959), 6. 69. Buber, I and Thou, 124. 70. Marcel, Being and Having, 167. 71. Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, trans. Waltraut Stein (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), 83. 72. Chan, Source Book, 286. 73. Chan, “Evolution,” 306. 74. Chan, Source Book, 559. 75. Ibid., 633. 76. Ibid., 65. 77. Ibid., 659–60, and Fung, History, 2:599. 78. Fung, History, 2:693. 79. Chan, Source Book, 65. 80. John Wild points out: “No adequate or even noteworthy social philosophy has as yet come from existentialist sources. This is a striking weakness. They are no doubt right in pointing to the human individual as the bearer of human freedom, and in rejecting the totalitarian theories of Hegel and Marx. But so far they have given us no plausible alternative to take their place” (The Challenge of Existentialism, 184–85). 81. The Great Philosophers, ed. Hannah Arendt and trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962), 59. 82. Wild, Existence and the World of Freedom, 54. Compare Frederick Patka, Value and Existence (New York: Philosophical Library, 1964), 31. 83. Chan, Source Book, 659. 84. Laszlo Versényi states, “The trouble with Heidegger’s existentialistic analysis is not that it is humanistic, but that it is not humanistic enough: for all its preoccupation with man it does not go far enough in clarifying, and providing guidance for, human existence.” Heidegger, Being, and Truth (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965), 177. 85. Chan, Source Book, 632. 86. Ibid., 523. 87. Ibid., 46. 88. Encounter (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1960), 34. 89. Ibid. 90. Existence and the World of Freedom, 159.
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91. Raymond Polin, La Création des valeurs, 2nd ed. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1952), 241. 92. Ibid., 3. 93. Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (New York: Washington Square Press, 1963), 175. 94. Chan, Source Book, 27; 101. 95. Fung, History, 1:71. 96. Ibid., 373. 97. Ibid. 98. See Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), 221. I am not concerned here with Sartre’s view of intersubjectivity in his Critique of Dialectical Reason, I: Theory of Practical Ensembles, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith and ed. Jonathan Rée (London: NLB, 1976). 99. Compare Schrag, Existence and Freedom, 41: “to say that Kierkegaard did not take seriously the social character of existence and foundered on a radical and unqualified individualism would seem to be a most questionable generalization.” 100. “Die Welt des Daseins ist Mitwelt. Das In-Sein ist Mitsein mit Anderen. Das innerweltliche Ansichsein dieser ist Mitdasein” (Sein und Zeit, 118). Compare Macquarrie and Robinson translation, Being and Time, 155: “The world of Dasein is a with-world [Mitwelt]. Being-in is Being-with Others. Their Being-in-themselves within-the-world is Dasein-with [Mitdasein].” 101. Ludwig Binswanger, “The Existential Analysis School of Thought,” in Existence, ed. Rollo May, Ernest Angel, and Henri F. Ellenberger (New York: Basic Books, 1958), 195. See Buber, Between Man and Man, 163–81. 102. Buber writes, “By We I mean a community of several independent persons, who have reached a self and self-responsibility, the community resting on the basis of this self and self-responsibility, and being made possible by them. . . . The We includes the Thou potentially. Only men who are capable of truly saying Thou to one another can truly say We with one another” (Between Man and Man, 175–76). Compare Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers II: Studies in Social Theory, ed. Arvid Brodersen (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), 20–63. 103. Schutz considers that “Husserl’s signal contribution to the social sciences consists [not] in his unsuccessful attempt to solve the problem of the constitution of the transcendental intersubjectivity within the reduced egological sphere . . . but rather in the wealth of his analysis pertinent to problems of the Lebenswelt and designed to be developed into a philosophical anthropology” (Collected Papers I: The Problem of Social Reality, 149). 104. Maurice Natanson, Literature, Philosophy and the Social Sciences (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), 75. 105. The term is used by Abraham J. Heschel, Who Is Man? (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1965), 60. 106. Viktor Frankl, “The Philosophical Foundations of Logotherapy,” in Phenomenology: Pure and Applied, ed. Erwin W. Straus (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1964), 54. 107. This distinction between “quality” and “relation” is borrowed from Moira Roberts, Responsibility and Practical Freedom (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 312. 108. Heschel, Who Is Man? 106.
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109. See Schrag, “The Structure of Moral Experience,” 263. 110. Gusdorf, Speaking, 59. 111. Buber, Between Man and Man, 16. 112. Bugbee, The Inward Morning, 210. 113. Ibid., 100. 114. Wild, Existence and the World of Freedom, 154–55. 115. Carl J. Friedrich, ed., George Schrader, “Responsibility and Existence,” in Responsibility (New York: The Liberal Arts Press, 1960), 70. 116. Bugbee, The Inward Morning, 159. 117. James M. Edie, ed., John Wild, “Authentic Existence: A New Approach to ‘Value Theory,’” in An Invitation to Phenomenology (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1965), 62. See Heschel, Who Is Man? 2: “philosophy was made for man rather than man for philosophy.” 118. See Schrag, Existence and Freedom, 43: “Existential philosophy has contributed more to a clarification of this depersonalization and dehumanization in man’s unauthentic being-with-others than all the academic ethical systems propounded in Western thought.” 119. See Paul Ricoeur, “Negativity and Primary Affirmation,” in History and Truth, trans. Charles A. Kelbley (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1965), 305–28. 120. Buber, Between Man and Man, xi. 121. Martin Buber, “What Is Common to All,” in The Knowledge of Man, ed. Maurice Friedman (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1965), 108. 122. Hussserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, 15, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Les Sciences de l’homme et la phénoménologie (Paris: Centre de Documentation Universitaire, 1963), 2.
chapter 6 1. Maurice Friedman, ed., Martin Buber: The Life of Dialogue (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960), 28. For Buber’s comments on Chinese philosophy, see “What Is Common to All,” trans. Maurice Friedman, in The Knowledge of Man, ed. Friedman (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 89–109; “The Teaching of the Tao (1910)” and “China and Us (1928),” in Pointing the Way, ed. and trans. Maurice Friedman (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 31–58 and 121–25; and “The Place of Hasidism in the History of Religion,” in The Origin and Meaning of Hasidism, ed. and trans. Maurice Friedman (New York: Horizon Press, 1960), 220–39. 2. Martin Buber, “Afterword: The History of the Dialogical Principle,” trans. Friedman, in Between Man and Man (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 223. 3. Karl Jaspers, The Great Philosophers, ed. Hannah Arendt and trans. Ralph Manheim, 2 vols. (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962 and 1966): “Confucius,”1:41–63 and “Lao-tzu,” 2:388–415. 4. Martin Buber, Way to Wisdom, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1954), 190. 5. A most recent critical comparison is found in Hazel E. Barnes, “The Temptation
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of Eastern Philosophy,” in An Existentialist Ethics (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), 211–77. 6. Hajime Nakamura, Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples, ed. Philip P. Wiener (Honolulu: East-West Center Press, 1964), pt. II, “China,” 175–294. For the original and unabridged texts in Japanese, see Toyojin no Shii Hoho, 2 vols. (Tokyo: Misu zu Shobo, 1948), 1:293–554. 7. The term “Sinism” is coined by H. G. Creel to indicate a uniquely Chinese Weltanschauung in ancient (or pre-Buddhist) China. He emphasizes the “practical” and “humanistic” temper of Chinese thought. See Sinism: A Study of the Evolution of the Chinese World-View (Chicago: Open Court, 1929). 8. Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture (New York: Pantheon Books, 1959), 3. 9. Ibid., 11. Suzuki further comments that “the Oriental peoples are sometimes said to be deficient in the power of philosophical thinking and analytical preciseness. Perhaps they are, but they have a richer store of the experience of reality itself, which refuses to be so sharply defined that ‘yes’ can never be ‘no’ and ‘no’ ‘yes’” (ibid., 236). 10. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Humanities Press, 1962), xvi–xvii. 11. Søren Kierkegaard, The Present Age, trans. Alexander Dru (New York: Harper and Row, 1962). 12. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1962), 163–68; Karl Jaspers, Man in the Modern Age, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957); Gabriel Marcel, Man Against Mass Society, trans. G. S. Fraser (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1952); Nicolas Berdyaev, The Fate of Man in the Modern World, trans. Donald A. Lowrie (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1935); and José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (New York: W. W. Norton, 1932). Calvin O. Schrag remarks that “existential philosophy has contributed more to a clarification of this depersonalization and dehumanization in man’s unauthentic being-with-others than all the academic ethical systems propounded in Western Thought.” Existence and Freedom (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1961), 43. 13. For further discussion of jen in relation to existential philosophy and phenomenology, see author’s paper: “Jen: An Existential and Phenomenological Problem of Intersubjectivity,” Philosophy Eat and West 16:169–88, which is reprinted in this volume of essays as chapter 5. 14. All the translations of the Chinese classics in this essay are those of James Legge. 15. Wing Tsit Chan, “Chinese Theory and Practice,” in Philosophy and Culture East and West, ed. Charles A. Moore (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1962), 85. 16. Concerning Wang’s theory of the unity of knowledge and action in relation to existential phenomenology, see author’s paper: “Wang Yang-ming and Existential Phenomenology,” International Philosophical Quarterly 5 (December 1965): especially 632–35. 17. See David S. Nivison, “The Problem of ‘Knowledge’ and ‘Action’ in Chinese Thought since Wang Yang-ming,” in Studies in Chinese Thought, ed. Arthur F. Wright (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 112–45 and O. Brière, Fifty Years of Chinese Philosophy, 1898–1948, trans. Laurence G. Thompson (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1965), 54.
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18. John Wild states that “in the Lebenswelt, value is not a later addition. It is constitutive of the thing. . . . A human culture is not a neutral structure with approvals and disapprovals added on. It is a structure of approvals and disapprovals.” Existence and the World of Freedom (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963), 54. 19. For an excellent discussion of jen as a way of action and sociality, see Chang Wing-tsit, “The Evolution of the Confucian Concept of Jen,” Philosophy East and West 4 (January 1955), 295–319. Two comprehensive studies on jen are available in Japanese: Teruo Takeuchi, Jin no Kogi no Kenkyu (Tokyo: Meiji Shoin, 1964) and Satsujo Yamaguchi, Jin no Kenkyu (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoden, 1937). The first is devoted to the early classical writers including Confucius. It also contains a commentary on Chan’s article in its epilogue. The second is more comprehensive in scope and includes brief comments on Western writers. 20. Karl Jaspers, The Great Philosophers, 1:49. 21. Fung Yu-lan, A History of Chinese Philosophy, trans. Derk Bodde, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953), 1:71 and 373. 22. See Hsieh Yu-wei, “Filial Piety and Chinese Society,” in Philosophy and Culture East and West, 411–27. The emphasis on filial piety certainly reflects the background of the Chinese agricultural society. Primitive society is an anthropological specimen. It is a specimen for understanding the human lifeworld that is prescientific. Some anthropological study of archaic societies shows profound insights that reveal the other side of modern anonymity. For example, Marcel Mauss’s study of “the gift” (le don) of archaic societies such as Polynesia, Melanesia, and Northwest America is relevant to the understanding of reciprocity in its primordial form. As a form of obligation, the gift is the “necessary form of exchange” and “one of the bases of social life” as carried out by the people on a communal basis in the form of courtesies, entertainment, ritual, dances, feasts, military assistance, marriages, succession to wealth, and so forth. See The Gift, trans. Ian Cunnison (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1954). It must be noted that the idea of pao is also a basis for social relations in China. The term “pao” in its verb form means essentially “to respond” or “to return.” It stands for reciprocity that has influenced the shaping of the various modes of social association in China. See Yang Lien-sheng, “The Concept of Pao as a Basis for Social Relations in China,” in Chinese Thought and Institutions, ed. John K. Fairbank (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 291–309. 23. Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1941), 279. 24. Søren Kierkegaard, The Journals of Kierkegaard, ed. Alexander Dru (New York: Harper and Row, 1958), 134. 25. Ibid., 145. 26. Søren Kierkegaard, The Point of View for My Work as an Author, trans. Walter Lowrie (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 158. 27. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 122. 28. Kierkegaard, The Point of View, 115. 29. Kierkegaard, The Journals of Kierkegaard, 133 and 151. 30. Kierkegaard, The Present Age, 79. 31. Kierkegaard, The Journals of Kierkegaard, 149. 32. Kierkegaard, The Present Age, 69. 33. Ibid., 71.
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34. Karl Jaspers, Reason and Existenz, trans. William Earle (New York: Noonday Press, 1955), 106. 35. Ibid., 79. 36. Ibid., 119. 37. Ibid., 112. 38. Ibid., 92. 39. Ibid., 124. 40. See Buber, “Distance and Relation,” in The Knowledge of Man, 59–88. 41. Jaspers, Reason and Existenz, 99. 42. Buber, Between Man and Man, 177.43. The notion of coexistence pervades Merleau-Ponty’s thought on history, politics, literature, and the arts. The main program of his existential phenomenology is indicated in the preface to Phenomenology of Perception, vii–xxi. 44. Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers III: Studies in Phenomenological Philosophy, ed. Ilse Schutz (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), 82.
chapter 7 I wish to dedicate this essay to James J. Heller, who, as the academic dean at Moravian College, has given me his support and encouragement for my work in every way he could for about twenty-five years. An earlier version of this essay appeared as “The Piety of Thinking: Heidegger’s Pathway to Comparative Philosophy,” in The Phenomenology of Man and of the Human Condition, Part 2 (Analecta Hussertiana, vol. 21), ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Reidel, 1986), 337–68. 1. In a recent collection of essays that explore the status of phenomenology in Japan, it is claimed that in Japan phenomenology became “a field of scholarship [the Japanese] could explore, evaluate and appropriate in their own terms: ultimately, as it seems, it became a genuine mode of Japanese philosophizing. The result is a Japanese phenomenology, that is to say: a reflection which is unmistakenly heir to Hussserl, but reflects as much the Japanese intellectual legacy and the philosophical quest of contemporary Japan, from the Meiji era to World War II and the present” [Yoshihiro Nitta and Hirotaka Tatematsu (eds.), Japanese Phenomenology, Analecta Husserliana, vol. 8 (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Reidel, 1979), x]. It should be noted that a new East-West dialogue in the movement of phenomenology might very well have begun in earnest with the recent publication of Phenomenology of Life in a Dialogue between Chinese and Occidental Philosophy, Analecta Husserliana, vol. 17 (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Reidel, 1984). 2. The twentieth-century Chinese philosopher Chang Tung-sun propounds the logic of correlation as uniquely Chinese. See “A Chinese Philosopher’s Theory of Knowledge,” in Our Language and Our World, ed. S. I. Hayakawa (New York: Harper, 1959), 299–324. In The Theoretical Foundations of Chinese Medicine (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1974), Manfred Porkert elaborates on the Chinese systems of “kinesthetic” correlation or correspondence. 3. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 4.
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4. Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? trans. Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 16–17. 5. See my “Misreading the Ideogram: From Fenollosa to Derrida and McLuhan,” Paideuma 13 (Fall 1984): 211–27. See Zhang Longzi, “The Tao and the Logos: Notes on Derrida’s Critique of Logocentrism,” Critical Inquiry 11 (March 1985): 385–98. For a comparative analysis of Heidegger’s thought and the Chinese language, see Johannes Lohmann, “M. Heidegger’s ‘Ontological Difference’ and Language,” in On Heidegger and Language, trans. and ed. Joseph J. Kockelmans (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 303–63. Lohmann writes, “A dominating trait manifests itself here in the relationship between Chinese thought and Indo-European, or Greek and Western, thought, a trait which is manifested equally in the relationship between Chinese and European cultures. As Humboldt has pointed out for languages, this trait is unique in the relationships of languages and of cultures to one another; it can be briefly characterized as a total difference within the context of an equally total comparability. One can observe this trait in various aspects of a culture—from such formalities as the mourning color (white or black) or the place of honor (left or right) to the overall habitus of philosophical thought and of the conception of life and world view. There is obviously not only a question of ‘two extreme realizations of the possibilities of man’s language which are related to one another in polar opposition,’ but a question of two realizations of human possibilities, each of which in its own way is perfect. From this the incomparable, paradigmatic value which the Chinese language as well as the Chinese culture and its history have for us becomes evident” (337–38). For the most comprehensive study of Oriental thought in this connection, see Hajime Nakamura, Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples, ed. Philip P. Wiener (Honolulu: East-West Center Press, 1964). 6. For an excellent discussion of the kinaesthetic relationships of calligraphy to painting, sculpture, and architecture, see Chiang Yee, Chinese Calligraphy, 3rd rev. and enl. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973). A unique, interesting side of Chinese ideography (kanji) is the invention of a kind of Rorschach test based on tsukuriji (“made-up words”) to test the attitudes of the Japanese youth. See George Fields, From Bonsai to Levi’s (New York: Macmillan, 1982), 102–5. 7. In Puzzles and Epiphanies (New York: Chilmark Press, 1962), Frank Kermode writes that “. . . [the American dancer Loïe] Fuller is a kind of Ideogram: l’incorporation visuelle de l’idée, a spectacle defying all definition, radiant, homogeneous” (25). For an elegant justification of dancing as the consummate art, see Havelock Ellis, The Dance of Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1923), 36–67. 8. Somewhere in the genealogy of language we must insert the “savage” body itself as “a cuneiform tablet,” inscription, or graphics. See Alphonso Lingis, Excesses: Eros and Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), 24–25. For a sociology of the body in relation to contemporary culture, see John O’Neill, Five Bodies: The Human Shape of Modern Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982). 9. In this Heideggerian tradition, Albert Hofstadter writes that “the statement, as a form of oral language, articulates in sound. Not only does it articulate being, both objective and subjective in their unity, but it makes it audible. Written language is a score for oral performance, except in extreme cases of artificial symbolic languageconstruction. Human being becomes audible in the articulate form of the declarative sentence. The serial ordering of different phonemes, making use of their sound qualities, rhythms, and other characteristics, constitutes an utterance which is heard as the
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uttering of the self-world, subject-object complex just described, and which therefore is the means by which that complex is itself heard as just that complex. . . . In the end, every feature of language, from vocabulary, case, tense, and mood to synonymyantonymy, logic, rhyme, rhythm, and rhetorical order, is intelligible as a functioning constituent of a medium that articulates human existence. Language is the act by which man brings himself out as man.” Truth and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 82–83; emphasis added. 10. The following passage from “The Poet” is one of the most eloquent passages in the entire corpus of Emerson’s writings: “The poets made all the words, and therefore, language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses. For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin. But the poet names the thing because he sees it, or comes one step nearer to it than any other.” Essays: Second Series (New York: Lovell, Coryell, n.d.), 21; emphasis added. 11. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967), 52, 141. 12. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 1, The Will to Power as Art, trans. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), 99. The acoustic side of Zen or Zen’s “record of things heard” is brought forth by David Applebaum in “On Turning a Zen Ear,” Philosophy East and West 33 (April 1983): 115–22. 13. Geoffrey H. Hartman, Saving the Text (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 120. 14. See my “Martin Heidegger and the Homecoming of Oral Poetry,” Philosophy Today 26 (1982): 148–70. 15. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 49. 16. C. Kerenyi, The Religion of the Greeks and Romans, trans. Christopher Holme (New York: Dutton, 1962), 119. See the following stanzas of “pious” John Donne’s “Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” (which is quoted from Hartman, Saving the Text, 153): If they be two, they are two so As Stiffe twin compasses are two, Thy soule the fixt foot, makes no show To move, but doth, if th’other doe. And though it in the center sit, Yet when the other far doth rome, It leanes, and hearkens after it, And growes erect, as that comes home. Such wilt thou be to mee, who must Like th’other foot, obliquely runne; Thy firmness makes my circle just, And makes me end, where I begunne.
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For my treatment of reciprocity or sociality as the absolute ground of Sinism in general and Confucianism in particular, see “Jen: An Existential and Phenomenological Problem of Intersubjectivity,” Philosophy East and West 16 (July–October 1966): 169–88 and “Confucianism and Existentialism: Intersubjectivity as the Way of Man,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 30 (1969): 186–202. These two essays are reprinted here as Chapters 5 and 6. 17. We have already noted etymological and semantic filiation of the German words hören (“to hear”), horchen (“to hearken”), gehören (“to belong”), and gehorchen (“to obey”) in addition to the Latin abaudire that has the double meaning of hearing and obeying. Hans-Georg Gadamer points further to the familial intimacy of these auditory words when he notes, “It is the Greek word oikeion, i.e., that which pertains to the household, to the oikos. It is an ordinary expression for relatives and house friends, i.e., for all who belong to the household. Oikos, household, thus has the broad sense of an economic unit such as the Greek household characteristically was. But oikeion is just as much an expression for that place where one feels at home, where one belongs and where everything is familiar. We too have usages similar to the usage of the Greek oikeion which display this double aspect in the conceptual field of household. In German, hoi oikeioi is rendered as die Angehörige, and in abstraction from this normal usage we have to speak of das Angehörige, meaning everything which pertains to the household and not only those people who belong to it.” Dialogue and Dialectic, trans. Christopher Smith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980), 18. For a discussion of ecology based on the auditory model of sound as performance, see my “The Orphic Voice and Ecology,” Environmental Ethics 3 (1981): 329–40. 18. See Hwa Yol Jung and Petee Jung, “Toward a New Humanism: The Politics of Civility in a ‘No-Growth’ Society,” Man and World 9 (1976): 283–306. 19. The themes of homopiety and geopiety are inspired by the Heideggerian historical semantist Leo Spitzer in his Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony. Prolegomena to an Interpretation of the Word “Stimmung,” ed. Anna Granville Hatcher (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963). I am greatly indebted to the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan for my understanding of geopiety, which is distinctly Heideggerian. From reading his works, I learned that geography is not confined to the reading of maps but is a philosophical and humanistic discipline. Among his writings, see especially “Geopiety: A Theme in Man’s Attachment to Nature and to Place,” in Geographies of the Mind: Essays in Historical Geosophy in Honor of John Kirtland Wright, ed. David Lowenthal and Martyn J. Bowden (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 11–39. For expositions on geopiety in Heidegger’s thought, see J. Glenn Gray, “Heidegger’s Course: From Human Existence to Nature,” Journal of Philosophy 54 (1957): 197–207; Vincent Vycinas, Earth and Gods (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961); and Michael E. Zimmerman, “Toward a Heideggerian Ethos for Radical Environmentalism,” Environmental Ethics 5 (1983): 99–131. 20. In the Western Inscription, the eleventh-century Chinese neo-Confucianist Chang Tsai writes, “Heaven is my father and Earth is my mother, and even such a small creature as I find[s] an intimate place in their midst. Therefore that which fills the universe I regard as my body and that which directs the universe I consider as my nature. All people are my brothers and sisters, and all things are my companions.” Wing-tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), 497. With this passage, Chang Tsai opens up a philosophical
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gateway to treat the Confucian concept of jen as the all-encompassing élan vital of social principle. 21. The Embers and the Stars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 13. 22. Color and sound are two radically different ways of organizing the human sensorium and the world. There is a qualitative difference in human experience between the visual and the acoustic. As music is the organized movement of sound, the spatiality of sound is most fully actualized in the tones of music. Color does not separate itself from the object, whereas sound separates itself from its source (e.g., voice or the sound of a musical instrument). In other words, color is a dependent attribute of an object, whereas sound is not. While the color we see is the property of a thing itself, and we confront color in space, the tone we hear is not the property of anything, and we encounter it out of or from space. Color is locatable and localizable in one single position with the object, whereas sound, once separated from its source, has no definite topological property or determination although its source is locatable. Sound travels in no one direction; it travels in all directions. Musical tones have no locatable places: they are neither “here” nor “there” but everywhere (i.e., placeless or ubiquitous). In Poetic Thinking: An Approach to Heidegger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), David Halliburton writes that “In the performance of a symphony, . . . responsibility may be seen in the interconnecting indebtedness of each constituent: the musicians, as users of equipment (instruments, chairs, music stands, and the like), together with their skills; the artisans responsible for the preparation of the equipment; the members of the audience, together with their capacity to hear and to sustain attention; the score, a being with a thingly character that allies it with equipment even as it carries an already constituted inclination (the totality of the composer’s notations); the composer, as one who brings forth within the same order as the artisan; that artisan who is the printer of the score; the manner (in the sense of melody, timbre, tone) of the score as performed; the space of time in which that manner emerges through the concerned composure of performance; the space of time of the tradition without which the music could not move into its own articulation— without which, as the temporal structure that preserves the reciprocal responsibility of all the constituents, it would not be music; and finally, the space of time which is the world play’s manner of moving, through all that is thus indebted to its own disclosure” (217). 23. J. Glenn Gray, “Heidegger in Remembering and Remembering Heidegger,” Man and World 10 (1977): 62–63. 24. See my “Vico’s Rhetoric: A Note on Verene’s Vico’s Science of Imagination,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 15 (1982): 187–202. 25. Li Chi: Book of Rites, 2 vols., trans. James Legge (New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1967), 2: 102–3. Speaking of the locus of the personal as moral performance embodied in the Confucian thought of rite, Herbert Fingarette writes, “We would do well to take music, of which Confucius was a devotee, as our model here. We distinguish sensitive and intelligent musical performances from dull and unperceptive ones; and we detect in the performance confidence and integrity, or perhaps hesitation, conflict, ‘faking,’ ‘sentimentalizing.’ We detect all this in the performance: we do not have to look into the psyche or personality of the performer. It is all ‘there,’ public. Although it is there in the performance, it is apparent to us when we consider the performance not as ‘the Beethoven Opus 3’ (that is, from the composer perspective), nor as a ‘public concert’ (the li perspective), nor as a ‘post-Mozartian opus’ (the style perspective), but primarily
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as this particular person’s performance (the personal perspective).” Confucius—The Secular as Sacred (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 53. 26. Heidegger, Poetry, Languge, Thought, 61. 27. David Farrell Krell sketches das Geviert as envisioned by Heidegger in the following pictogram in which the crossing of Being is not a crossing out (Durchstreichung) but a crossing through (Durchkreuzen). Sky
Gods
Being
Earth
Mortals
See “Analysis,” in Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 4, Nihilism, trans. Frank A. Capuzzi (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), 289. For a fine discussion of Taoism in this connection, see Kuang-ming Wu, Chuang Tzu: World Philosopher at Play (New York: Crossroad, 1982). 28. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 14. 29. Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 51–52. 30. For a scathing critique of Cartesianism, see Richrd Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979). In The World Viewed, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), Stanley Cavell uses the term “automatism.” The significance of automatism for our discussion here is twofold. First, as a mechanical reproduction or representation, photography, for example, is of reality but not reality itself; photographic automatism removes the human agent from the task of reproduction or representation. Second, photography is not handmade but mechanically reproduced—and what is mechanically reproduced is an absence of the human hand in forming its objects. To put it in the Heideggerian terminology, in photography thinking is no longer a “handicraft.” 31. See Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Dell, 1977). 32. See Philosophy East and West 20 (July 1970). 33. See Robert Magliola, Derrida on the Mend (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1984), which is an interesting three-way speculation on Heidegger, Derrida, and Eastern thought. 34. In the Politicus, Plato interestingly likens the practical art of statesmanship (political praxis) to the art (technē) of weaving—the wholesome handicraft that I consider to be the opposite of the natural-scientific study of politics. 35. In Zen and Western Thought, ed. William R. LaFleur (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1985), Masao Abe argues that “Dōgen grounds his existence on the radically dehomocentric, cosmological dimension whereas Heidegger is not altogether freed from homocentrism, though he emphasizes transcending towards the world” (65). Heidegger’s later philosophical orientation would, however, make superfluous Abe’s contention concerning Heidegger as contrasted with the Zen master Dōgen.
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chapter 8 This chapter was originally published as “Misreading the Ideogram: From Fenollosa to Derrida and McLuhan.” In A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), Harold Bloom suggests that misreading is a form of reading or interpretation. 1. For a well-researched article on Fenollosa’s and Pound’s conception of Chinese grammatology, see Achilles Fang, “Fenollosa and Pound,” Harvard Journal of Asian Studies, 20 (1957): 213–38. Fenollosa belongs to the long genealogy of linguistic sinology rooted in Francis Bacon, Thomas Browne, William Warburton, and Wilhelm Leibniz. A critical genealogy of the ideogramic method in American poetry as found now is Laszlo K. Géfin, Ideogram: History of a Poetic Method (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982). I am grateful to Lloyd Burkhart, my colleague in the English Department, for bringing this book to my attention. 2. See John T. Irwin, American Hieroglyphics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980). There is neither mention of Fenollosa nor discussion of Chinese grammatology in the book. 3. Fenollosa’s magnum opus is a posthumously published work on the history of Chinese and Japanese art. See Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art, 2 vols. (London: William Heinemann, 1912). He also wrote poetry including “East and West,” which celebrates the meeting of the yin of the “markedly feminine” East and the yang of the “markedly masculine” West. See East and West: the Discovery of America and Other Poems (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1893). 4. James A. Winn makes an astute observation when he writes that “Pound’s fascination with Chinese ideograms, beyond their alleged visual expression, lay in the fact that one ideogram might be made out of several others like a chord out of several notes.” Unsuspected Eloquence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 297. 5. For discussions of the thesis that Chinese ideography reflects the practically and concretely minded attitude, see Hajime Nakamura, Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples, ed. Philip Wiener (Honolulu: East-West Center Press, 1964), 175–294; Herrlee Glessner Creek, Sinism (Chicago: Open Court, 1929); and Marcel Granet, La Pensée chinoise (Paris: Éditions Albin Michel, 1934). 6. See Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. Ezra Pound (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1964). Also see the recent edition by Haun Saussy, Jonathan Stalling, and Lucas Klein with a commentary by Saussy and additional essays by Fenollosa (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). It is no secret that there have been the inseparable ties between painting, calligraphy, and poetry and that painting and calligraphy are the two facets of brushwork. Moreover, the idea of ch’i (vital energy) permeates all of these activities. See Mai-mai Sze, “The Elements of a Picture,” in The Tao of Painting (New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1963), 75–104. In “Water and Ice” the Japanese painter Hiro Kamimura plays with the differentiation of the two graphemes by a single stroke or by the absence and presence of a single stroke. For a recent “interartistic” treatise on painting and literature, see Wendy Steiner, The Colors of Rhetoric (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 7. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: Second Series (New York: Lovell, Coryell, n.d.), 21. 8. Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character, 22.
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9. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, ed. Robert E. Spiller and Alfred R. Ferguson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 18. 10. Emerson, Essays, 10. 11. Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character, 21. 12. Ibid., 23. See Johannes Lohmann who refers to the Chinese as “the most economical man on earth” and to their language as “equally economical,” which is not unlike Fenollosa’s conception of poetry. See “M. Heidegger’s ‘Ontological Difference’ and Language,” in On Heidegger and Language, ed. Joseph J. Kockelmans (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 338. 13. In this regard, Giambattista Vico made the following, interesting observation: “in all languages the greater part of the expressions relating to inanimate things are formed by metaphor from the human body and its parts and from the human senses and passions. Thus, head for top or beginning; the brow and shoulders of a hill; the eyes of needles and of potatoes; mouth for any opening; the lip of a cup or pitcher; the teeth of a rake, a saw, a comb the beard of wheat; the tongue of a shoe; the gorge of a river; a neck of land, an arm of the sea; the hands of a clock; heart for center (the Latins used umbilicus, navel, in this sense); the belly of a sail; foot for end or bottom; the flesh of fruits; a vein of rock or mineral; the blood of grapes for wine; the bowels of the earth. Heaven or the sea smiles; the wind whistles; the waves murmur; a body groans under a great weight. The farmers of Latium used to say the fields were thirsty, bore fruit, were swollen with grain; and our rustics speak of plants making love, vines going mad, resinous trees weeping. Innumerable other examples could be collected from all languages.” The New Science, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1970), 88. 14. See Chang Cheng-Ming, L’Écriture chinoise et le geste humain (Paris: P. Geuthner, 1937). 15. Samuel Beckett, “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . . Joyce,” in Samuel Beckett et al., Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (London: Shakespeare, 1929), 11. 16. R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), 243–44. See Curt Sachs, World History of the Dance, trans. Bessie Schonberg (New York: W. W. Norton, 1937), 3: “The dance is the mother of the arts. Music and poetry exist in time; painting and architecture in space. But the dance lives at once in time and space.” 17. Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker, Through the Vanishing Point (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 39. The the page opposite of p. 39 is filled with the Chinese ideogram “language” or “word” whose “acrobatic” character is represented by printing it upside down. Nevertheless, McLuhan and Parker speak of “an alphabetic ballet of words in rite order” in order to characterize E. E. Cummings’s poem “Chanson Innocent” (ibid., 186–87). 18. For a discussion on this matter, see Hu Shih, “The Rectification of Names and Judgments,” in The Development of the Logical Method in Ancient China, 2nd ed. (New York: Paragon, 1963), 46–52. 19. Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions, 1960), 21. 20. I am a Korean by birth, and I learned how to read Chinese initially from a Japanese teacher—probably the same way as Fenollosa learned Chinese—and later from my grandfather. 21. I mean to use the term “deconstruction” in the original sense that Martin
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Heidegger uses the term “destruction” as “a critical process in which the traditional concepts, which at first must necessarily be employed, are deconstructed down to the sources from which they were drawn.” See The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 23. Walter J. Ong notes that “With work such as Derrida’s, philosophy, which as a formal discipline depends on a certain interiorization of writing, becomes acutely and exquisitely aware of its own chirographic framework, but has not yet much attended to the orality out of which the chirographic has developed historically and in which it is always in some way embedded. It may be worth noting that Derrida’s key distinction between différence and différance [his neologism] is not phonemic, but chirographic.” Interfaces of the Word (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 17n1. The American deconstructionist Paul de Man plays with the literal meaning and the figurative meaning of Archie Bunker’s rhetoric: Archie Bunker answers, “What’s the difference?” when his wife Edith asks him whether he wants to have his bowling shoes laced over or laced under. When his answer really means, “I don’t give a damn what the difference is,” the literal meaning of “difference” is denied by the figurative meaning. Since Derrida is an archie de-Bunker (a debunker of the arche or origin), there is indeed the difference between différence and différance in his deconstructive grammatology. See Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 8–9. Of course, the frequently cited example of the idea of “difference” in deconstructive rhetoric is a line from William Butler Yeats’s poem “Among School Children”: “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” The following Japanese haiku is also a play on the imagistic “difference”: “The fallen blossom flies back to its branch: A butterfly.” 22. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974). The beginning of Derrida’s deconstructive grammatology can be traced to his long introduction to his 1962 French translation of Edmund Husserl’s “The Origin of Geometry” (1939) where Husserl makes reference to the important function of writing or written expression as making human communications possible without immediate or mediate personal address. For Derrida’s 1962 introduction to Husserl’s “The Origin of Geometry,” see Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, ed. David B. Allison and trans. John P. Leavy Jr. (Stony Brook, NY: Nicolas Hays, 1978). In my judgment, Husserl’s critique of the Galilean origin of modern scientism exemplifies phenomenology as philosophical deconstruction. See Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), which includes “The Origin of Geometry,” 353–78. The most redeeming quality of Derrida’s grammatology in the context of this paper is this: his rejection of logocentrism or alphabetic writing as the surrogate of speech, which is characteristic of Western metaphysics, is also the rejection of Western ethnocentrism or what Edward W. Said calls “Orientalism.” See Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). In discussing the origin of language, the eighteenthcentury seminal Neapolitan thinker Giambattista Vico agreed with Aristotle in defining grammar as the art of writing rather than speaking. Vico observed that the first nations originally spoke in writing. Mutes made themselves understood by the use of gestures or objects that were related to the ideas they wished to signify (i.e., by sign languages). In short, they spoke in hieroglyphics or ideographics. As Beckett already noted judiciously in the Vichian tradition, the spoken and the written are the same in
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language as a system of gestures. See Vico, The New Science, especially paragraphs 429, 225, 401, 434, and 435. Compare Leon Pompa, ed. and trans., Vico: Selected Writings (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 233. 23. Of Grammatology, 92. 24. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). For the “power” of hierography and ideography, see also his “Scribble (Writing Power),” Yale French Studies, 58 (1979): 117–47. 25. Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in The Structuralist Controversy, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), 272. In Marxism and Deconstruction (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), Michael Ryan comments that “Deconstruction deals for the most part with how we conceive the world” (159). There is, I think, a profound irony or paradox in a deconstructive interplay between conception and perception in their literal and figurative meanings. Whereas the notion of “conception” in Derrida’s deconstructive grammatology after the tradition of Hegel becomes disembodied and desexualized, there is an embodied and sexualized way of defining “conception” or “to conceive.” In the Vichian tradition, Elizabeth Sewell points out that the body fertilizes the process of conceptual thinking with language: in grammar there is a gender as masculine, feminine, or neuter, and also in grammatical terminology, there are “copula” and “conjugation.” In grammar, the body is as much operative as the mind. If, as Sewell maintains, grammar is “a choreography of language and mind,” that is, it is bodily and sexual, then Fenollosa’s contention as noted earlier that Chinese ideography, like nature, knows no grammar must be examined in a different light. For a discussion of the anatomy of grammar as embodied and sexualized, see Elizabeth Sewell, The Orphic Voice (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960), 34–41. It was Vico who defined man as “only mind, body and speech” and speech as standing somewhere “midway between mind and body.” See Vico, The New Science, 347, para. 1045, and see also the author’s paper “Vico’s Rhetoric: A Note on Verene’s Vico’s Science of Imagination,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 15 (Summer 1982): 187–202. 26. Pound, ABC of Reading, 61. 27. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographic Literaria, 2 vols. (London: Rest Fenner, 1817), 2:14. In Poetry and the Physical Voice (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), Francis Berry comments that “I am indeed half-persuaded by those who urge that the origin of a poem lies not in sound but in seeing” (ix). In Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning, trans. John Mepham (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1976), Roman Jakobson advances the idea that “In poetic language, in which the sign as such takes on an autonomous value, . . . sound symbolism [i.e., the symbolic value of phonemes as signifiers] becomes an actual factor and creates a sort of accompaniment to the signified” (113). 28. See Roman Jakobson, “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics,” in Style in Language, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960), 350–77. 29. Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character, 6. 30. The conductor-composer Leonard Bernstein attempts to synthesize music and linguistics (Noam Chomsky’s linguistics) in The Unanswered Question (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976). 31. See one of the Chinese classics: Li Chi: Book of Rites, 2 vols., trans. James Legge (New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1967), 1:92–131 (Book 17). Speaking
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of the locus of the personal as moral performance embodied in the Confucian thought of li (rite) and jen (humanity), Herbert Fingarette writes, We would do well to take music, of which Confucius was a devotee, as our model here. We distinguish sensitive and intelligent musical performances from dull and unperceptive ones; and we detect in the performance confidence and integrity, or perhaps hesitation, conflict, ‘faking,’ ‘sentimentalizing.’ We detect all this in the performance; we do not have to look into the psyche or personality of the performer. It is all ‘there,’ public. Although it is there in the performance, it is apparent to us when we consider the performance not as ‘the Beethoven Opus 3’ (that is, from the composer perspective), nor as a ‘public concert’ (the li perspective), nor as ‘post-Mozartian opus’ (the style perspective), but primarily as this particular person’s performance (the personal perspective). (Confucius—The Secular as Sacred [New York: Harper and Row, 1972], 53) 32. James J. Y. Liu, The Art of Chinese Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 20–38. This is also one of the main arguments that George Kennedy advances in “Fenollosa, Pound and the Chinese Character,” Yale Literary Magazine 126 (December 1958): 24–36. 33. T’ung Tai, The Six Scripts or the Principles of Chinese Writing, trans. L. C. Hopkins (Cambridge: University Press, 1954). 34. Ibid., 27. 35. I borrowed the term “diatactics” from Hayden White, who means to modify Hegel’s and Marx’s notions of dialectic. Diatactics is neither “hypotactical” (Hegelian conceptual overdetermination) nor “paratactical” (Marxian conceptual underdetermination). See Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 4. I like the term especially because it implies the intimate sense of touch or tactility. 36. Tai, The Six Scripts, 33. For an excellent discussion of the Chinese logic of correlations in reference to the theory of language and knowledge, see Chang Tung-sun, “A Chinese Philosopher’s Theory of Knowledge,” in Our Language and Our World, ed. S. I. Hayakawa (New York: Harper, 1959), 299–324. 37. Tai, The Six Scripts, 43. See also passages in 4–5, 27, and 31. Compare Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Humphry House (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), 267: “verse is speech having a marked figure”; it is a “figure of spoken sound.” 38. For discussions on the various “medium” issues, see Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan, eds., Explorations in Communication (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960). 39. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962). For a critical assessment of McLuhan, see the author’s paper “The Medium as Technology: A Phenomenological Critique of Marshall McLuhan,” in Phenomenology and the Understanding of Human Destiny, ed. Stephen Skousgaard (Washington, DC: Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology and University Press of America, 1981), 45–80. 40. Marshall McLuhan, “Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan,” Playboy (March 1969): 59. 41. It might be of some relevance to our discussion that Hugh Kenner, a noted
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scholar on Pound, dedicated his The Poetry of Ezra Pound (New York: Kraus Reprint, 1968, 7) to McLuhan: “A catalogue, his jewels of conversation.” 42. Harold A. Innis, The Bias of Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951) that has a critical introduction by McLuhan. An account of Innis’ intellectual achievement is found in Eric A. Havelock, “Harold Innis: A Man of His Times,” Et Cetera 38 (Fall 1981): 242–68. 43. Innis, The Bias of Communication, 106. 44. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 18.
chapter 9 1. See Hwa Yol Jung, “The Anatomy of Language: Vico, Joyce, and Etymosinology,” Rivista di Studi Italiani 4–5 (1986/1987): 29–46 and “Vico and Etymosinology Revisited,” Rivista di Studi Italiani 23 (2005): 119–46. 2. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962). 3. See Domenico Pietropaolo, “Vichian Ascendancy in the Thought of Marshall McLuhan,” New Vico Studies 13 (1995): 55–62. 4. See Lawrence W. Chisolm, Fenollosa: The Far East and American Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963), 3–32. 5. Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. Ezra Pound (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1964). Most recently “a critical edition” has been edited by Haun Saussy, Jonathan Stalling, and Lucas Klein (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). It includes an essay by Saussy entitled “Fenollosa Compounded: A Discrimination” (1–40) and five essays by Fenollosa, of which the most interesting and relevant to the present discussion is “The Coming Fusion of East and West” (153–65). In his Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, corrected ed. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 92, Jacques Derrida, who is the most influential grammatologist of the twentieth century, gives honorable mention to Fenollosa’s oeuvre. Also see Hwa Yol Jung, “Misreading the Ideogram: From Fenollosa to Derrida and McLuhan,” Paideuma 13 (1984): 211–27, which is reprinted in chapter 8 of this book with a slightly modified title from the original. The French literary meijin Roland Barthes could not contain his enthusiasm for the Japanese “Empire of Signs” of which Chinese ideography or sinography was only one component. See Empire of Signs, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982). For a critical evaluation of the work, see Hwa Yol Jung, “The Joy of Textualizing Japan: A Metacommentary on Roland Barthes’s Empire of Signs,” Special Issue, Self, Sign, and Symbol, ed. Mark Neuman and Michael Payne, Bucknell Review 30 (1987): 144–67, which is reprinted in this book, chapter 10. 6. Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language, trans. Hugh J. Silverman (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 102. 7. Ezra Pound, The Cantos (New York: New Directions, 1969). Also see Hugh Kenner, The Poetry of Ezra Pound (Norfolk: New Directions, 1951). 8. Sinism (Chicago: Open Court, 1929).
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9. Chang Tung-sun, “A Chinese Philosopher’s Theory of Knowledge,” in Our Language and Our World, ed. S. I. Hayakawa (New York: Harper, 1959) and Hajime Nakamura, Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples, ed. Philip P. Wiener (Honolulu: East-West Center Press, 1964), 175–294. 10. Essays: Second Series (New York: Lovell, Coryell, n.d.). 11. Ibid., 21. I would call Emerson’s description the “ideogrammatization” of the alphabetical. There is the Japanese tsukuriji (made-up word) “towelket,” which is a large beach towel—as large as a blanket. The wordsmithing of “towelket” should be called the “alphabetization” of the ideogrammatical. The rhetoric of Guillaume Apollinaire’s “calligram,” according to Michel Foucault, “aspires playfully to efface the oldest oppositions of our alphabetical civilization: to show and to name; to shape and to say; to reproduce and to articulate; to imitate and to signify; to look and to read.” This Is Not a Pipe, trans. and ed. James Harkness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 21. If so, there is no reason why we cannot ideogrammatize the alphabetical on the one hand and alphabetize the ideogrammic on the other. René Magritte’s L’Art de la conversation (1950), too, is the ideogrammatization of the alphabet. 12. Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, ed. Robert E. Spiller and Alfred R. Ferguson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 18. 13. Essays: Second Series, 10. 14. The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, 21. 15. Ibid., 23. 16. Language as Gesture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 3–4. 17. For recent works concerning the role of the body or phenomenology of the body in communication and media theory, see Mark B. N. Hansen, Bodies in Code (New York: Routledge, 2006) and Bernadette Wegenstein, Getting Under the Skin (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006). See also Hwa Yol Jung, The Body, Sociality and Transversal Communication (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, forthcoming) and Phenomenology, Body Politics and the Future of Communication (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, forthcoming). 18. “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . . Joyce,” in Samuel Beckett et al., Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (London: Shakespeare, 1929), 11. 19. Through the Vanishing Point (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 39. 20. See Hwa Yol Jung, “Phenomenology and Body Politics,” Body and Society 2 (1996): 1–22 and “Writing the Body as Social Discourse: Prolegomena to Carnal Hermeneutics,” in Signs of Change, ed. Stephen Barker (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 261–79 and 394–416. 21. The Logic of Practice (Le Sens pratigue), trans. Richard Nice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 57. 22. Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 294. 23. Marshall McLuhan and Bruce R. Powers, The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 24. Marshall McLuhan and Eric McLuhan, Laws of Media: The New Science (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988). 25. Ibid., 35.
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26. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 47. 27. Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is the Message (New York: Bantam Books, 1967), 8. 28. Jacques Lusseyran, And There Was Light, trans. Elizabeth R. Cameron (London: Heinemann, 1964), 34–5. 29. Helen Keller, The World I Live In (New York: Century, 1908), 183. 30. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Husserl et la notion de natur (notes prises au cours de Maurice Merleau-Ponty),” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, 70 (1965): 261. 31. Ibid. 32. Quoted in Hwa Yol Jung, “The Medium as Technology: A Phenomenological Critique of Marshall McLuhan,” in Phenomenology and the Understanding of Human Destiny, ed. Stephen Skousgaard (Washington, DC: Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology and University Press of America), 50. 33. Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991). 34. Ibid., 22. 35. It is worth noting that the contemporary Chinese philosopher Li Zehou coined the term “subjectality” (zhu/ti/xing) in three sinograms to avoid “subjectivity” (zhu/ guan/xing). The sinogram guan stands for visual “idea” as a product of subjective consciousness (cogito) or Plato’s eidos, whereas the sinogram ti (body) denotes the material disposition of being human. The significance of Li’s neologism subjectality lies in the fact that cognition, too, involves a bodily dimension, that is, it is an embodied action. See Li Zehou, “Subjectivity and ‘Subjectality’: A Response,” Philosophy East and West 49 (1999): 174–83. 36. See Varela et al., 3. 37. Ibid., 172. More precisely, Merleau-Ponty’s word is “empiricism” (empirisme) rather than “realism.” Here it is worth quoting Merleau-Ponty’s full passage: Where empiricism was deficient was in any internal connection between the object and the act which it triggers off. What intellectualism lacks is contingency in the occasions of thought. In the first case consciousness is too poor. In the second too rich for any phenomenon to appeal compellingly to it. Empiricism cannot see that we need to know what we are looking for, otherwise we need to be ignorant of what we are looking for, or equally again we should not be searching. They are in agreement in that neither can grasp consciousness in the act of learning, and that neither attaches due importance to that circumscribed ignorance, that still ‘empty’ but already determinate intention which is attention itself. (Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith [New York: Humanities Press, 1962], 28; emphasis in the original) 38. See Hwa Yol Jung, “Transversality and Comparative Political Theory: A Tribute to Fred Dallmayr’s Work,” in Letting Be: Fred Dallmayr’s Cosmopolitical Vision, ed. Stephen F. Schneck (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), 230–50 and “Merleau-Ponty’s Transversal Geophilosophy and Sinic Aesthetics of Nature,” in Merleau-Ponty and Environmental Philosophy, ed. Suzanne L. Cataldi and William S. Hamrick (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 235–57. 39. Milič Čapek, Philosophical Impact of Contemporary Physics (New York: Van Nostrand, 1961).
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40. Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics (Boston: Shambhala, 2000 [1975]). 41. Ibid., 4. 42. McLuhan and McLuhan, Laws of Media, 72–3. 43. Ibid., 80. 44. Ibid., 43. 45. Interbeing, revised ed., ed. Fred Eppsteiner (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 1993). See also Hwa Yol Jung, “Interbeing and Geophilosophy in the Cultural Topography of Watsuji Tetsuro’s Thought,” in Why Japan Matters! vol. 2 (Victoria: Centre for Asia-Pacific Initiatives, University of Victoria, 2005), 691–702 and Richard E. Nisbett, The Geography of Thought (New York: Free Press, 2003). In chaos theory there is something called “the butterfly effect.” It is a belief that everything is so interconnected in the universe that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in one spot can mysteriously cause a typhoon thousands of miles away. 46. The Body and Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 168. 47. The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort and trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 48. 48. Jung, “Writing the Body as Social Discourse: Prolegomena to Carnal Hermeneutics,” 262. 49. See Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). If we follow Terry Eagleton’s definition of the aesthetic (aisthesis) as “a discourse of the body” and the body’s rebellion against the “tyranny of the theoretical” (theoria) (see The Ideology of the Aesthetic [Oxford: Blackwell, 1990], 13), Shusterman’s “somaesthetics” sounds redundant. 50. McLuhan and McLuhan, Laws of Media, 94 n. 1. 51. Richard Shusterman, Performing Live (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 127 (emphasis added). 52. Shusterman, Body Consciousness, 4. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid., 8, emphasis added. 56. Performing Live, 144. 57. See Bernadette Wegenstein, Getting under the Skin: The Body and Media Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 119–62. 58. It is unfortunate that the limited space of this article does not allow a discussion of Hansen’s “new philosophy” of “new media.” A detailed consideration of it has to be postponed to another occasion, especially in light of the fact that he is a close reader of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. 59. I am quoting Walter Kaufmann’s translation. Wegenstein’s quoted translation reads, “Body I am throughout, and nothing besides; and soul is merely a word for a something in a body.” 60. See Skin, trans. Thomas Dunlap (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 221–34. 61. Ibid., ix. On this crucial point Benthien is in line with Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body as social ontology. She mentions our sexual experience (in teletactility) becoming “autoerotic” and “narcissistic” (ibid., 226). Wegenstein speaks of Emmanuel Levinas’s face as “screen.” Granting that the metaphor “screen” is interesting for media or cinema, its appropriateness is questionable from the ethical standpoint of Levinas. It may even deface the human
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face. The term “screen” also shows and hides at the same time: it is a mixed metaphor. Benthien emphasizes that as the skin is not a “wall,” so is the body not a “monad” (ibid., 237). 62. Ibid., 7. 63. See Mike Featherstone, Mike Hepworth, and Bryan S. Turner (eds.), The Body (London: Sage). 64. The Civilizing Process, vol. 1, The History of Manners, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Urizen Books, 1978), 117. 65. Erwin W. Straus, Phenomenological Psychology (New York: Basic Books, 1966), 211. 66. Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 152. 67. On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 9–10. 68. David Sudnow, Ways of the Hand (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978) and Talk’s Body (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979). 69. What Is Called Thinking? trans. Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 16; emphasis added. See also Hwa Yol Jung, “Heidegger’s Way with Sinitic Thinking,” in Heidegger and Asian Thought, ed. Graham Parkes (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987), 222–23. The italicized expression is meant to emphasize the fact that “man” (human) is spelled in sinography as “sign” of the human “upright posture.” For a Heideggerian extension of handy craftsmanship as an expression of the humanity of humans, see Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). 70. In Wegenstein, Getting Under the Skin, x. There is no denying that the body functions as mediality. Phenomenologically speaking, however, the lived body also inscribes the world, that is, it is the authorial inscriber of the world. Just as sinography is a language of gestures—a vortex of corporate energy or “kinetograms” in the language of telecommunication—the language of the deaf, which is characterized as “seeing voices” or “talking hands,” is the inscription of “signs,” not just the medium. Oliver Sacks makes a poignant point: One has only to watch two people signing to see that signing has a playful quality, a style, quite different from that of speech. Signers tend to improvise [as in the hands playing/performing jazz on piano], to play with signs, to bring all their humor, their imaginativeness, their personality, into their signing, so that signing is not just the manipulation of symbols according to grammatical rules, but, irreducibly, the voice of a signer—a voice given a special force, because it utters itself, so immediately, with the body. One can have or imagine disembodied speech, but one cannot have disembodied sign. The body and soul of the signer, his unique human identity, are continually expressed in the act of signing. See Seeing Voices (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 119. 71. In Wegenstein, Getting Under the Skin, xiv-xv. 72. Ibid., 71–72. 73. See Jung, “The Medium as Technology: A Phenomenological Critique of Marshall McLuhan.”
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74. Themes from Lectures at the Collège de France, 1952–1960, trans. John O’Neill (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 103. 75. The Primacy of Perception, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 159–90. 76. Ibid., 160. 77. Ibid. 78. The Logic of Practice, 52–65. 79. Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 205. 80. “Bodies, Virtual Bodies and Technology,” in Body and Flesh, ed. Donn Welton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 349–57. 81. Hubert L. Dreyfus, who is a close reader of the phenomenological thought of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, challenges artificial intelligence on the ground of biological, psychological, and ontological assumptions. See What Computers Still Can’t Do (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992). “New media” thinkers, unfortunately, fail to take up each of these three assumptions and respond to them.
chapter 10 1. Jonathan Culler, Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 9. Among the American literary notables, Susan Sontag is the most enthusiastic admirer of Barthes’s literary genius. Recently, she writes, “Teacher, man of letters, moralist, philosopher of culture, connoisseur of strong ideas, protean autobiographer . . . of all the intellectual notables who have emerged since World War II in France, Roland Barthes is the one whose work I am most certain will endure.” “Writing Itself: On Roland Barthes,” in A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), vii. 2. Roland Barthes, L’Empire des signes (Geneva: Skira, 1970); Empire of Signs, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982). 3. Guy de Mallac, “Métaphores du vide: L’Empire des signes de Roland Barthes,” Sub-Stance 1 (1971): 31. 4. A Barthes Reader, 473. For Barthes, l’homme, c’est le langage, “A . . . principle, particularly important in regard to literature, is that language cannot be considered as a simple instrument, whether utilitarian or decorative, of thought. Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual. We never find a state where man is separated from language, which he then creates in order to ‘express’ what is taking place within him: it is language which teaches the definition of man, not the reverse.” “To Write: An Intransitive Verb?” in The Structuralist Controversy, Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, eds. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), 135. See the American semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce who writes that it is sufficient to say that there is no element whatever of man’s consciousness which has not something corresponding to it in the world; and the reason is obvious. It is that the word or sign which man uses is the man himself. For, as the fact that every thought is a sign, taken in conjunction with the fact that life is a train of thought, proves that man is a sign; so, that everything thought is
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an external sign, proves that man is an external sign. That is to say, the man and the external sign are identical, in the same sense in which the words homo and man are identical. Thus my language is the sum total of myself; for the man is the thought. (Collected Papers, vol. 5, Pragmatism and Pragmaticism, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University press, 1960], 189.) 5. The terms “donjuanesque” and donjuanisme are borrowed from Shoshana Felman, Le scandale du corps parlant (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1980). If Felman is able to dramatize John Austin’s philosophy of language as donjuanisme and impregnate connaissance with jouissance, we should be allowed to invent the hybrid neologism jouinaissance after the fashion of James Joyce. The slightest allusion of language to corporeality as hinted at by Felman—“la parole est une promesse corporelle”—elicits a filiality of the philosophy of language with (Lacanian) psychoanalysis. In Roland Barthes: A Conservative Estimate (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), Philip Thody observes that Barthes’s Empire of Signs is “one of the most hedonistic of all his books, and the one in which he writes with the most enthusiasm about his subjectmatter” (121). Another observer comments that Barthes’s thinking shifted from the themes of culture, the sign, and the text to the notion of pleasure (see ibid., 181). Steven Ungar, too, aptly characterizes Barthes as “the professor of desire” in his recent book Roland Barthes: The Professor of Desire (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983). More specifically, John O’Neill coined the term “homotextuality” to intimate the corporeal kinship between the reader and the text in Barthes’s work. See “‘Homotextuality’: Barthes on Barthes, Fragments (RB), with a Footnote,” in Hermeneutics, ed. Gary Shapiro and Alan Sica (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), 165–82. 6. “Writing Itself,” xxiv. Speaking of Empire of Signs, Vincent B. Leitsch describes the following: Barthes admires the Japanese custom of attending to wrapping while disregarding contents. The surface of the present, not its hidden gift, elicits appreciation. The preparations and the requisites of meaning, ritual and arbitrary, hold more interest and importance than the impatient possession of its truth. Whether the volume is ultimately empty or overfull seems less pressing than that its packaging be enjoyed. The writing of S/Z celebrates this non-Western tradition. Thus the lexia, a haiku of criticism, a delicacy of S/Z, is less violent manhandling than frail handiwork in miniature. A package of notation. Without hidden truth. A ritual of reading. Bonsai cultivated. (Deconstructive Criticism [New York: Columbia University Press, 1983], 204.) 7. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953), 84. 8. In discussing the legacy of Saussure’s linguistics, Jonathan Culler observes that “if everything which has meaning within a culture is a sign and therefore an object of semiological investigation, semiology would come to include most disciplines of the humanities and the social sciences. Any domain of human activity—be it music, architecture, cooking, etiquette, advertising, fashion, literature—could be approached in semiological terms.” (Ferdinand de Saussure [New York: Penguin Books, 1977], 103. See also 95 and 110–11). From a perspective of semiology, language is only one system of signs, though it is a special or privileged one. Thus, semiology broadens
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its jurisdiction to include all conceivable cultural objects. Barthes’s Empire of Signs should be read in the broad sense of semiology as a cultural science. 9. Fredric Jameson, “Metacommentary,” PMLA 86 (January 1971): 10. 10. Roland Barthes, 11. Of course, we should not take Culler’s use of the term “touristic” as nonserious or supercilious. Rather, he seems to use it after a study fashioned by Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken Books, 1976). 11. Roland Barthes, Shirushi no Teikoku, trans. So Sacon (Tokyo: Shincho, 1974). Judging from the description of the cover of the Japanese translation, the Japanese consider the work as the “cultural criticism” of Japan. I am indebted to my friend Kazuhiko Okuda of the International University of Japan for sending me a copy of the Japanese translation of Barthes’s Empire of Signs—Shirushi no Teikoku. At the conference on “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man” held under the auspices of the Johns Hopkins Humanities Center in 1966 (the same year in which he visited Japan), Barthes spoke of a homology between language and culture and of the intersection between literature and linguistics as “semio-criticism.” (See “To Write: An Intransitive Verb?” 135.) 12. See the author’s paper “Misreading the Ideogram: From Fenollosa to Derrida and McLuhan,” Paideuma 13 (1984): 24–27, which is reprinted here as chapter 8 with a modified title. In this connection, we should single out the following two important recent works on Japan. One is Noël Burch, To the Distant Observer, rev. and ed. Annette Michelson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). Burch admires Barthes’s Empire of Signs as “a pioneer text”: “it is the first attempt by any Western writer to read the Japanese ‘text’ in the light of contemporary semiotics” (13). After the fashion of Barthes, Burch treats the Japanese cinema as a system of signs, that is to say, he textualizes it. The other is William R. LaFleur, The Karma of Words (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). LaFleur’s work is concerned with the interconnection between Buddhism and the literary arts in medieval Japan. Although his methodology is self-professedly one of the Foucauldian episteme, the intertextuality of the religious and the literary in terms of the Japanese concept of funi (“nondualism”) in his analysis may be likened to the interdisciplinary spirit of Barthes. I am grateful to David Pollack of the University of Rochester for suggesting these two works to me. 13. There is another Confucian ethical term that is inseparably related to sincerity: it is fidelity that literally means “man standing by his word.” It refers to the responsibility of the speaker to his word as ethical performance. The American poet and essayist Wendell Berry dwells on the ethics of fidelity in Standing by Words (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1983), 24–63. Ivan Morris writes about the “tragic heroes in the history of Japan” from ancient times to the time of the kamikaze pilots based on this single idea of “sincerity” (makoto), which has its origin in Confucian philosophy. See The Nobility of Failure (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1962.) One would immediately recognize, therefore, that I am using the notion of sincerity in an extended sense. It is preeminently that moral concept that refers to the “unity of knowledge and action” (chih hsing ho yi) in Confucian thought: knowledge is the beginning of action, and action is the completion of knowledge. 14. The Fashion System, trans. Matthew Ward and Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1973), 258. 15. Empire of Signs, 29.
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16. From the vantage point of Barthes’s own semiology, one can say that the cover “fashions” or “dresses” the text of a book. However, when he was introducing the drawings of the fashion designer Erté in 1972, Barthes commented that fashion only seeks “clarity” (not “voluptuousness”), and the cover girl is not a good erotic object because she is too preoccupied with becoming a sign. (See Thody, Roland Barthes, 99 and 192.) 17. See Isshu Miura and Ruth Fuller Sasaki, The Zen Koan: Its History and Use in Rinzai Zen (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965), 3: “The living heart of all Buddhism is enlightenment or satori, and it is upon satori that Zen Buddhism is based. But Zen is not satori, nor is a satori Zen. Satori is the goal of Zen. Moreover, the satori that is the goal of Zen is not merely the satori experience; it is the satori experience deepened through training and directed to a definite end.” It would be of some interest to note that “France” and “Buddhism” begin with the same ideogram—an accidental connection between Barthes the Frenchman and his interest in (Zen) Buddhism. In the most recent collection of critical essays, L’Obvie et l’obtus (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1982), Barthes declares that “Distinguons . . . le message, qui veut produire une information, le signe, qui veut produire une intellection, et le geste, qui produit tout le reste (le ‘supplément’), sans forcément vouloir produire quelque chose” (148). Le geste is also a satori presumably because it produces without being forced to produce anything at all. 18. Empire of Signs, 4. A Zen master pondered for six years on the koan on mu. Then he suddenly achieved satori and composed the following “Dadaist” poem: Mu! Mu! Mu! Mu! Mu! Mu! Mu! Mu! Mu! Mu! Mu! Mu! Mu! Mu! Mu! Mu! Mu! Mu! Mu! Mu! See Ben-Ami Scharfstein, “Introduction/Zen: The Tactics of Emptiness,” in The Sound of the One Hand, trans. Yoel Hoffman (New York: Basic Books, 1975), 26. This book is a compilation of Zen koan(s) with answers. To fashion a semiological koan, if a semiological package is made of the wrapping (“sign”) and the content (“message”), what is the “content” when the “wrapping” is all peeled off? (The answer, of course, is mu or the void!). In Mind and Nature (New York: Dutton, 1979), Gregory Bateson emphasizes zero as a message when he writes: “the deep partial truth that ‘nothing will come of nothing’ in the world of information and organization encounters an interesting contradiction in the circumstance that zero, the complete absence of any indicative event, can be a message. . . . The letter that you do not write, the apology you do not offer, the food that you do not put out for the cat—all these can be sufficient and effective messages because zero, in context, can be meaningful; and it is the recipient of the message who creates the context” (46–47). 19. In recounting Empire of Signs to Guy Scarpetta in 1971, Barthes commented that “le zen est apparemment bouddhique, mais il n’est pas du le côté du bouddhisme; le clivage don’t je parle n’est pas celui de l’histoire des religions; c’est précisément celui des langues, du langage.” (Roland Barthes, Le Grain de la voix: Entretiens 1962–1980 [Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1981], 115.) 20. See “The Aesthetics of Silence,” in Styles of Radical Will (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), 3–34. For Zen all verbalism essentially represents the pollution of reality. See Miura and Sasaki, The Zen Koan, 35: “Zen is ‘without words,
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without explanations, without instruction, with knowledge.’ Zen is self-awakening only. Yet if we want to communicate something about it to others, we are forced to fall back upon words.” The positive role of silence in human communication as an ontological issue is explored extensively in Bernard P. Dauenhauer, Silence: The Phenomenon and Its Ontological Significance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980). 21. In speaking of psychoanalysis as the “talking cure,” Jacques Lacan regards “empty speech” as an impediment to the realization of the truth of the subject: “I have tackled the function of speech in analysis from its least rewarding angle, that of ‘empty’ speech, where the subject seems to be talking in vain about someone who, even if he were his spitting image, can never become one with the assumption of his desire. I have pointed out the source of the growing devaluation of which speech has been the object in both theory and technique.” (Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan [New York: W. W. Norton, 1977], 45–46.) In Love’s Body (New York: Random House, 1966), Norman O. Brown speaks eloquently of the metaphysics of silence in the following passages: The ego is loquacity, the interior monologue, the soliloquy which isolates. The way of silence leads to the extinction of the ego, mortification. To become empty, to become nothing; to be free from the constrictions of the self, to have no self, to be of no mind, to be a dead man. . . . The matrix in which the word is sown is silence. Silence is the mother tongue. . . . The meaning is not in the words but between the words, in the silence. . . . The virgin womb of the imagination in which the word becomes flesh is silence; and she remains a virgin. . . . The word is made flesh. To recover the world of silence, of symbolism, is to recover the human body. . . . The true meanings of words are bodily meanings, carnal knowledge; and the bodily meanings are the unspoken meanings. What is always speaking silently is the body (264–65). 22. Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture (New York: Pantheon Books, 1959). 23. Empire of Signs, 75. 24. Barthes’s own term would be “Sinic.” The popular French “myth” of China as a “peculiar mixture of bells, rickshaws and opium dens” is referred to by Barthes as “Sininess” or “Sinity.” Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 121. 25. “Calligraphy,” Bernard Karlgren writes, “is the mother of Chinese pictorial art and always its intimate ally, and an expert calligrapher has always been just as much esteemed in China as a painter of the first rank. . . . From this close connexion between script and painting it follows that the Chinese artist, who often is both calligrapher and painter, loves to insert in his picture some lines of writing, which he employs with decorative effect in a masterly way.” (Sound and Symbol in Chinese [London: Oxford University Press, 1923], 67.) Another unique, interesting side of Chinese ideography is the invention of a kind of the Rorschach test based on tsukuriji (“made-up words”) to test the attitudes of the Japanese youth. (See George Fields, From Bonsai to Levi’s [New York: Macmillan, 1982], 102–5.) 26. Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker, Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 187. 27. R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), 243–44.
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28. See Barthes, Le Grain de la voix, “Sur ‘S/Z’ et ‘l’Empire des signes,’” 69–86. 29. The reason for Barthes’s liking for haiku lies in the fact that it enables the signified to “evaporate” or disappear, and what is left is only a thin cloud of signifier (il ne reste plus qu’un mince nuage de significant). (Le Grain de la voix, 114.) The writing of haiku appears to be an act of kenosis or even “semioclasty.” It should be noted, however, that Barthes seems to have been carried away with his enthusiasm of haiku, that is, his assertion that haiku is merely the literary branch of Zen is a little hyperbolic. According to Suzuki, for example, although they are exquisitely interfused, “Haiku and Zen . . . are not to be confused. Haiku is haiku and Zen is Zen. Haiku has its own field, it is poetry, but it also partakes of something of Zen, at the point where a haiku gets related to Zen” (Zen and Japanese Culture, 229). 30. In relation to the importance of the surficial, the following description by Liza Crihfield Dalby on geisha is relevant and appropriate: “Customers are expected to give a geisha an honorarium, but the cash (preferably a stiffly virgin 5,000-yen note or two) must first be folded into a decorative envelope. A crumpled bill fished from a pocket would hardly do.” “The Art of the Geisha,” Natural History 92 (February 1983): 49. For her complete treatment of Japanese geisha culture based on her anthropological field work and personal experience as a geisha, see Geisha (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). The “sociological,” “cultural,” and “psychoanalytical” approaches to the role of play or playing in relation to human reality is proposed by George Herbert Mead’s Mind, Self and Society, ed. Charles W. Morris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934); Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955); and Donald Woods Winnicott’s Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock, 1971). Notwithstanding their differences, they all treat playing as a universal element of human reality. Strictly speaking, geisha asobi as a nightly activity that began as a male entertainment is close structurally to Huizinga’s conception of play as an intermezzo in the flow of normal, workaday life. However, I wish to use asobi in Winnicott’s sense of “playing as doing.” He writes that “Psychotherapy takes place in the overlap of two areas of playing, that of the patient and that of the therapist. Psychotherapy has to do with two people playing together. The corollary of this is that where playing is not possible then the work done by the therapist is directed towards bringing the patient from a state of not being able to play into a state of being able to play,” and that “it is play that is the universal, and that belongs to health: playing facilitates growth and therefore health; playing leads into group relationships; playing can be a form of communication in psychotherapy; and, lastly, psychoanalysis has been developed as a highly specialized form of playing in the service of communication with oneself and others” (Playing and Reality, 38 and 41). I can see no reason why what is true with playing in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy cannot be true in (Barthes’) semiology. 31. In “Maoism, Psychoanalysis, and Hermeneutics: A Methodological Critique of the Interpretation of Cultures,” Asian Thought and Society: An International Review 9 (1984): 143–67, Petee Jung and I challenge shallow cultural hermeneutics and conceptual overkill that ignore a cultural phenomenology of lived experience: we point to the facile trappings of cultural interpretation in relation to Maoism as the Sinicization of Marxism. 32. John Sturrock, ed., “Roland Barthes,” in Structuralism and Since: From LéviStrauss to Derrida (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 77. 33. Ibid., 78.
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34. Chang Tung-sun, “A Chinese Philosopher’s Theory of Knowledge,” in Our Language and Our World, ed. S. I. Hayakawa (New York: Harper, 1959), 299–324. During the course of modernization in the Meiji Restoration whose acceleration was sloganized by a group of Japanese intellectuals as “America our mother, France our father,” the Japanese unity of the inner (indigenous) and the outer (foreign) was expressed as “Eastern morality” and “Western science and technology.” There may indeed be the difference here between the Eastern “logic of correlation” and the Western “logic of identity.” 35. An interesting contrast can be made between the eighteenth-century anatomical sketch of the vena cava cited by Barthes and the nineteenth-century Japanese acupuncture figure. The contrast between the two may be depicted as that of the universal “semiological” man and the particular “Japanese” man. The vena cava supplements Barthes’s notion of how “to write the body”—“Neither the skin, nor the muscles, nor the bones, nor the nerves, but the rest: an awkward, fibrous, shaggy, raveled thing, a clown’s coat.” See Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 180. Ironically, however, Barthes’s vena cava reveals more of the inside “depth” of the body than its counterpart, the “surficial” body of the Japanese acupuncture figure. 36. See Dean MacCannel and Juliet Flower MacCannel who write that “we have adopted the stance that comparative cultural studies cannot make sense except as a contribution to a general semiotics of culture.” The Time of the Sign (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 3. This semiotic Procrusteanism might easily, I am afraid, invite conceptual hypostatization that reverses the thesis that language and culture are the masters of linguistics and anthropology. One of the anecdotes of Zen monks published around the turn of this century is an instructive parable for conceptual hypostatization or eutrophication. The edited story begins with the ideogram “emptiness” (ku, le vide), which is followed by the title caption “A Cup of Tea.” The Zen master Nan-in served tea to a university professor who was visiting him to inquire about Zen. Nan-in poured the visitor’s cup full and then kept on pouring. Watching the overflow the professor could no longer restrain himself and said, “It is overfull. No more will go in!” Thereupon Nan-in replied, “Like this cup, you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?” Paul Reps, Zen Flesh, Zen Bones (Rutland, VT: Tuttle, 1957), 19; italics mine. Zen “emptying,” to which Barthes himself is so attracted, should serve as a deconstructive lesson for his semiological method. If by “metacommentary” we mean the piling of conceptual construction upon conceptual construction, moreover, the word in the subtitle of this paper too should be replaced with a “koan” or “teisho”—without the pretension of being a Zen master—on Barthes’s Empire of Signs. It also should not escape our attention that that “phenomenological reduction” (epoche) may be called “conceptual emptying”—the technique of “suspending” all prejudgments so that the observer may construct his thought based directly on actual experience rather than piling concept upon concept (i.e., conceptual sedimentation). Zen thinking (nen) is compared with phenomenological reduction in Katsuki Sekida, Zen Training, ed. A. V. Grimstone (New York: Weatherhill, 1975), 188–92. It is of course beyond the scope of this paper to compare and elaborate on Zen and phenomenology including what, as contrasted with phenomenological reduction, Alfred Schutz calls the “epoche of the natural attitude,” which suspends “doubt” rather than “belief” in the reality of the outer world. See Collected Papers, vol. 1, The Problem of
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Social Reality, ed. Maurice Natanson (The Hague, Netherlands: Nijhoff, 1962), 229. Zen can be a free variation on both types of epoche and more. 37. For an emphasis on the system of intersubjective meanings relevant to our discussion here, see Charles Taylor, “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man,” The Review of Metaphysics 25 (September 1971): 3–51; Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, trans. John B. Thompson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981); and Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), especially chap. 1, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” 3–30 and Local Knowledge (New York: Basic Books, 1983), especially chap. 3, “‘From the Native’s Point of View’: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding,” 55–70. In The Conflict of Interpretations, ed. Don Ihde (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974), Paul Ricoeur develops most fully the idea of hermeneutical phenomenology as compared with structural semiology. See David Carroll, The Subject in Question (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 15: The structuralist critic in his effort to be for language, for the ‘text,’ will be for the most part militantly anti-subject. In fact, the problem of the subject soon passes into obscurity, into a space radically outside that is no longer analyzed, no longer pertinent. The insistence on the subject and the whole problem of consciousness associated with it is considered by structuralists to have obscured, if not negated, the problem of language (the work of the signifier); and so now, through a reversal of the problematic, language negates, displaces, and replaces the subject as origin. The subject remains only as a skeleton of its former self, as a function of language. In The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), Kaja Silverman explores the human subject as the subject of semiotics. 38. See Dalby who writes that “it is often said with justification that Japanese food is more a feast for the eyes than for the palate, so even if I didn’t get to taste the banquets I witnessed, I at least got to view the beautifully orchestrated composition of dishes” (Geisha, 113). 39. The expression hors jeu is used by Richard Macksey during the questioning of Jacques Derrida’s talk entitled “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” (See Macksey and Donato, eds., The Structuralist Controversy, 268). The limits of the “theatrical” understanding of the world is explored by Bruce Wilshire in Role Playing and Identity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982). 40. Zenkei Shibayama, Zen Comments on the Mumonkan, trans. Sumiko Kudo (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), 10.
chapter 11 1. See Hwa Yol Jung and Petee Jung, “The Hermeneutics of Political Ideology and Cultural Change: Maoism as the Sinicization of Marxism,” Cultural Hermeneutics 3 (August, 1975), 165–98 and “Maoism, Psychoanalysis, and Hermeneutics: A Methodological Critique of the Interpretation of Cultures,” Asian Thought and Society: An International Review 9 (1984), 143–67. 2. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New
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York: Humanities Press, 1962) and The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort and trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968). 3. Claude Lefort, “La politique et la pensée de la politique,” Lettres Nouvelles 32, n.d., 45. 4. Humanism and Terror, trans. John O’Neill (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969) and Adventures of the Dialectic, trans. Joseph Bien (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973). 5. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror, 153. What Jean-Paul Sartre says in his Critique de la raison dialectique, vol. 1: Théorie des ensembles pratiques (Paris: Librairie Gallimard, 1960) is reminiscent of this passage of Merleau-Ponty when Sartre speaks of “Marxism as the unsurpassable philosophy of our time” (marxisme comme l’indépassable philosophie de notre temps) (9). 6. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. Richard G. McCleary (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 223. 7. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 152. 8. Ibid., 184. 9. Ibid., 150. 10. See Stuart R. Schram, The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1963), 112–15. 11. Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror, xxxiv–xxxv. 12. Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, 162. 13. Here we cannot overlook Paul Ricoeur’s warning against progressive violence that risks an endless perpetuation or cycle of violence. See Paul Ricoeur, “Non-Violent Man and His Presence to History,” in History and Truth, trans. Charles A. Keibley (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1965), 223–33. 14. Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror, 109. 15. See G. F. W. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover Publications, 1956), 105–6 and 116–38. Speaking of “a permanent cultural revolution,” Henri Lefebvre follows this heritage of Hegel in excluding Oriental thought from “philosophy.” See Everyday Life in the Modern World, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 203–4. 16. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 289. 17. Ibid., 285. 18. Ibid., 16. 19. Ibid., 280. 20. Signs, 138. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., 133. 23. Ibid., 139. 24. Ibid., 128. 25. Ibid., 139. 26. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Random House, 1973), 101. For a systematic study of the Marxian dialectic from a historical perspective, see Dick Howard, The
notes to pages 186–188
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Development of the Marxian Dialectic (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972). 27. In the afterword of the second edition of Das Kapital, Marx wrote, My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of ‘the Idea,’ he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of ‘the Idea.’ With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought . . . I . . . openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker. . . . The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell. (Capital, vol. 1, ed. Frederick Engels and trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling [New York: International Publishers, 1967], 19–20) 28. Grundrisse, 99. 29. Ibid., 93. 30. Ibid., 91. 31. See especially Stuart R. Schram, ed., “Introduction” to Chairman Mao Talks to the People, trans. John Chinnery and Tieyun (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974), 25. 32. Selected Works, vol. 1 (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1975), 318. 33. Ibid., 343. 34. Ibid., 338. 35. All different interpretations of the dialectic attest to this view. Speaking of the ambiguity of the Hegelian dialectic, Hans-Georg Gadamer writes the following: the all-encompassing synthesis which Hegel’s speculative idealism claims to accomplish contains an unresolved tension—one which is reflected in the way in which the meaning of the word ‘dialectic’ shifts in Hegel. Specifically, ‘dialectical’ may be said on the one hand to characterize the viewpoint of reason, which is able to perceive both the unity of the whole and the whole of the unity in all oppositions and contradictions. But, on the other hand, dialectic, corresponding to the meaning of the word in antiquity, is also thought of as the heightening of all contradictions to a ‘fixed’ point of irresolvable contradictoriness, or, put another way, as the working out of the contradictions that plunge thought into an abyss of meaningless talk, even if from the perspective of reason the contradictions coexist in tension filled unity. (See Hans-George Gadamer, Hegel’s Dialectic, trans. Christopher Smith [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976], 110). 36. Alphonse de Waelhens even describes Merleau-Ponty’s thought as a philosophy of ambiguity. See Une Philosophie de l’ambïguité: L’Existentialisme de Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Louvain, Belgium: Publications Universitaires de Louvain, 1951). 37. In the same vein, Simone de Beauvoir proposes that existentialism is the only philosophy in which an ethics has its place and that in it ambiguity must not be confused with absurdity because to say that existence is ambiguous is to assert that its
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meaning is never fixed but must be constantly won. See The Ethics of Ambiguity, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Philosophical Library, 1948), 34 and 129. 38. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 224. 39. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, xvi–xvii. 40. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, trans. Alden L. Fisher (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963). 41. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 167–68. 42. Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic, 69. 43. Ibid., 40. 44. Viewed in this way, Sartre exaggerates the role of violence in decolonization when he says in his prefatory remarks for Frantz Fanon’s Les Damnés de la terre, which in the end tell more about Sartre’s own thought and temperament than about Fanon’s, “The rebel’s weapon is the proof of his humanity. For in the first days of the revolt you must kill: to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time: there remain a dead man, and a free man; the survivor, for the first time, feels a national soil under his foot.” The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1966), 18–19. 45. William Barrett and Henry D. Aiken, eds., “Letter on Humanism,” in Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, vol. 2, trans. Edgar Ohner (New York: Random House, 1962), 287. According to Gadamer, it was Friederich Schiller who was the first to recognize the problem of alienation to which Hegel assigns a central role in his philosophy (see Hegel’s Dialectic, 106). 46. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, In Praise of Philosophy, trans. John Wild and James M. Edie (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1963). This is far from saying that Merleau-Ponty is a Marxist. Nor do we wish to minimize his later critical reinterpretation of Marxism itself. 47. Ibid., 49. 48. For Merleau-Ponty’s discussion on “Hegel’s Existentialism,” see Sense and Non-Sense, 63–70. 49. Barry Cooper attempts to discern Hegelian elements in Merleau-Ponty’s The Structure of Behavior and comes to the conclusion that “Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical observations no less than his political and ethical opinions can be a blend of Hegelian ideas and sound, common sense observation of empirical reality.” “Hegelian Elements in Merleau-Ponty’s La Structure du comportement,” International Philosophical Quarterly 15 (December, 1975): 423. However, we believe that MerleauPonty’s social and political thought can be more fruitfully investigated in terms of the Marxian dialectic as anti-Hegelian. 50. Merleau-Ponty, In Praise of Philosophy, 50. 51. Ibid. 52. It is interesting to ask whether in Merleau-Ponty the notion of “interrogation” is opposed to that of the dialectic. “This vital interrogation,” Alphonso Lignis notes, “is not simply the alternation of faith and doubt, of position and negation, of affirmation and denial, of expectation and satisfaction, of demand and response. Merleau-Ponty opposes it to dialectics.” Garth Gillan, ed., “Being in the Interrogative Mood,” in The Horizons of the Flesh (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973), 85. 53. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Themes from the Lectures at the Collège de France
notes to pages 191–198
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1952–1960, trans. John O’Neill (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 59. 54. See Hwa Yol Jung, “The Radical Humanization of Politics: Maurice MerleauPonty’s Philosophy of Politics,” Archiv für Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie 53 (May, 1967): 233–56. 55. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 173. 56. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), 233. We are also cognizant of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s critique of Sartre in The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 245–69, which is dedicated to the memory of Merleau-Ponty. In it Lévi-Strauss claims “the ultimate goal of the human sciences to be not to constitute, but to dissolve man” (ibid., 247). 57. Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic, 205. In this respect, MerleauPonty sees that the phenomenology of speech is best suited to reveal something that is inaccessible to psychologism and historicism on the one hand and dogmatic metaphysics on the other. 58. Merleau-Ponty, In Praise of Philosophy, 52–53. 59. Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic, 34. 60. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 170–71. 61. Echoing Merleau-Ponty in his interpretation of Hegel, Charles Taylor comments that “Complete freedom would be a void in which nothing would be worth doing, nothing would deserve to count for anything. The self which has arrived at freedom by setting aside all external obstacles and impingements is characterless, and hence without defined purpose, however much this is hidden by such seemingly positive terms as ‘rationality’ or ‘creativity.’” Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 561. 62. Paolo Freire, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), 75. 63. Ibid. 64. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, xix. 65. Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic, 207. 66. Mao, Selected Works, 1:300. 67. Ibid., 308. 68. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 25. 69. Ibid., 13. 70. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, x–xi. 71. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), 401–2. 72. Hajime Nakamura, Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples, ed. Phillip P. Wiener (Honolulu: East-West Center Press, 1964), 181. 73. Mao, Selected Works, 1:298. 74. Ibid. 75. Ibid., 303–4. 76. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 28. 77. Ibid., 408. “The initial form of language,” Merleau-Ponty writes, “. . . would have been a kind of song. Men would have sung their feelings before communicating their thought. Just as writing was at first painting, language at first would have been
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song, which, if it analyzed itself, would have become a linguistic sign. It is through the exercise of this song that men would have tried out their power of expression” Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language, trans. Hugh J. Silverman (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 81. 78. At the height of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the body, the flesh becomes “an ultimate notion.” It is neither “spirit” nor “matter”: “To designate it, we should need the old term ‘element,’ in the sense it was used to speak of water, air, earth, and fire, that is, in the sense of a general thing, midway between the spatio-temporal individual and the idea, a sort of incarnate principle that brings a style of being wherever there is a fragment of being. The flesh is in this sense an ‘element’ of Being” (The Visible and the Invisible, 139). It is interesting to note here that from beginning to end MerleauPonty rejects both spiritualism and materialism. 79. Nakamura, Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples, 177–82. 80. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 382. 81. Ibid., 173. 82. See F. V. Konstantinov and M. I. Sladkovsky, A Critique of Mao Tse-tung’s Theoretical Conception, trans. Yuri Sdobnikov (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972) and M. Altaisky and V. Georgiyev, The Philosophical Views of Mao Tse-tung: A Critical Analysis, trans. Bryan Bean (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1971). 83. See Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic, 36–37: The movement is accelerated by violence when established capitalism tries to take over and control backward societies. Nothing permits one to say that this transition is necessary, that capitalism is contained within precapitalism as its inevitable future, or that it contains to any great degree all that has preceded it, or, finally, that any society, to go beyond capitalism, must inevitably pass through a capitalistic phase. All these conceptions of development are mechanical. A dialectical conception demands only that, between capitalism, where it exists, and its antecedents, the relationship be one of an integrated society to a less integrated one. 84. For a treatment of education as the praxis of cultural liberation, see Paulo Freire, Education for Critical Consciousness (New York: Seabury Press, 1973). See John O’Neill, “Gay Technology and the Body Politic,” in The Body as a Medium of Expression, ed. Jonathan Benthall and Ted Polhemus (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1975), 301: “Today, poetry and politics, just as art and technology, can no longer be separated if we are to remake the connections of mind and body, to restore the community of the senses which is the foundation of our political life. All politics therefore is ultimately a matter of education and all education a mode of political education. It is for this reason that there is a long-standing quarrel between poetry and philosophy over the true nature of the body politic.” 85. In his introduction to Karl Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy, trans. Fred Halliday (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970), Halliday writes that “Before the victory of the Chinese Revolution, he [Korsch] wrote an introduction to a planned volume of Mao Tse-tung’s essays, stressing their theoretical originality, and he had an optimistic perspective on developments in Asia and Africa” and that “Mao Tse-tung’s emphasis on revolutionary ideas as concrete forces has some analogies with Korsch’s theses on ideological struggle” (25). 86. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 443.
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87. It should be noted here that Merleau-Ponty is defending the Lukács of Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein (1923). In 1967, Lukács reproached Maoism as a form of the Stalinist “subjectivist sectarianism” and insisted that the truth of Marxism will in the long run be proven not in the empty propaganda of the Chinese revolutionary catchphrases but in its technical and economic superiority alone. See Marxism and Human Liberation, ed. E. San Juan Jr. (New York: Dell, 1973), 72–96. 88. John O’Neill contends that “I see in Merleau-Ponty’s work, from beginning to end, a critique of the two principal techniques of reason, namely the analytic method of experimental science and the structuralist method of the human sciences through which the tradition of rationalism dominates the world by removing the responsible subject of human history.” “Translator’s Introduction” to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, ed. Claude Lefort and trans. John O’Neill (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), xxvi. 89. Adventures of the Dialectic, 73. 90. Ibid., 72. 91. Ibid., 222. 92. Ibid., 5. 93. Ibid., 7. 94. Themes from the Lectures at the Collège de France 1952–1960, 56. 95. In Praise of Philosophy, 39. 96. For an exposition of this theme, see John Sallis, Phenomenology and the Return to Beginnings (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1973). 97. In reference to Leninism, Merleau-Ponty comments that “That new dogmatism, which puts the knowing subject outside the fabric of history and gives it access to absolute being, releases it from the duty of self-criticism, exempts Marxism from applying its own principles to itself, and settles dialectical thought, which by its own movement rejected it, in a massive positivity” (Adventures of the Dialectic, 60). 98. Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy, trans. T. B. Bottomore and ed. Bottomore and Maximilien Rubel (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1956), 65. 99. Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects, trans. Brian Pearce (London: New Park Publications, 1962), 8. 100. Ibid., 9. Whatever its shortcomings may be, Adam B. Ulam at least captures in his The Unfinished Revolution (New York: Random House, 1960) the sense of the continuation of the Marxist revolution in the “Third World.” He contends that Marxism is the natural ideology that accommodates the “Third World’s” desire to become industrialized. 101. In reference to a newly inserted passage in Mao’s original writing, which insists on the indivisibility between the Sinicization and the internationalization of Marxism, Schram comments that it is “in flagrant contradiction with the whole spirit of Mao’s text” (The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung, 114). In light of Trotsky’s exposition on an “uninterrupted” continuity between the national phase of revolution as “tactics” and its international culmination as “strategy,” however, there is really no “flagrant contradiction” between the Sinicization and the internationalization of Marxism. 102. In an interview in 1969, Sartre reluctantly comments on the Chinese Cultural Revolution. While confessing his ignorance concerning what was then happening in China, he nonetheless commented that
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striking are the contradictions within the Cultural Revolution. There is a central discordance between the unleashing of mass initiatives and the cult of the leader. On the one side, there is the perpetual maintenance of the fused group with unlimited personal initiatives within it, with the possibility of writing anything in big-character posters, even ‘Chou En-lai to the gallows’—which did, in fact happen in Peking; on the other side, there is the fetishization of the little red book, read aloud in waiting rooms, in airplanes, in railway stations, read before others who repeat it in chorus, read by taxi-drivers who stop their cab to read it to passengers—a hallucinating collective catechism which resounds from one end of China to the other. (Between Existentialism and Marxism, trans. John Mathews [New York: Pantheon Books, 1974], 58) 103. Mao, Selected Works, 1:316. 104. Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic, 209. 105. Ibid., 39 and 207. Speaking of the way toward a permanent cultural revolution for which the Chinese Revolution is definitely not a model, Henri Lefebvre comments that “The objective and directive of our cultural revolution is to create a culture that is not an institution but a style of life; its basic distinction is the realization of philosophy in the spirit of philosophy. The logical outcome of a critical appraisal of culture, of the prestige and glamour attached to this term, and of its institutionalization, is a total acknowledgement of philosophy, of its theoretical and practical significance, its educational, experiential, intellectual and social importance” (Everyday Life in the Modern World, 203; italics added). 106. Adventures of the Dialectic, 82–83. 107. Ibid., 65. 108. The terms “scale” and “height” come from Mao’s poem “Chingkangshan Revisited” that, together with “Two Birds: A Dialogue,” was written in 1965 on “the eve of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” in the spirit of perpetuating the Revolution. To cite the second half of “Chingkanshan Revisited,” Wind and thunder are stirring, Flags and banners are flying Wherever men live. Thirty-eight years are fled With a mere snap of the fingers. We can clasp the moon in the Ninth Heaven And seize turtles deep down in the Five Seas: We’ll return amid triumphant song and laughter. Nothing is hard in this world If you dare to scale the heights. In “Two Birds: A Dialogue,” Mao further alludes to the worldwide fervor of revolution, when he says, “Look you, the world is being turned upside down.” See Peking Review 19 (January 2, 1976): 5–6. For a political interpretation of these two poems, see Yuan Shui-po, “Magnificent Poems That Inspire Us in Battle,” Peking Review 19 (January 9, 1976): 7–10. 109. What Lévi-Strauss impresses us deeply with is not his structuralist theory or techniques but the homage he pays to the “savage mind” of the “primitives,” whose “pupil” and “witness” he is, to the end of preserving the lateral continuity of
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humanity in the same spirit of Merleau-Ponty. See Structural Anthropology, vol. 2, trans. Monique Layton (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 32.
chapter 12 1. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 85. 2. David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a MoreThan-Human World (New York: Pantheon Books, 1996) is thus far the unsurpassed and most creative interpretation of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy in applying and communicating it to the language and world of nonhuman beings and things. 3. See Rosalyn Diprose, Corporeal Generosity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 190. 4. The term “Interbeing” is used by the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh. See Interbeing, rev. ed., ed. Fred Eppsteiner (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 1993). 5. See Félix Guattari, Psychoanalyse et Transversalité: Essais d’Analyse Institutionnelle (Paris: François Maspero, 1972), 72–85 and Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics, trans. Rosemary Sheed (New York: Penguin Books, 1984), 11–23 and see also Gary Genesko, “The Life and Work of Félix Guattari: From Transversality to Ecosophy,” in Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London: Athlone Press, 2000), 106–59. 6. See Calvin O. Schrag, The Self after Postmodernity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997). 7. See Hwa Yol Jung, “The Tao of Transversality as a Global Approach to Truth: A Metacommentary on Calvin O. Schrag,” Man and World 28 (1995): 11–31. 8. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. Richard D. McCleary (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 120. 9. Ibid., 140. Edouard Glissant, who is a Caribbean francophone, uses such terms as “transversality” and “diversality” in criticizing in part Hegel and Eurocentrism in praise of “créolité.” See Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989) and Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). 10. Ibid., 138. 11. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 140. 12. Michel Foucault, Religion and Culture, trans. Richard Townsend (New York: Routledge, 1999), 110–14. 13. When transversality is said to be complicit with the Buddhist’s “Middle Way,” we should keep in mind what Masao Abe says: “This Middle Way, however, should not be taken as a middle point between two poles. On the contrary, the Middle Way breaks through dipolarity; it is the overcoming of dipolarity itself.” Zen and Western Thought, ed. William R. LaFleur (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1985), 157. 14. See Hwa Yol Jung, “Enlightenment and the Question of the Other: A Postmodern Audition,” Human Studies 25 (2002): 297–306. 15. The panopticon is Jeremy Bentham’s masterly architectural blueprint for an ideal prison system. For Foucault, it is “a figure of political technology” that has
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multiple applications. It is also “a type of location of bodies in space.” See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 205. 16. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? 104. 17. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic, trans. Joseph Bien (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 155. 18. See Hugh G. Dick, ed., Selected Writings of Francis Bacon (New York: Modern Library, 1955). 19. “Husserl et la Nation de Nature (Notes Prises au Cours de Maurice MerleauPonty),” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 70 (1965): 257–69. 20. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 13. “Perception,” Emmanuel Levinas also writes, “is a proximity with being which intentional analysis does not account for.” See Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), 118. 21. Ibid., 13 (italics added). 22. Marjorie Grene, “The Sense of Things,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 38 (1980): 378. 23. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 248. 24. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Husserl et la notion de nature (notes prises au cours de Maurice Merleau-Ponty,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, 70 (1965): 260. 25. Ibid., 261 (italics added). 26. Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 238. 27. Nancy Mairs, Remembering the Bone House: An Erotics of Place and Space (New York: Harper and Row, 1989), 7. 28. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, 30th anniversary ed. (New York: Random House, 1982), 3. 29. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort and trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 139–40. 30. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 57. 31. For a superb essay on Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “circularity” or “Being circular,” see Thomas W. Busch, Circulating Being from Embodiment to Incorporation: Essays on Late Existentialism (New York: Fordham University Press, 1999), 80–106. Concerning the “circularity” of philosophy, Merleau-Ponty (The Visible and the Invisible, 177) notes that “the end of a philosophy is the account of its beginning.” Compare Gaston Bachelard who writes that “being is round” (das Dasein ist rund) and that “everything round invites a caress.” The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 234 and 236. 32. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 134 (italics added). 33. Johann G. Herder, J. G. Herder on Social and Political Culture, trans. and ed. F. M. Barnard (London: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 199. 34. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 139. 35. Ibid., 48.
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36. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic, trans. Joseph Bien (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 155. 37. See Sander L. Gilman, Inscribing the Other (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 29–49. 38. José Ortega y Gasset, Man and People, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: W. W. Norton, 1957), 72. See Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, who says that “sensibility must be interpreted as touch first of all” and “contact is tenderness and responsibility” (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), 116–18; italics added. 39. Ortega, Man and People, 72. 40. Henry G. Bugbee, Jr., The Inward Morning: A Philosophical Exploration in a Journal Form (State College, PA: Bald Eagle Press, 1958), 159. In her Earth Muse (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1993), Carol Bigwood is ambidextrous in synchronizing Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of embodiment and the aesthetics of Constantine Brancusi’s sculpture in developing a feminist geophilosophy. 41. Cynthia Willett, Maternal Ethics and Other Slave Moralities (New York: Routledge, 1995), 31–47. It is interesting to observe that tickling, according to Adam Phillips, is the pleasure we cannot reproduce in “the absence of the other,” that is, it requires “the enacted recognition of the other.” See On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 9. 42. Willett, Maternal Ethics and Other Slave Moralities, 47. 43. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 267. 44. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985) and Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 493–542. 45. Miranda Shaw, Passionate Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 140–78 in particular. 46. There is indeed a stark contrast between female Tantrics and the early Christian Fathers such as Origen who believed that “Human life, lived in a body endowed with sexual characteristics, was but the last dark hour of a long night that would vanish with the dawn. The body was poised on the edge of a transformation so enormous as to make all present notions of identity tied to sexual differences, and all social roles based upon marriage, procreation, and childbirth, seem as fragile as dusts dancing in a sunbeam.” See Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 168. 47. See Penelope Deutscher, A Politics of Impossible Difference: The Later Work of Luce Irigaray (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 164–84. 48. See Monica Sjöö and Barbara Mor, The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth (New York: Harper and Row, 1987), 428. 49. Luce Irigaray, “Love Between Us,” in Who Comes After the Subject? ed. Eduoardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (New York: Routledge, 1991), 167–77. 50. Ibid., Between East and West: From Singularity to Community, trans. Stephen Pluhãcek (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 46. 51. The “myth of the eternal return” is the primordial way of correlating historical time with the cyclical rhythm of nature. For a critique of “historicism” including
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the modernist view of progress against this primordial legacy, see Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Pantheon Books, 1954), 139–62. 52. Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 88–89. 53. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 155. 54. Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), 264. 55. According to Roland Barthes, silere (to be silent) denotes “a sort of timeless virginity of things.” The Neutral, trans. Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 23. 56. Brown, Love’s Body, 265. 57. Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990), 99. 58. Yasuo Yuasa, The Body, ed. Thomas P. Kasulis and trans. Shigenori Nagatomo and ThomasP. Kasulia (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), 18. 59. Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture (New York: Pantheon Books, 1959), 104 n. 12. 60. For a comparison between Dogen and Merleau-Ponty, see Carl Olson, “The Human Body as a Boundary Symbol: A Comparison of Merleau-Ponty and Dogen,” Philosophy East and West 36 (1986): 107–20. 61. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language, trans. Hugh J. Silverman (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 102. 62. See Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. Ezra Pound (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1936). Also see the recent edition by Haun Saussy, Jonathan Stalling, and Lucas Klein with a commentary by Saussy and additional essays by Fenollosa (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). 63. What Michel Foucault says about the calligram would apply to the sinogram: “the calligram aspires playfully to effect the oldest oppositions of our alphabetical civilization: to show and to name; to shape and to say; to reproduce and to articulate; to imitate and to signify; to look and to read.” This Is Not a Pipe, trans. and ed. James Harkness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 21. 64. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962). 65. See Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker, Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 183. 66. See Yuasa, The Body, 48n. 67. Li Zehou, “Subjectivity and ‘Subjectality’: A Response,” Philosophy East and West 49 (1999): 174. 68. See Watsuji Tetsuro, A Climate: A Philosophical Study, trans. Geoffrey Bowas (Tokyo: Ministry of Education, 1961). 69. Ibid., Rinrigaku, trans. Seisaku Yamamoto and Robert E. Carter (Albany: State University Press of New York, 1996), 29–45. 70. Yuasa, The Body, 47 and see further 37–48. 71. See Hwa Yol Jung “Interbeing and Geophilosophy in the Cultural Topology of Tetsuro Watsuji’s Thought,” in Why Japan Matters! ed. Joseph F. Kess and Helen Lansdowne, vol. 2 (Victoria: Centre for Asia-Pacific Initiatives, University of Victoria, 2005), 691–702. The author’s contention that what Being is to the West, Interbeing
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is to the East is supported by Robert E. Nisbett’s recent empirical findings. See The Geography of Thought (New York: Free Press, 2003). 72. See Hwa Yol Jung, “The Way of Ecopiety: An Essay in Deep Ecology from a Sinitic Perspective,” Asian Philosophy 1 (1981): 127–40. 73. See Dee Brown who describes the attachment of the native Americans to nature and the earth: for them, “the earth is part of our body”; and “the measure of the land and the measure of our bodies are the same.” Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (New York: Rinehart and Winston, 1970). 74. Chang Chung-yuan, Tao: A New Way of Thinking (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 71–72. 75. Cho Kah Kyung, Bewusstsein und Natursein (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 1987). 76. Wang Yang-ming, Instructions for Practical Living and Other Neo-Confucian Writings, trans. Winig-tsit Chan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), 272. 77. Ibid. 78. Wing-tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, trans. Wing-tsit Chan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), 497. 79. See Glen A. Mazis. Earthbodies: Discovering Our Planetary Senses (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002). 80. See Olson, “The Body as a Boundary Symbol.” 81. Mikel Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, trans. Edward S. Casey (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 255. 82. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 270. For my two experimental essays on environmental ethics and philosophy based on music and its metaphors, see Hwa Yol Jung, “The Orphic Voice and Ecology,” Environmental Ethics 3 (1981): 329–40 and Hwa Yol Jung and Petee Jung, “The Way of Ecopiety: A Philosophic Minuet for Ecological Ethics,” in Commonplaces: Essays on the Nature of Place, ed. David W. Black, Donald Kunze, and John Pickles (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1989), 81–99. 83. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1934), 39. 84. See Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); William Hamrick, Kindness and the Good Society (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002); and Diprose, Corporeal Generosity. 85. Erazim Kohák, The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Moral Sense of Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 13.
chapter 13 1. See Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 193–242. 2. See Michel Haas, The Song of the Earth, trans. Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). 3. See Michel Serres, The Natural Contract, trans. Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995). 4. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 85. 5. See Hwa Yol Jung and Petee Jung, “To Save the Earth,” Philosophy Today 19
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(1975): 108–17. Without doubt the earliest commentary on the subject is Vincent Vycinas, Earth and Gods (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961). 6. Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955), 199–20. 7. The astute observer of modernity, Zygmunt Bauman writes, From at least the seventeenth century and well into the twentieth, the writing elite of Western Europe [with] its footholds on other continents considered its own way of life as a radical break in universal history. Virtually unchallenged faith in the superiority of its own mode over all alternative forms of life— contemporaneous or past—allowed it to take itself as the reference point for the interpretation of the telos of history. . . . Now, . . . Europe set[s] the reference point of objective time in motion, attaching it firmly to its own thrust towards colonizing the future in the same way as it has colonized the surrounding space. (Legislators and Interpreters [Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987], 110) 8. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort and trans. Alphonse Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 267. For the author’s attempt to formulate carnal hermeneutics as a postmodern project, see “Writing the Body as Social Discourse: Prolegomena to Carnal Hermeneutics,” in Signs of Change, ed. Stephen Barker (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 259–77. Compare Carl A. Raschke, for example, who says that “Postmodernity, in contradistinction to modernism, is immanently inscribed in the thought of the body.” Fire and Roses (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), vii. 9. Nancy Mairs, Remembering the Bone House (New York: Harper and Row, 1989), 7. 10. Ibid., 8. 11. Compare Pierre Bourdieu. The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 57: “The habitus is what enables the institution to attain full realization: it is through the capacity for incorporation, which exploits the body’s readiness to take seriously the performative magic of the social, that the king, the banker or the priest are hereditary monarchy, financial capitalism or the Church made flesh.” 12. Mairs, Remembering the Bone House, 7–8. 13. “Caring” is preferred to “care” simply because what “care” is to “being,” “caring” is to “becoming,” although “being,” unlike “care,” is also a gerund. “Caring” is that processual or participial act that is always and necessarily active, ongoing, and unfinished. Moreover, all participial acts subvert essentialism—that attempt that fixes truth or being by appealing to or identifying with a set of immutable principles, doctrines, or dogmas. 14. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 13. 15. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Penguin Books, 1959), 146. For the carnal origins of European thought, see Richard Broxton, Onians: The Origins of European Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951). 16. See the corporeal and ecosophic feminist Susan Griffin who registers a complaint concerning the persisting logocentric tradition of the West that began with Plato: “Plato’s idea of earthly existence as a poor shadow of eternal ideas not only permeates the dominant traditions of Western philosophy but also reflects a fundamental
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posture toward existence, a hierarchy of values in which abstractions, theories, principles, ideas, mathematical equations, logic, and analysis are elevated about what is called concrete, corporeal, sensible, palpable, tangible, solid, physical, material, and contextual.” The Eros of Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday, 1995), 77–78. 17. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Random House, 1967), 52 and 141. 18. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufman and R. J. Hollingdale and ed. Walter Kaufman (New York: Random House, 1967), 348–49. 19. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Random House, 1966), 26. 20. See George Herbert Mead who defines sociality as “the capacity of being several things at once.” The Philosophy of the Present, ed. Arthur E. Murphy (Chicago: Open Court, 1932), 49. 21. The alleged dark continent of corporeality has almost always been castigated and even crucified as an ephemeral and perishable commodity in favor of incorporeal immortality in Christian thought. Origen, the stern Christian ascetic and theologian who voluntarily castrated himself—for that matter, castration was not an uncommon practice in his time—depicted corporeality or, more specifically, sexuality as a passing phenomenon and hinted at the hope of purifying and redeeming the soul from the temporary shackles of the flesh: “Human life [for Origen], lived in a body endowed with sexual characteristics,” Peter Brown remarks, “was but the last dark hour of a long night that would vanish with the dawn. The body was poised on the edge of a transformation so enormous as to make all present notions of identity tied to sexual differences, and all social roles based upon marriage, procreation, and childbirth, seen as fragile as dust dancing in a sunbeam.” The Body and Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 168. The Hebraic tradition is an exception. St. Augustine called it “eternal carnality.” See Daniel Boyarin, Carnal Israel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 22. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 139. 23. Gerald L. Bruns, “What Is Tradition?” New Literary History 22 (1991): 3. 24. Erwin W. Straus, Phenomenological Psychology (New York: Basic Books, 1966), 211. For his critique of the Cartesian dualism of mind and body and its implications, see The Primary World of Senses, tr. Jacob Needleman (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1963). 25. See Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 212. 26. My discussion of Bacon from his various works is found in Selected Writings of Francis Bacon, ed. Hugh G. Dick (New York: Modern Library, 1955). 27. See Benjamin Farrington, The Philosophy of Francis Bacon (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1964). 28. See Lynn White, Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” in Machina ex Deo (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968), 75–94. 29. Loren Eiseley, The Firmament of Time (New York: Atheneum, 1960), 138. 30. See Luce Irigaray, “Love Between Us” (trans. Jeffrey Lomonaco), in Who Comes After the Subject? ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (New York: Routledge, 1991), 170. My discussion here of Irigaray is based on the following works: This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985); “The Fecundity of the Caress: A Reading of Levinas, Totality and Infinity” (Section 4, B) and “The Phenomenology of Eros,” in
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Face to Face with Levinas, ed. Richard A. Cohen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 31–56; An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); Je, Tu, Nous, trans. Alison Martin (New York: Routledge, 1993); Thinking the Difference, trans. Karin Montin (New York: Routledge, 1994); and “The Question of the Other” (trans. Noah Guynn), Yale French Studies, No. 87: Another Look, Another Woman, ed. Lynne Huffer, 7–19. 31. The myth of the eternal return is the ancient way of correlating historical time with the cyclical rhythm of nature. For a critique of “historicism” including the modernist view of progress against this ancient tradition, see Mircea Eliade, “The Terror of History,” in The Myth of the Eternal Return, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Pantheon Books, 1954), 139–62. 32. Diatactics, as far as I know, is the neologism of Hayden White, who intended to replace with it the dialectic that was chartered in modern Western thought by Hegel and Marx. By diatactics, White means to avoid the certain transcendental overtone of Hegel’s thought on the one hand and the ideological overtone of Marx’s on the other: diatactics is neither “hypotactical” (conceptually overdetermined) nor “paratactical” (conceptually underdetermined). See Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 4. The term diatactics is further appropriated in this essay as the logic of correlating two (or more) disparate phenomena as complementary (i.e., having difference). As it is spelled dia/tactics, moreover, it arouses literally the intimate sense (way) of touch (tactility) and broadly the interplay of the senses including the incorporation of mind and body. See the author’s The Question of Rationality and the Basic Grammar of Intercultural Texts (Niigata: International University of Japan, 1990), 11. 33. The best philosophical summation of feminine difference is found in Françoise Collin, “Philosophical Differences,” in A History of Women in the West. vol. 5: Toward a Cultural Identity in the Twentieth Century, ed. Françoise Thébaud and trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 261–96. 34. Irigaray, “The Question of the Other,” Yale French Studies, 19. 35. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 62. 36. Je, Tu, Nous, 13. In his remarkable 1869 essay entitled, “The Subjection of Women,” John Stuart Mill is critical of “one person in law” in English jurisprudence, which may be comparable to the Biblical notion of marriage as “one flesh,” because it prevents married women from possessing their own property among other things. It is an example of phallocratic monism or the “phallacy” of identity in practice. See On Liberty and Other Writings, ed. Stefan Collini (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 117–217. 37. In Difference and Subjectivity, trans. Andrew Rothwell (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), Francis Jacques advances the “primacy of the relation” (primum relationis) without denigrating subjectivity or difference. See Mikhail Bakhtin’s philosophy of dialogue as the simultaneous act of decentering subjectivity and rejecting identity in favor of heteronomy imbedded in the notion of answerability or responsibility that becomes the keystone of his philosophical anthropology. Speaking of his philosophical protagonist Dostoevsky, Bakhtin writes in no uncertain terms:
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at the center of Dostoevsky’s artistic world must lie dialogue, and dialogue not as a means but as an end in itself. Dialogue here is not the threshold to action, it is the action itself. It is not a means for revealing, for bringing to the surface the already ready-made character of a person; no, in dialogue a person not only shows himself outwardly, but he becomes for the first time that which he is—and, we repeat, not only for others but for himself as well. To be means to communicate dialogically. When dialogue ends, everything ends. Thus dialogue, by its very essence, cannot and must not come to an end. At the level of his religious-utopian world-view Dostoevsky carried dialogue into eternity, conceiving of it as eternal co-rejoicing, co-admiration, con-cord. At the level of the novel, it is presented as the unfinalizability of dialogue, although originally as dialogue’s vicious circle. (Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984], 252; italics mine) The best summation of his dialogism is found in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist and trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). 38. “The Question of the Other,” Yale French Studies, 11–12. 39. The word com/prehension means etymologically “holding hands together.” See Elizabeth Sewell who observes perceptively: the fertility of the body cooperates in the processes of thinking with language. There remains a great unresolved problem behind this, as behind the use of words such as ‘fertile’ or ‘pregnant’ of ideas, of the verb ‘to conceive’ in intellectual terms. To relegate these simply to metaphor is to miss the whole point, for they are clues to something that is going on in this field of myth we are exploring. Grammar maintains that the body is operative there as much as the mind. The human organism thinks as a whole, and our division of it into mind and body is the result of overemphasis on logic and intellect in near isolation which has led [or better, misled] us into so one-sided a view of the activity of thought, so gross an underestimation of the body’s forms of thought and knowledge. (The Orphic Voice [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961], 35–36) In his Suspended Animation (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1995), 92–93, the historian of the medical body Frank Gonzalez-Crussi conveys to us that the maternal contribution to conception has been historically devalued. While semen is “quintessential” in nature as part of man’s soul and as such treated as if it were truth serum, woman’s alleged “coldness” is often blamed for producing imperfect conceptions. It was Aristotle who believed that while healthy sperms produce boys, unhealthy ones produce girls. In this light, Michel Foucault’s idea of power (pou/voir) as a ubiquitous phenomenon and thus sexuality itself as a form of power relation or an effect of power exercised is incontrovertible. See The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1878). Indeed the humanity of humans rests in culture that, for good or bad, is capable of subverting and transgressing biology. 40. The ecological importance of feminine jouissance as meaning “hearing” is intimated by Michel Serres when he writes, “sight is local; hearing is global. Far more than the ichnography, which is geometric for the subject or the object, hearing is marked by ubiquity, by an almost divine power to capture the universal. The
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optical is singular; the acoustical is total.” “Panoptic Theory,” in The Limits of Theory, ed. Thomas M. Kavanagh (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), 40. For the most comprehensive study of antiocularcentrism in twentieth-century French thought, see Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). For his discussion on Irigaray (and Derrida), see “‘Phallogocularcentrism’: Derrida and Irigaray,” 493–542. Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979) is one of the most comprehensive critiques of visualist epistemology. Hermeneutics, he asserts, is “what we get when we are no longer epistemological” (325). The difference between conversation and inquiry, according to him, is that inquiry, unlike the openness of conversation, turns philosophy into an exchange of views. He proposes that “We must get the visual, and in particular the mirroring, metaphors out of our speech altogether. To do that we have to understand speech not only as not the externalizing of inner representations, but as not a representation at all” (371). 41. Quoted in Craig Owens, “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), 70. See also his Beyond Recognition, ed. Scott Bryson et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 179. There is an interesting parallel or match between the masculine domination of the feminine and the European conquest of America by way of visualization. Craig Owens contends that the conquest of America is a European act of denomination since the time of the “nominophiliac” Christopher Columbus who was driven to reduce the New World to “a series of sites/sights to be named.” Columbus’s visual reductionism, which is the act of “both a distancing and a muting,” is equivalent to taking possession. In deconstructing the Eurocentric project of visualizing and prospecting the Other, which makes the Indians the “invisible victims of Western ethnocentrism”—very much like Ralph Ellison’s American blacks who are social “invisibles,” Owens urges that “It is time to stop looking, and listen to what the Indians may have to say.” See Beyond Recognition, “Improper Names,” 284–97. In her interesting discussion of chora that originates from Plato’s Timaeus, Elizabeth Grosz writes that it is “the condition for the genesis of the material world” and “can only be designated by its, by her, function: to hold, nurture, bring into the world.” Space, Time, and Perversion (New York: Routledge, 1995), 115. The antihero of Jerzy Kosinski’s Being There (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970) is Chance, whose “channeled existence” as an “image-junkie” is shaped by television. In it there is a scene between Chance and EE (Elizabeth Eve) that may serve as a telling story about masculine vision and feminine touch. EE takes Chance to be “very brainy, very cerebral,” that is, to be a Cartesian man. She also believes him to be one who does not practice “all of those American lovers’-lane tricks, all of the fingering, kissing, tickling, stroking, hugging.” While she is in her sexual overture, her legs and arms wrapped around him like “a web of sprawling branches” of a tree in a garden, Chance repeatedly says to her, “I like to watch you” as he likes to watch television. 42. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), especially “The Age of the World Picture,” 115–54. 43. See Jeremy Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, 11 vols. (New York: Russell and Russell, 1962), 4:39–248.
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44. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 195–228. Foucault further comments, The Panopticon must not be understood as a dream building: it is the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form. . . . [I]t is in fact a figure of political technology. . . . It is polyvalent in its applications; it serves to reform prisoners, but also to treat patients, to instruct schoolchildren, to confine the insane, to supervise workers, to put beggars and idlers to work. It is a type of location of bodies in space, . . . of definition of the instruments and modes of intervention of power, which can be implemented in hospitals, workshops, schools, prisons. (205) 45. Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, 4:74. 46. Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 204. 47. Irigaray, Thinking the Difference, 79. 48. Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 5. 49. See Sandra L. Gilman, “Goethe’s Touch: Touching, Seeing, and Sexuality,” in Inscribing the Other (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 29–49 and “Touch, Sexuality and Disease,” in Medicine and the Five Senses, ed. W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 198–224. 50. Walter J. Ong, “Word as View and World as Event,” American Anthropologist 71 (1969): 644. 51. Irigaray, Thinking the Difference, 94–95. It is worth mentioning the recent fascinating study of women in Tantric Buddhism, of yogini-tantra by Miranda Shaw, entitled Passionate Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). In the first place, Tantric Buddhism eulogizes the body or flesh as an “abode of bliss” by embracing sexual desire and pleasure for liberation or enlightenment. In the second place, it is a gynocentric view of Tantrism where women represent the idea of blissful intimacy as a path to enlightenment. In so doing, Shaw assumes methodologically that “regardless of how men may view them, women experience and interpret their own lives as the subjects of their lives” (196). 52. Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). 53. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Penguin Books, 1988), 88. 54. See C. Kerenyi, The Religion of the Greeks and Romans, trans. Christopher Holme (New York: Dutton, 1962), 119. 55. Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? trans. Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 16. 56. See Otto Benesch, The Art of the Renaissance in Northern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1945), 41–53. Giambattista Vico is an Italian Tantrist who observes the way in which the language of body politics is capable of enchanting and enlivening nonhuman things: It is noteworthy that in all languages the greater part of the expressions relating to inanimate things are [sic] formed by metaphor from the human body and its parts and from the human senses and passions. Thus, head for top or beginning; the brow and shoulders of a hill; the eyes of needles and of potatoes; mouth for any opening; the lip of a cup or pitcher; the teeth of a rake,
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a saw, a comb; the beard of wheat; the tongue of a shoe; the gorge of a river; a neck of land; an arm of the sea; the hands of a clock; heart for center (the Latins used umbilicus, navel, in this sense); the belly of a sail; foot for end or bottom; the flesh of fruits; a vein of rock or mineral; the blood of grapes for wine; the bowels of the earth. Heaven or the sea smiles; the wind whistles; the waves murmur; a body groans under a great weight. The farmers of Latium used to say the fields were thirsty, bore fruit, were swollen with grain; and our rustics speak of plants making love, vines going mad, resinous trees weeping. Innumerable other examples could be collected from all languages. (The New Science, trans. Thomas Goodard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984], paragraph 405 at 129) Citing a comparison between the human body and the “propensity” (shi) of the landscape in Chinese thought, François Jullien writes, “Regardless a man’s posture, whether he is standing upright, walking, sitting, or lying down, each part of his body, down to the smallest joint, will be in harmony with that posture. And to push this analogy to its limit—as Chinese critics love to do—rocks are like the skeleton of a mountain, forests are its clothes, grass its hair, waterways its arteries and veins, the clouds its air, mists its complexion, and temples, belvederes, bridges, and hamlets its jewels. From a total perspective, . . . the mountain will stand straight, be bent, or lean.” The Propensity of Things, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone Books, 1995), 100. 57. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 19. In Friendship, Altruism, and Morality (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), Lawrence A. Blum proposes “a new conception of the moral self,” based on sympathy and compassion for the well-being of others, which is meant to be an alternative to both Kantianism and utilitarianism. See also Ross Poole, Morality and Modernity (New York: Routledge, 1991), which seriously entertains gender as the basis of two different conceptions of morality and argues for the feminine formulation of morality as a genuine concern for others. 58. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper, 1962). 59. Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986). 60. Heidegger, Being and Time, 198; and See Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 302. 61. Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). In The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), John Llewelyn attempts to develop a philosophy of ecological responsibility based largely on the writings of Heidegger and Levinas. 62. Emmanuel Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonse Lingis (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), 52. 63. Mark C. Taylor, Altarity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 64. See Mary Ann Glendon, Rights Talk (New York: Free Press, 1991). 65. Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 269. Also quoted in Glendon, Rights Talk, 40. 66. C. B. Macpherson, “Human Rights as Property Rights,” in The Rise and Fall
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of Economic Justice and Other Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 76–85. 67. Glendon, Rights Talk, 76. The category of what is left unsaid is what Carole Pateman calls the “sexual contract.” See The Sexual Contract (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988). Her contention is not that social contract is a species of “rights talk” but that it is the patriarchal construction of masculinity as freedom and femininity as subjection, that is to say, it is the installment of patriarchal right. For Locke, for example, the “individual” is not a universal human being but a man. 68. Alan Ritter and Julia Conaway Bondanella, ed., Rousseau’s Political Writings, trans. Julia Conaway Bondanella (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 24. Also quoted in Glendon, Rights Talk, 33, from another translation. 69. Carolyn Merchant, Earthcare (New York: Routledge, 1996). 70. See the author’s “Marxism and Deep Ecology in Postmodernity: From Homo Oeconomicus to Homo Ecologicus,” Thesis Eleven 28 (1991): 86–99. 71. See the author’s “The Way of Ecopiety: An Essay in Deep Ecology from a Sinitic Perspective.” Asian Philosophy 1 (1991): 127–40. 72. The term kosmotheoros is used by Merleau-Ponty in The Visible and the Invisible, 113. 73. A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, trans. Wing-tsit Chan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), 497. 74. Compare Merleau-Ponty, who writes in The Visible and the Invisible, 234, We must accustom ourselves to understand that ‘thought’ (cogitatio) is not an invisible contact of self with self, that it lives outside of this intimacy with oneself, in front of us, not in us, always eccentric. Just as we rediscover the field of the sensible world as interior-exterior (cf. at the start: as global adhesion to the infinity of motor indexes and motivations, as my belongingness to this Welt), so also it is necessary to rediscover as the reality of the inter-human world and of history a surface of separation between me and the other which is also the place of my union, the unique Erfüllung of his life and my life. It is to this surface of separation and of union that the existentials of my personal history proceed, it is the geometrical locus of the projections and introjections, it is the invisible hinge upon which my life and the life of the others turn to rock into one another, the inner framework of intersubjectivity. 75. Walter J. Ong, The Presence of the Word (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967), 171. “I believe,” Ong declares elsewhere, “that another productive way to supplement our concept of world view is to move from the concept of world sense to the concept of world-as-presence. By presence I mean the kind of relationship that exists between persons, when we say that two persons entails more than sensation. Insofar as it is grounded in the senses, it appears to be grounded in all of them simultaneously. We speak of a ‘sense’ of presence, rather than a sight, sound, smell, taste, or touch of presence” (“World as View and World as Event,” 646). One significant drawback of, or omission in, Ong’s language of presence is that it is concerned with interhuman relationships to the exclusion of human and nonhuman relationships, that is, it is bereft of interspecific relationships. 76. In her Song of Solomon (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), Toni Morrison writes, “No, it was not language; it was what there was before language. Before things were written down. Language in the time when men and animals did talk to one
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another, when a man could sit down with an ape and the two converse; when a tiger and a man could share the same tree, and each understood the other; when men ran with wolves, not from or after them” (278). 77. See Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), 9. Elsewhere Marcuse also argues that radical social change entails the “emancipation of the senses,” which is a question of the syn/aesthetic. He contends not only that the liberation of nature is a vehicle of the liberation of humanity but also that femininity holds the “promise of liberation.” See his Counterrevolution and Revolt (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972).
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I N D E X
A altarity, 243–44 alterity, iv, 6, 9, 236–37, 243 anthropocentrism, 6–7, 120, 224–35, 245–46, 248 anthropology, 24, 30, 57, 73–74, 85, 87–88, 116, 164, 184, 231, 245 phenomenological anthropology, 30 philosophical anthropology, 73–74, 85, 87 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 172 arche, 107, 129, 144 Archilochus, 33 Arendt, Hannah, 104, 106, 115 Aristotle, 38, 61–62, 107, 183 Aufklärung, 3, 9 Austin, John, 68, 244 axiology, 32, 81, 86
B Bacon, Francis, 6–7, 215–16, 222, 224, 234–36, 246 Bakhtin, Mikhail, iv, 26–27, 213 Barrett, William, 103 Barth, Karl, 95 Barthes, Roland, ii, v, 141, 163–78 Bashō, 120–21, 176 Beckett, Samuel, v, 70, 110, 133, 146 Being and Interbeing, iii–iv, 11, 153, 224–26 Bentham, Jeremy, 4, 238, 239 Benthien, Claudia, 157 Berdyaev, Nicolas, 91 Berger, Gaston, 40
Bergson, Henri, 38, 50, 156 Berlin, Isaiah, 33 Binswanger, Ludwig, 83 bipolar, ii–iii, 22 Blackmur, R. P., 146 Bloom, Harold, 166 body, 81, 108–10, 141–43, 148, 150, 154– 61, 168–69, 198, 214–22, 231–37, 237–41, 247–48 Bourdieu, Pierre, 148, 161, 218 Braidotti, Rosi, 217 Brentano, Franz, 44, 65 Brown, Norman O., 221–22 Brown, Peter, 154 Bruns, Gerald L., 233 Buber, Martin, vi, 39, 61, 77–100 Buddhism, iv, 7–8, 22, 42–43, 76, 80, 88–91, 104, 118, 124, 143, 151–53, 170–71, 198, 220, 222 Indian Buddhism, 11 Bugbee, Henry G., i, iii, 75, 77, 84–85, 219, 225 Burke, Kenneth, 109 butterfly effect, iv
C Cage, John, 171, 174 Calvino, Italo, 26 Čapek, Milic, 152 Capra, Fritjof, 152–53 care (Sorge), 6–7, 80, 83, 219, 227, 242–43 Carson, Rachel, 221 Champollion, Jean-François, 130, 144 Chang Tung-sun, 60, 176
394
Chan Wing-tsit, iv, 54, 57, 59, 73–76, 92, 143 Ch’eng-Chu school, 46, 51 Ch’eng Hao, 77, 81 Ch’eng I, 80 ch’eng (sincerity), 53, 59, 68 Chiang Kai-shek, 52, 92, 203 chih (wisdom), 52, 68, 73, 81, 94 Chinese philosophy, ii, 23–24, 38, 42, 51–55, 56–60, 68, 72–86, 87–92 Ching, Julia, 62–67 Chou Tun-I, 76 Christianity, 95, 97, 154, 233–36 Chuang Tzu, 79, 88, 117, 176 Chu Hsi, 42, 51, 63–67, 80–81 chung (conscientiousness), 82, 94 See also shu Chung yung, 76 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 23, 116–17 Clifford, James, 9 cognition, 151–52, 196–98 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 135 Collingwood, R. G., 70, 110, 133, 146, 172 Collins, Randall, 11 communication, iv, 15–16, 78, 87–88, 97–100, 112–15, 137–42, 147–61 comparative philosophy, iii, 23, 33, 104, 107, 109, 124 Confucius and Confucianism, iv, 23, 37, 42, 52, 59, 64, 69–71, 73–86, 87– 101, 104, 114, 118, 124, 143, 222–27 Copernican reversal/revolution, iv, 22, 243 cosmopolis, 10, 142 See also global village Creel, Herrlee G., 57, 104, 143 creolization, iii, 27–29 See also Glissant, Edouard Cua, A. S., 62–68 Culler, Jonathan, 17, 163, 165, 172
D Daoism and Chan/Zen Buddhism, iv, 15, 20, 143, 152–53, 224 See also Taoism and Chan/Zen Buddhism
index
Dasein (There-being), 38, 41, 63, 73, 83, 112–13, 223, 242 See also Heidegger, Martin da Vinci, Leonardo, 123 de Beauvoir, Simone, 6 Deleuze, Gilles, 15, 17, 21, 26, 212, 215, 230 Derrida, Jacques, 17, 61, 132–40, 168, 243 Descartes, René, iv–vi, 4–6, 43–44, 61, 70, 111, 122–23, 148, 154–57, 192, 215–18, 222, 224, 229–39, 246 Dessauer, Friedrich, 159 Dewey, John, 59, 227 dialectic, 26, 28, 32, 52, 59–60, 60, 105, 167, 170–71, 176, 179–80, 186–207, 213 dialogical philosophy, vi, 10, 26–27, 77, 83–88, 105 diatactics, 60, 105–9, 137, 164, 171, 176, 236, 247 See also White, Hayden difference, iv, 4, 6, 9–10, 16, 21, 26–33, 109, 118, 130, 192, 212–13, 223, 231, 236–37, 240–47 ontological difference, 104–5 Differenz as Unterschied, iv, 27, 213, 237 Diogenes, 33 Dogen Kigen, 222 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 26–27 Douglass, Frederick, 20 dualism, 42, 53, 59, 61, 67, 68, 70, 105, 176, 231–32 See also monism; reductionism Dufrenne, Mikel, 78, 227 Dworkin, Ronald, 244
E Eagleton, Terry, 232 earthcare, 8, 245–48 ecology, 8, 211, 225–35, 246–48 ecosophy, 212, 229–35, 245–48 egocentrism, v, 43, 61, 83, 116, 226, 229, 233, 236, 238, 242–48 Eichmann, Adolf, 106, 109, 115
index
395
Eiseley, Loren, 236 Elias, Norbert, v, 157 Eliot, T. S., 129, 136, 143 Ellison, Ralph, 176, 217 Ellul, Jacques, 159 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 7, 111–12, 130– 33, 144–46, 155 empiricism, 197 Enlightenment, i–ii, 3–11, 16–17, 169, 214, 220–22 en-soi (essence), 38, 42–43, 46, 51, 191–94 See also pour-soi epistemocracy, 4, 148, 154, 229, 230, 233–38 epistemology, 4, 18, 32, 44, 52, 60, 64, 66, 77, 96, 107, 122, 206, 215, 218 epoché, 40, 48 eschatological, 60, 154 ethics, ii–iii, 22, 56, 58, 62, 67, 69–70, 75, 92, 95, 100, 114, 182, 227, 236, 241–48 ethnocentrism, ii, 9, 11, 16–18, 24, 29– 30, 33, 57, 124, 149, 167, 177 ethnography, 9, 24, 27 ethnology, 57, 213 ethnophilosophical, 24, 213 etymosinology, vi, 109, 129–31, 141–61, 222 See also ideography; sinography Eurocentrism, ii, 8, 10–11, 16–31, 149, 213, 226 existentialism/existential philosophy, 38–39, 46, 48, 51, 54, 56, 59, 72–76, 85–101, 91, 95, 190 existential phenomenology, i–ii, 37–55, 56–71, 61–63, 66–67, 70, 72–86, 87, 179–80, 190 Existenz, 41, 87–88, 98–100
Fenollosa, Ernest, vi, 109–11, 129–51, 222 Feuerbach, Ludwig, iv, 243 filial piety, 45, 79, 95, 109, 117, 118, 225 Fingarette, Herbert, 70 fleshfold, 7, 154, 161, 195, 208, 216, 217, 233, 239 Foucault, Michel, 3, 4, 17, 23, 32, 161, 163, 214, 221, 242 Frankl, Viktor, 82, 84 Fukuyama, Francis, iii, 10 Fung Yu-lan, 37, 55, 57, 78, 79, 82, 94
F
H
feminine difference, 6, 236–40, 248 See also sexual difference feminism, 6, 232, 236, 241–42, 247–48 feng shui, 7–8, 224, 241
Habermas, Jürgen, 5, 102, 242 haiku, 120–21, 133, 173–74, 224 Hansen, Mark, 156, 159 Han Yü, 76, 79
G Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 9, 10, 104, 153, 213 Galileo, 4, 6, 123 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 33 Geertz, Clifford, 9 geophilosophy, iii, 7, 211–15, 221–27, 230 geopiety, 117–24, 225, 247 Gestell, 7, 121–22 Gilligan, Carol, 232, 242, 244 Gilroy, Paul, 33 Glendon, Mary Ann, 244 Glissant, Edouard, ii, 27–29, 212 globalization, ii, vi, 10–11, 15–16, 32– 34, 149 global village, 10–11, 16, 141–42, 147–56 glocalization, vi, 16, 25, 32–33 grammatology, 132–46, 167, 170 Granet, Marcel, 57, 139, 151, 165 Gray, J. Glenn, 118, 124 Grene, Marjorie, 216 Grundrisse, 186–87 Guattari, Félix, 21, 212, 215, 230, 232, 246 Gurwitsch, Aaron, 40 Gusdorf, Georges, 78, 84
396
Hardt, Michael, 16 Hasidism, 88 Havelock, Eric A., 113 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, ii, 5, 8–9, 17, 23–32, 57–60, 66, 105, 130, 134, 169, 183–86, 190–93 Heidegger, Martin, i–vi, iii–iv, 7, 17, 27, 32, 38–41, 56, 63, 66–68, 73–74, 78, 81, 83, 91, 102–25, 148, 155–60, 165, 175, 190, 213, 223–24, 229–31, 237–38, 241–43 Gelassenheit, 7, 119, 121, 175 Heisenberg, Werner, 147, 153 Herder, Johann Gottfried, i, 17, 22, 102, 218 hermeneutics, 5, 9, 21, 25, 85, 104, 113, 131, 142–43, 147–53, 167, 179, 213, 222–23 carnal hermeneutics, 148 Hermes, 112–13 Herrigel, Eugen, 120, 175 Heschel, Abraham J., 84 heterocentrism, 43, 53, 61, 77, 83, 116 heteronomy, 4, 243, 248 hieroglyphics, 130–32, 132, 144–45 Hobbes, Thomas, 230, 244–45 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 125 Homer, 16, 112–13, 132, 137, 141 homocentrism, 118, 124, 245, 246, 248 homopiety, 117–24, 247 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 135 Hoshi, Zen Monk, 170, 174, 214 hsiao (filiality), 68, 79, 95 hsin (fidelity), 38, 41–47, 51–55, 59, 63– 69, 81, 94 See also Wang Yang-ming Humboldt, Alexander von, 17, 102 Hume, David, 8–9, 19–20, 30 Huntington, Samuel P., 10 Husserl, Edmund, 38–40, 43–44, 48–50, 54, 62, 65–66, 73–74, 83, 86, 88, 105, 123, 183–84, 190, 196, 202–3 hyperdialectic, 26, 221 Hyppolite, Jean, 190
index
I i (righteousness, will), 64–68, 75, 79, 81, 94 I Ching (Yijing), 60, 76, 115, 153 ideography, iv–v, 57, 69–70, 77, 94, 104, 109–11, 114–15, 129–40, 143, 147, 164, 167–74, 196, 200, 211, 222–24 kanji, 111, 130–31, 142, 169–72, 223 See also sinography Ihde, Don, 161 I Li, 76 in-der-Welt-sein (Being-in-the-world), 41, 112, 158, 243 See also Heidegger, Martin Innis, Harold A., 139, 147, 151 intentionality, 38–53, 59, 62–67, 73 intercorporeality, v, 143, 148, 153, 157, 192, 212, 217, 220, 224, 226, 233, 247 interexistence (intermonde), 181, 192, 195, 201, 207, 217 intersubjectivity, 72–86, 87, 100, 181, 190, 192, 198, 237 Irigaray, Luce, i, 3, 6, 15, 17, 219–20, 227, 229, 232, 236–40, 247
J Jackson, Michael, 9 Jakobson, Roman, 129, 135 James, William, 9, 39, 49, 67 Jameson, Fredric, 165 Jaspers, Karl, 61, 78–86, 87–101 jen (humanity), 53–54, 59, 68, 72–86, 87–95, 98, 101, 114, 227 Johann, Robert O., 79 Jonas, Hans, 243 jouissance (j’ouïs sens), 6, 175, 219–21, 232, 236, 238–39, 246–48 Joyce, James, 110, 131, 160, 212 Jullien, François, 22–23
K Kamimura, Hiro, 172 K’ang Yu-wei, 75, 77
index
Kant, Immanuel, i, iii, 3–4, 8–9, 17–22, 30, 61, 107, 159, 215 Karlgren, Bernard, 115 Keller, Helen, 150 Kerenyi, Carl, 115–17 Kierkegaard, Søren, 39, 59, 64, 66, 72, 75, 79, 83, 87–91, 95–100, 190–91 kinaesthetic, 109, 142, 146–47, 172, 222 Kipling, Rudyard, 10 Kohák, Erazim, 118, 227 Kohlberg, Lawrence, 242 Kojève, Alexandre, 190 Kolakowski, Leszek, 20 Kristeva, Julia, 33, 166 Kwant, Remy C., 82
L Lacan, Jacques, 163 Lao-tzu, 88–89 Laqueur, Thomas, 236 lateral universal/lateral thinking, 11, 18, 20, 23–27, 57–58, 185, 208, 212–14, 226–28 Lauer, J. Quentin, 77 Leibniz, G. W., 17, 102 Lenin, Vladimir, 201–6 Levinas, Emmanuel, iv, 17, 50, 219, 237, 243 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 9, 24, 57, 163 li (reason, propriety), 38, 42, 67–71, 81, 94 liang-chih (good knowledge), 38, 42–54, 62, 67, 172 See also Wang Yang-ming liang-neng (good ability), 48 Li Chi, 118–19 lifeworld (Lebenswelt), i–ii, 10, 16, 24– 25, 32–33, 38–41, 43, 47–50, 54, 57–62, 73–74, 81–82, 86, 88, 91, 95, 176, 184–85, 189, 196–98 See also Husserl, Edmund linguistics, v, 38, 69, 107, 111, 115, 124, 129–31, 134, 143, 169, 175 Liu, James J. Y., 136
397
Li Zehou, 223 Locke, John, 230, 244–45 logocentrism, 4, 6, 102, 111, 124, 134, 167, 169, 220, 222, 229, 236, 247 logos, 5, 15, 21, 38–39, 82, 118, 216, 234 Lord, Albert B., 113 Luijpen, William A., 39 Lukács, Georg, 201 Lusseryran, Jacques, 150 Lyotard, Jean-François, 5, 17, 21
M Machiavelli, Niccolo, 148, 182 Macmurray, John, 39, 48–49, 61, 78 Macpherson, C. B., 244 Mahbubani, Kishore, iii, 31 Mairs, Nancy, 232 Maitreya (Middle Way), ii, 22, 34, 152, 214 malestream, 17, 219–20, 227 Mallarmé, Stéphane, v, 110, 134–35 Malraux, André, 181 Mandelbaum, Maurice, 62 Mao Tse-tung, 52, 59, 92, 179–207 Marcel, Gabriel, 39, 61, 75, 79, 83, 85, 91, 141, 150–51, 156 Marcuse, Herbert, 159 Marx, Karl, 8, 17, 26, 33, 59, 105, 179– 207, 183, 186–208 materialism, 186–87, 190, 192–93, 197–99 mathematics, 123 Mauss, Marcel, 9, 24, 57, 116 Mazis, Glen, 226 McLuhan, Marshall, 11, 16, 110, 113, 129– 40, 141–42, 147–61, 172, 223, 239 Mead, George Herbert, 133 Mehta, J. L., 124 Mencius, 37, 48, 75–76, 78–80, 93, 172 Merchant, Carolyn, 245–46 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, v, 5, 9, 21, 23– 33, 39–45, 56–58, 61, 63, 74, 83, 87, 90, 100, 105–6, 143, 150–61, 165, 179–208, 211–28, 231–33, 240
398
metaphysics, 8, 25, 44, 59–65, 107–8, 120–24, 154, 229 Mitsein (being-with-others), 83, 192, 243 modernity, i, 3–11, 16–20, 21, 22, 148, 154, 212–14, 215–16, 230–31, 234– 41, 241–46 Mohanty, Jitendra Nath, 65 Monan, J. Donald, 62 mondialisation, 15 See also globalization monism, 6, 59, 105, 176, 236 See also dualism; reductionsim monoculturalism, 11 monological, v, 4, 10–11, 83–85, 154, 157, 215 morality, i, 10, 18–19, 23, 59–69, 81–82, 92–101, 106–7, 113–14, 117–18, 123, 133, 145, 172, 182–83, 193, 223, 227, 242, 244 Morris, Ivan, 68 Morrison, Toni, 240, 248 Mo Tzu, 79 mousike, 34 multiculturalism, 11, 15–34, 141 See also globalization Mumford, Lewis, 159 Mumon, 15 music, 70, 110–23, 113, 133–40, 158, 227, 232
N Naess, Arne, iii, 212 Nakamura, Hajime, 57, 89 Natanson, Maurice, 39, 49, 83 nature, 116–23, 130, 144–45, 146, 191– 94, 199, 211–27, 229–48 Negri, Antonio, 16 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 5, 17, 31, 102, 111– 12, 156, 166, 232–33 Nishida Kitaro, 103–4, 172, 223 noema/noesis, 44, 65 Northrop, F. S. C., 119
index
O Occidentalism, 30, 31, 124, 130 See also Orientalism ocularcentrism, 4, 151, 154, 215, 218, 227, 229, 236, 238, 247 oikos (household), 211, 226, 246 Oken, Lorenz, 8 Ong, Walter J., 113, 239, 247 ontology, ii–vi, 22, 28, 41, 48, 56, 63–64, 67, 104, 107, 191–92, 212, 226, 236, 243 fundamental ontology, 41, 63, 91, 118 Orientalism, 30, 31, 57, 129, 165 See also Occidentalism Origen, 154, 240 Ortega y Gassett, José, 91, 219 Other, iii–v, 3–11, 17, 24–27, 29, 30–33, 57–60, 77–84, 115, 158–59, 189–92, 219, 222, 233, 239, 241, 242–44 humanity and nature, i, iii, 4–7, 17, 20, 60, 105, 108, 117, 215–16 man and woman, 4, 6, 17, 20, 215, 237 masculine and feminine, 5–7, 109, 219, 227, 236–38, 240–42, 247 mind and body, iii–v, 4–6, 17, 20, 22, 46, 53, 60, 67–70, 105, 215–16, 238 Orient and Occident, ii, 17, 25–26, 56–58, 87–88, 119, 130, 165–66, 177, 185, 220 West and non-West, i, 4, 7–10, 213, 215 O Yomei, 68 See also Wang Yang-ming
P Pagden, Anthony, 22 Panopticon, 4, 159, 161, 215, 218, 234–39 Paracelsus, Theophrastus, 241 Parker, Harley, 133, 147 Parry, Milman, 113 Pater, Walter, 111 Paz, Octavio, 10
index
perception, 5, 45, 47, 60, 135, 150, 195– 98, 216–17, 222, 227, 234 phallocentrism, 5, 6, 169, 220, 238 phenomenology, i–ii, 23–24, 37–55, 56– 71, 72–74, 80–87, 103–6, 150, 152, 155, 157, 161, 166–67, 176–77, 179– 80, 186, 189–92, 196–98, 202–3, 217, 223, 232, 247 Phillips, Adam, v, 158 philosophy of language, 132, 134, 145 phronesis, 61–62 See also Aristotle physics, 104, 152–53, 212 Picasso, Pablo, 70, 110, 133, 147, 172, 223 piety, i, iv, 3, 45, 79, 95, 105–6, 114–18, 124, 240, 248 Plato, 60, 94, 102, 134, 161, 183, 220, 232–33 poetry, 109, 111–13, 118, 129–45 Polin, Raymond, 82 postmodernity, iv, 4–5, 8, 9, 17, 21, 32– 33, 148, 212, 229–48 Pound, Ezra, 109, 129, 132, 134–37, 143, 147 pour-soi, 191–94, 201 See also en-soi (essence) praxis, 50, 52–53, 59, 66, 74, 93, 107, 112– 13, 122–23, 141, 180, 191, 194–207 See also theoria printing technology, 16, 139, 149, 154 Pythagoras, 123
R reductionism, 59, 105, 176 See also dualism; monism res cogitans and res extensa, iv, 5, 70, 154, 192, 215, 222, 233 Richards, I. A., 136 Richardson, William, 103 Ricoeur, Paul, 40, 73, 85 Rilke, Rainer Maria, iv, 113 Rodin, Auguste, iii, v, 5, 158, 219, 222, 240
399
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 17, 230, 245
S Sachen (things), 40, 42, 45, 63 Said, Edward W., ii, 11, 31, 57 Saigo Takamori, 68 Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de, 39 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 21, 39, 56, 59, 63, 68, 75, 83, 85, 190–94, 201 satori (enlightenment), ii, 22, 163–75, 177, 214, 222 See also Zen Savignac, Raymond, 165 Scheler, Max, 79–80 Schrader, George, 85 Schrag, Calvin O., 15, 21, 124, 212–13 Schram, Stuart R., 187 Schumacher, E. F., 248 Schutz, Alfred, 48, 74, 83, 100, 157 semiology, v, 164–78 Serres, Michel, 211, 229–30, 245–46 sexual difference, 6, 236–40 See also feminine difference sexuality, v, 154, 157, 169, 177, 220–21, 236–37 shu (altruism), 82, 94 Shusterman, Richard, 155–56 See also somaesthetics Sinism, iv, 7, 57–59, 70, 104–5, 115–25, 143, 222–24 sinography, iv–v, 15–16, 129, 134, 137, 142–51, 172, 211, 222–25 See also ideography Smith, John, 54 Socrates, 60–61, 105, 107, 203 somaesthetics, 155–56 See also Shusterman, Richard Sontag, Susan, v, 164, 171–72 sound (acoustical), v, 113, 121–23, 135– 39, 149, 227 Spengler, Oswald, 114 Spiegelberg, Herbert, 38, 41 spiritualism, 190, 192–93, 199
400
St. Augustine, 117, 240 Stein, Edith, 79 Strasser, Stephan, 50 Straus, Erwin, W., 157, 233 Stravinsky, Igor, 136, 167 Sturrock, John, 175–76 subjectality, 223 subjectivity, 46, 64–67, 79, 83, 87–101, 105, 155, 176, 198–201, 206, 223, 237–38, 244 Sudnow, David, 158 Sun Yat-sen, 52, 59, 92 Suzuki Daisetz Teitaro, 57, 89–90, 103, 171, 175, 229 synaesthesia, 138, 149–52, 219, 227, 247
index
trans(uni)versality, 20, 30, 214 Trotsky, Leon, 201–6 Tseng Tzu, 82 Tung Chung-shu, 75, 79 Tu Wei-ming, 62–70
U universal truth, 21, 24–27, 213
V Valéry Paul, v, 31, 221 Vattimo, Gianni, iv, 17, 212 Vico, Giambattista, iv–v, 5, 69, 103, 107– 8, 118, 132, 142, 144–45, 149 vision (optical), 50, 117, 149, 154–55, 218, 220, 227, 238–41, 247
T Tagore, Rabindranath, 7 Tai T’ung, 115, 136–37, 139–40 Tantric Buddhism, 151, 156, 220, 232, 239 T’an Tsu-t’ung, 76, 78, 80 Taoism and Chan/Zen Buddhism, 7–8, 42, 66, 88–92, 103–6, 117–25, 170– 78, 221–25 Tao Te Ching, 117, 120, 170, 200 Taylor, Charles, 30 Taylor, Mark C., iv, 243 technē, 107–8, 112–13 technology, 6–7, 121–23, 147–49, 159– 61, 200, 215, 230, 234–35 technomorphic, 7, 121, 234–35 theoria, iii, 52–53, 66, 74, 89–90, 92–93, 117, 183–84, 194–207, 215, 232–34 See also praxis Thévenaz, Pierre, 41 Thich Nhat Hanh, 153 Todorov, Tzvetan, 10 Tokuoka, Takao, 110, 130 toleration, 10, 33, 181, 192 transcendental, 40, 41, 60, 74, 83, 105, 154 transversality, ii, ii–v, vi, 10–11, 13–34, 212–15, 226–27
W Wang Tch’ang-tche, 43, 49 Wang Yang-ming, ii, 37–55, 56–71, 75– 76, 80–81, 92, 225 Watsuji Tetsuro, 223–24 Wegenstein, Bernadette, 156–59 Weltanschauung, 58 Weltbild, 112, 122, 155, 238 White, Hayden, 60, 105, 235 See also diatactics Wild, John, 37, 39, 49–51, 75, 81–82, 85 Willett, Cynthia, 219 Wittfogel, Karl, 17 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, v, 22, 93, 164, 226 Woolf, Virginia, 33 wu-wei, 119–20, 170
Y Yen Chin-tui, 196 yi (will, thought), 43–44 yin-yang, iii, 23, 31, 60, 75, 105, 109, 115, 137, 171, 187, 221 Young, Robert J. C., 28
Z Zen, 163, 166–77 Zhang Zai, 225, 247
